Hi, with everyone at home your broadband service is more important than ever.
No matter who your internet provider is there are a number of things you need to be aware of and things you can do to improve the service in your home.
There has been a massive increase in Internet traffic across the world to such an extent that, to protect essential services and businesses, authorities like the EU have issued instructions to all major data operators including broadband providers, entertainment and online streaming providers along with mainstream mobile social media messaging platforms to support the reduction and control of data usage – https://on.ft.com/39A3Nf3 – Financial Times.
This is also effecting everyone and in response the largest streaming companies including Netflix, YouTube, Disney+, Facebook, Apple and many other streaming services who have already downgraded their service to help reduce internet usage – https://tcrn.ch/2ynGA35/ – Techcrunch
What does that mean for you?
Regardless of your normal broadband speed some of the services you use will be of a lower quality or slower to download.
How you connect to your broadband in your home – Wi-Fi
With everyone at home online working, streaming, gaming with multiple devices etc, the amount of data you are using has increased.
The majority of people connect to their home broadband through Wi-Fi. The quality of your service will be affected by the number of devices connected and sharing your Wi-Fi and also the quality of the Wi-Fi signal in your home.
Many things create interference and affect the quality of your Wi-Fi which will reduce the speed of your connection and the quality of your service.
What can I do?
See the below tips – Click Here to see how you can improve your home Wi-Fi quality and service
Heavy data usage
With everyone now living and working from home, streaming, gaming, video calling etc has caused an increase in data usage. These increases in data usage should not cause you an issue.
However, there are a number of things you may be unaware of that could be consuming large amounts of data which would affect your service.
You need to check if something has changed in terms of your applications or services running in the background on your devices, which are causing high usage, that you may not be aware of.
THINK IT DOESN’T APPLY TO YOU… We have customers, who have found connected devices have consumed very high data usage even when they’ve been away from their home for a few days.
Here are some examples of the types of activity that can cause high levels of data usage that you may be unaware of:
- Streaming services like YouTube, Netflix, Amazon Prime set on auto play when you’re not watching.
- Running excessive concurrent internet sessions or regularly accessing excessive bandwidth-intensive Peer-to-Peer applications, video streams, website hosting.
- Accessing file-sharing services like BitTorrent and UTorrent which can load automatically and can run in the background without you knowing and can cause high data usage.
- Continually downloading or uploading large images or data files.
- Automatic software updates running in the background.
We also strongly recommend updating your anti-virus and computer security programs regularly to avoid potential security breaches that can cause high amounts of background data.
Note: While this heavy data usage will affect your service, it may ALSO cause your monthly usage to increase significantly.
Like all operators we have a fair usage policy to prevent abnormal and excessive use by some, impacting other customers including you. As users differ our fair usage policy limit of 1TB is a multiple of the average normal usage which at 270Gb per month is the second highest in the market. So even a significant increase of 50% in usage will be well below the 1Tb threshold.
However, if you have heavy usage data activity that you are not aware of your usage could ALSO be considerably higher than you expect so it is important to read and act on the advice above.
You enjoy the benefit and experience of the service because of the Fair Usage Policy and we will continue to enforce the policy to deliver on our obligation and commitment to you and all of our customers. This is particularly important in the current circumstances.
This Page was last updated March 31st 2020.