Tesco Broadband Fair Usage Policy

Tesco Broadband Only’ and ‘Tesco Broadband With Calls’ offer our customers the flexibility of unlimited downloads per month.

However, in order to keep customer usage within the normal limits expected when providing a residential broadband service, and to ensure that we provide a fast and reliable service to all our customers, we apply a Fair Usage Policy.

This policy forms part of paragraph 11 of the Tesco Broadband & Tesco Home phone Terms & Conditions and works in conjunction with our Traffic Management Policy.

We regularly monitor and review our customer’s collective and average monthly usage to set our fair usage limit (FUL) at a level that will not affect the majority (at least 95%) of our customers. Currently the FUL is set at 100GB per month.  If a customer regularly downloads in excess of the FUL, we take the following steps:

1. When we first notice that a customer has exceeded the FUL, we contact the customer to bring the matter to their attention. We will ask the customer to modify their usage.

2. If the customer does not modify their usage but continues to exceed the FUL for a further two consecutive months, we will suspend or terminate the customer’s service.

Tesco Broadband Traffic Management Policy

Tesco Broadband & Homephone are residential services for non-commercial use only. This Traffic Management Policy explains how Tesco manages the use of the Broadband services which are integral to the “Tesco Broadband With Calls” and “Tesco Broadband Only” products.

This policy is referred to in paragraph 8.7 of the Tesco Broadband & Homephone Service terms and conditions (effective from 1/7/11), which explain how Tesco provides services to customers.

Tesco wants to make sure that all our Broadband customers receive the best possible service. Our network capacity is large but finite and we want to ensure that all our customers get a fair share of this capacity at all times (particularly at the busiest times of day and evening).

A very small number of customers want to make a heavy demand on our broadband network at peak times and, if left unchecked, this could have a detrimental effect on the user experience of the vast majority of customers with more modest broadband requirements.

Consequently, Tesco constantly monitors the way in which our customers use our broadband services. In particular, at peak times, we will look for (and restrict) non-time-critical traffic, such as Bit Torrent, other peer to peer file sharing applications and online storage services.

Currently, we do not restrict Bit Torrent and other similar intensive file-sharing activity between midnight and 6 pm, but during the peak hours, when most of our customers want to use the internet, we may slow down specific services to make the shared usage of our network fair for all customers.

This policy ensures that we can deliver a great service to all our customers at all times and we never have to limit the customers who are using the internet for day to day time-critical transactions, such as normal surfing, emailing, online shopping and banking, using BBC/Sky iPlayer applications, gaming or making online phone calls via companies like Skype.

Rest assured that Tesco will make sure that all our customers get a fair share of our excellent broadband service and we will only impose restrictions in a fair and measured way.