Three of the UK’s biggest broadband providers, Sky, Virgin Media, and BT have pledged to make their management of traffic over their networks transparent.
The three signed a policy drawn up by the Broadband Stakeholder Group, the trade body for UK ISPs.
Traffic management has proved a controversial issue in recent years due to the increase in network bandwidth demanded by customers who use services like the BBC iPlayer, YouTube, and Spotify. ISPs argue that use of these services overwhelms the network and, in addition to capping some services with monthly data limits, have implemented bandwidth throttling for customers on unlimited tariffs who use more than the ISP considers reasonable.
Often called Fair Use agreements, these policies have, until now, usually been buried in the small print of ISP customer contracts. The transparency agreement is designed to allow customers to more easily compare ISPs’ traffic management policies before signing up.
In a separate statement last week, BT announced that it would scrap its Fair Use agreement for customers of Total Broadband and Infinity, its fibre optic broadband services.
‘As BT continues to invest in the network and network bandwidth we can now remove these restrictions and ensure the experience of the wider customer base,’ said Mayuresh Thavapalan, General Manager of Consumer Broadband at BT Retail. ‘On completion there will be no individual user controls targeted at atypical users on our BT Total Broadband and BT Infinity products.’
