Many broadband products contain download limits – usually ranging from 1GB to 40GBs per month. However many do not, and consumers who sign up to such products are lead to believe that they may download as much content from the Internet as they like, at any time of the day or night. However it has emerged that broadband providers touting such products are not revealing the full story to their customers. So called “heavy users” who download masses of content during “peak times” are having their connections restricted by major broadband suppliers. The customers who are targeted are not necessarily those who download the most content over a period of time – say 100GBs during a month.

In other words, if a user downloads around 5GBs of content in a month with their primary downloading time being each evening after work (which is a peak time), they may be penalised. In contrast, a user who downloads 100BGs per month during the night when most people are sleeping and Internet usage is at it lowest, would avoid a penalty for excessive use as they are not adding to congestion during a peak time. Broadband suppliers are defending themselves by arguing that they have to buy bandwidth and if a small number of users are using more than others, it distorts the amount of bandwidth they need to buy, which increases the costs for all users. Therefore, they argue, the heavy users should be penalised.