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At Sky we want all of our customers to enjoy the best possible broadband experience. We have made a commitment to a voluntary code of practice which aims to make traffic management easier to understand and compare between providers.
We've provided detailed information about our traffic management policy in the Key Fact Indicator (KFI) tables below.
Traffic management:
Traffic management is the term used to describe a range of technical practices undertaken to manage traffic across networks.
The different outcomes achieved by the use of technical practices can include:
Managed services: The majority of internet traffic is delivered on a "best efforts" basis. A managed service, on the other hand is one whereby an ISP offers "quality of service" that can guarantee a certain level of performance, so that the content, service or application can be delivered without risk of degradation from network congestion. Such a quality of service arrangement can be made between an ISP and a content or service provider or directly between an ISP and the consumer.
Best Efforts: This phrase relates to the delivery of internet traffic where traffic management is applied without distinctions based on the source of that traffic.
Slowed down: This outcome is achieved by the deployment of technologies that can decrease the priority of traffic types deemed to be non-time critical on the network e.g. slowing down traffic such as downloads during busy times and busy periods.
Prioritised: This outcome is achieved by the deployment of technologies that increase the priority given to certain traffic types, e.g. time-critical traffic such as video. This outcome can also be achieved as a consequence of slowing down other selected traffic which reduces the overall data flow on the network.
Heavy users: Heavy users can cause peak traffic volumes to exceed the engineered maximum load. In practice this refers to a very small proportion of users of a network whose use is excessive to the extent that it impacts on other users.
For information from Ofcom on Traffic Management, visit ofcom.org.uk