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If you wish to leave Sky, you will need to provide 31 days notice, please check your Terms and Conditions or speak to one of our advisors if you're not sure whether your minimum contract period has expired. Please call Sky Customer Services on 08442 410 266 (UK) or 0818 719 819 (Rep. of Ireland) as you are unable to complete this process online.

If you don't want to leave Sky, but you're not happy with your current package, we may be able help you choose channels and services that are right for you and your budget. 


If you're happy with your current TV subscription but want to see more of the programmes you love, see My Sky for personalised recommendations, Sky Anytime, Remote Record, Never Miss and more. 

If you're not happy with your telephone or internet service, we can help you get more from these products and fix common problems. We can, for example, see if we can help you improve a slow wireless broadband connection and help you get the best speeds possible. For tips and fixes for common technical problems, visit our dedicated help sections for Sky Talk and Sky Broadband.

Standard, Premium and Pro packages.  You can download or upload as much as you like each month – within reason. Like most other broadband providers, we have a policy on fair use. The policy is there to stop people overloading the system. And slowing it down for everyone else. You won't have any problem downloading films and music or watching videos online. But if you download large files at peak times every day, we might ask you to cut down. And if you keep overdoing it, we could close your account.

Access. There’s a monthly download limit of 20GB if you joined on or after 14th July 2010. If you joined before this date, there is no limit on monthly network usage. But if we feel that your activities are so excessive that other customers are detrimentally affected, we may give you a written warning (by email or otherwise). In extreme circumstances, if the levels of activity do not immediately decrease after the warning, we may terminate or suspend your Services.

The Basics. If you’ve signed up to The Basics package, there’s a 20GB monthly usage allowance. If you use more than 20GB in any month, we’ll give you a written warning (by email or otherwise). In extreme circumstances, if the levels of activity don’t decrease in line with our instructions after the warning, we may terminate or suspend your Services.

The All Rounder & The Works. You can download as much as you like up to a fair usage limit of around 100GB for the All Rounder or around 250GB for The Works. If you exceed these limits, or we feel that your activities are so excessive that other customers are detrimentally affected, we may give you a written warning (by email or otherwise). In extreme circumstances, if the levels of activity don’t immediately decrease in line with our instructions after the warning, we may terminate or suspend your Services.

How do we measure your usage on The Basics, The All Rounder and The Works packages?

We monitor your usage every billing month. You can get an indication of how much data you’ve downloaded (apart from our Access product) in your online account ato2.co.uk/MyBroadband. There are also hints and tips for keeping down usage that can be accessed from here, and on the help section of our Website.
I've been told to use less broadband. What should I do? 
Try to download and upload less. Here are some activities that use a lot of bandwidth:

• Peer-to-peer software (like BitTorrent).
• File sharing programs often run in the background without you knowing. So turn off the 'auto start' setting. And if yours lets you set a maximum download speed, choose 'low'.
• BBC iPlayer: use the newest version – it uses less bandwidth.
• What else is going on in your house? Is someone else overdoing it? Ask everyone to use a bit less.

If you need further information on controlling your usage, go to:http://www.o2.co.uk/broadband/usage/

Our Access package:

We optimise our Access network by traffic type. During the busiest times of day (typically the afternoon and evening) we shape Peer to Peer (P2P) traffic to a maximum throughput of 50kbps. This will limit P2P traffic during peak time and free up capacity on our links. 
Additionally, to give priority to traffic that most customers just can't wait for we have applied a Quality of Service (QoS) queuing system to prioritise traffic. That means streaming traffic gets ahead of browsing which in turn gets ahead of P2P. This will be applied during peak times from 11am-1am.

Our other packages, The Basics, The All Rounder and The Works: 

On these packages, traffic management works optimising the speed based on certain activities only: video/ streaming and Peer to Peer (file sharing/ downloads). Basically, the higher the package, the higher the speed you should get on these activities. See the table below for more details. All other types of web use (including web browsing, email and numerous other ways of using the internet) are not traffic managed on these packages. 

Of course all this depends on what line speed you get to start with. For example, if in the house where you live your line can only ever get 4 meg, then you won’t be able to benefit from the up to 8 meg speed streaming speed on The All Rounder. Since your overall line speed is lower than the ‘optimised’ speed for streaming on this package. 

So when picking the package that’s right for you, it’s a good idea to consider not only how these packages are ‘optimised’ by speed, but what is the actual line speed you’re getting at home.

So what’s all this about kilobits and megabytes?

When we talk about speed (or sometimes called ‘throughput’) of connection, the unit of measurement is called a ‘kilobits per second’. Kilobits per second (kbits/s) are what make up the larger unit of measurement, called a Megabits per second (Mbits/s; 1000kbits/s = 1Mbit/s).

Let’s take an example on the larger unit of measurement, the Mbits/s, and what it means in the real world.

Say you want to stream a video. For an ‘SD’ video you should get a decent streaming experience with an 800 kbits/s (equivalent to 0.8 Mbits/s) connection speed. But say you want to stream some HD content, you’ll generally need a bit more connection speed for a good experience. Something in the range of 3.7 Mbits/s (equivalent to 3700 kbits/s) to 6 Mbits/s (equivalent to 6000 kbits/s) is good for this.

Our broadband network gets clogged up at rush hours, just like real roads. A lot of that congestion comes from people downloading large files (movies, TV shows and music) and using peer to peer programs and newsgroup services.

This makes it slower for other people to do things like email, look at websites, watch things on BBC iPlayer and YouTube or use programs like Skype or Messenger.

All we're doing is encouraging people to download large files and use peer to peer programs and newsgroups when there's less traffic, to help our broadband flow better.

Peer to peer is a way of sharing files with other people. Mostly music, video and games. Instead of downloading things from a website, you can download and share files by connecting directly to other people’s computers. If you’ve heard people talking about BitTorrent, Gnutella or KaZaA, they’re all examples of peer to peer.

If you use peer to peer, make sure you don’t download or share anything that’s copyright protected or illegal. And try to do it at non-peak times like late night, for faster speeds.

Newsgroups

They're basically discussion groups about a particular topic. They're not news sites like BBC News or Sky News.

These are some of the popular newsgroup services:

NNTP 
NNTPS 
TAC_News 
Audio_News 
NTalk 
NetNews 
NAS 
DDI 
Giganews

We think it’s important that most people are able to do what it is they want to do online, as far as possible. That’s different for all us.

But by managing different types of traffic across the network, in different ways by package, we’re trying to get to a balance between those people who just want to do a few more basic things on line (we have an ideal package for that, The Basics), or those wanting to a lot more in the way of video (The All Rounder) or those people who want do it all such as movies and online gaming (The Works).

So each of these packages is more suited, because of how the traffic is managed, to these different needs.

In managing traffic in this way, we also look to ensure a more balanced use of the network for all. Since just a few people using huge amounts of data can really affect the experience of everyone else using the network; who may just want to do something much more simple (like check their email, or browse a few websites).

All this also helps create clearer choice for you. So you’re less likely to end up paying for either a really high-spec package when your online needs are more basic, or for a simpler package when you really would rather have (and are prepared to pay for) a package for more intensive web use.