What are the technical details of your traffic management?

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.