Virgin Media Broadband usage policies

Broadband usage is how much you upload or download from the internet. It goes hand-in-hand with how many devices you are using, and what type of content you are accessing online. For example, a house with many different devices accessing the internet at one time, doing different things, will have an impact on your data usage. Activities such as watching a video has higher broadband data usage than looking at a web page. Gaming and downloading video content also has higher usage.

All Virgin Media broadband packages offer unlimited usage, subject to Virgin Media’s fair usage policy

See how traffic management measures apply to your broadband service with our Traffic Management Key Facts Indicator documents:

Check out our unlimited broadband services policy.

We implement some other reasonable traffic management measures across our network in order to comply with our legal obligations, ensure the integrity and security of our networks, make parental controls available to you and to provide you with the services you have asked us to provide. In particular:

1. We may block access to child abuse material and websites that the Courts have ordered us to block. You can find out more by reading Why do we block certain content?

2. If you have Web Safe switched on, then depending on what you have chosen to apply to your service, we will attempt to block: (a) websites which are inappropriate for children (Child Safe); and/or (b) websites that may be fraudulent or contain viruses. You can find out more by reading Web Safe.

3. In order to preserve the integrity and security of our network, we use DDoS detection and mitigation technology, and in the case of a suspected attack, we will attempt to screen out malicious traffic

4. We use a number of load balancers in our datacentres to balance traffic and provide you with the best possible service that we can.

The types of personal data processed due to site blocking and use of Web Safe are customer IP addresses, which are necessary to process in order to block the website and serve a page informing you that the requested page has been blocked. No personal data is being processed for DDoS mitigation and load balancing. We monitor usage to identify a customer’s total volumes of data usage but not specific applications or content. The only personal data processed are customer IP addresses and total data usage. Virgin Media operates a robust data governance programme with dedicated legal and compliance data protection and information security resources that advise on and monitor compliance with applicable law and policy, including safeguards. These safeguards and other measures help to ensure that Virgin Media’s processing of personal data adheres to all of the guiding principles of data protection law, such as minimisation of collection, fair and lawful use, retention limitations and appropriate technical and organisational measures.

• We monitor the performance of our network using a panel of real Virgin Media customers. You can find out all the stats, figures and FAQs about Virgin Media’s speeds from virginmedia.com/ourspeeds

• There are many factors that affect the speeds you get. We’ve put together a handy guide to checking your broadband performance.