TM is committed to ensuring our customers receive the best broadband service at the most competitive price. To achieve this goal, we provide a contended broadband service. This means our Internet bandwidth (capacity) is catered to be shared by all our customers at any one point in time, to ensure we provide a satisfactory and acceptable performance on an equal basis to all our customers.
However, a small number of customers use more than their "fair share" of the Internet bandwidth provided by us. On average, about 10% of our customers are using a disproportionate amount of Internet bandwidth. These customers degrade the performance of our broadband service by taking bandwidth away from other customers, who use the service fairly.
For example, some customers use P2P or file sharing software, which constantly sends and receives videos and other types of very large files, throughout the day. These activities (download and upload continuously) use a lot of bandwidth and can significantly reduce the connection speed, which other customers are getting to access the Internet during peak hours. We don’t believe this is fair to the vast majority of our customers.
We wish to bring to your attention our traffic prioritization policy with regards to P2P and Fair Usage Policy. We would like to reiterate that the P2P throughput is subject to peers (seed) availability and their throughput as well. Kindly note that TM does not have any control over peers’ availability or throughput.
The Fair Usage Policy automatically identifies the extremely heavy users and manages their bandwidth in order to protect the service of all our other customers. This traffic prioritization policy will protect the quality of service for the majority of our customers when they use the service, while at the same time, still allowing the extremely heavy users to continue to send and receive files with certain restrictions. With this policy in place, we will prioritize Internet activities like web browsing, live streaming, messaging applications and VOIP access while traffic to P2P sites will be given lower priority, due to the high bandwidth consumption of such services.
We wish to also highlight that as an Internet Service Provider (ISP), TM only provides access to the Internet and does not guarantee content delivery and performance where it is not within the domain of TM as an ISP. In fact, our international traffic management policy is designed to cater for all our customers so they have an optimal surfing experience within the normal limits of Internet usage.
As our priority is for all our customers to have a positive Internet experience, we wish to emphasize that it is important for all our customers to practice responsible usage of the allocated bandwidth based on normal usage.
We would like to reiterate that we are not against the use of P2P but we would like to educate our customers that the usage of excessive P2P does impact the overall service availability to our other customers.
TM does provide every customer with an allocated bandwidth, where other customers may use when not used by the others. Unfortunately, the nature of P2P more often than not, takes more than their allocated bandwidth, thus causing undue setbacks for other users when they want to use the service.
As a responsible service provider, we believe it is our responsibility and commitment to educate and encourage responsible usage of the infrastructure we provide.
