Green Dot Limited – ISP Fair Usage Policy

A Fair Usage Policy - FUP, is intended to assure that all broadband customers enjoy the same experience and have access to a quick and reliable service at all times.
A small number of customers use Peer to Peer or file sharing software, which constantly sends and receives video and other very large files, throughout the day, consuming excessive bandwidth. This type of activity can significantly reduce the speed at which other customers can access the internet during peak hours.

This fair usage policy automatically identifies the small number of extremely heavy users and manages their bandwidth only during peak hours (6pm to 11pm daily), to protect the service for all our other customers. Outside peak hours, the use of the internet by these heavy users is unaffected.

This approach protects the quality of service for the vast majority of our customers when they most use the service, while at the same time allowing the extremely heavy users to continue to send and receive without restriction outside of peak hours.

Actions to be taken in the event of FUP breach

We will contact the customer by email to let them know that their usage at peak hours is excessive and is affecting other customers, for that reason we are modifying the contention rate. The email will be sent to the email address Green Dot has in their records.

During peak hours, customers affected by the fair usage policy will share bandwidth with each other and will be separated from other customers. The amount of bandwidth available for affected customers to share will be at least as much as for those customers unaffected by the policy.

The speed affected customers experience when downloading at peak hours will therefore depend on what these customers are doing. If they are all web-browsing and reading emails, they will experience normal broadband speed. If on the other hand they are using Peer to Peer or file sharing software they will experience slow broadband speed. Outside of peak hours, no restrictions will apply.

Other Fair Usage Policy Considerations

Green Dot does not guarantee a service level and/or connectivity to users of peer-to-peer or file sharing software/applications.

Customer’s average usage per day shall NOT exceed 4Gb of data volume transmitted (total upload and download usage). This is to ensure that no individual hogs the bandwidth at all times. Exceeding this amount of data will be considered a breach of FUP.

Average daily data usage over previous 3 days

Download Speed

< 4 GB daily

Full speed

> 4 GB daily

Increase contention

As soon as the average over the previous 3 days falls below the threshold limits above then your speed will increase.

Customers could manage their usage simply by ensuring that any file sharing, sending and receiving of large file is done outside of peak hours.