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SWS Broadband Fair Use Policy

Our fair usage policy is designed to ensure your service stays stable and reliable 24 hours a day – it involves monitoring the amount of bandwidth each connection accesses and managing the bandwidth available to you.

Customers should be able to use their service in an appropriate manner to meet their needs. If a customer’s usage is continually excessive, unfair, negatively affects other users of our broadband service or is not consistent with the usage we would typically expect on their current package, we reserve the right to upgrade the customer to a package more suited to their usage.

In extreme cases we may restrict offending services during peak hours, suspend or terminate the customer’s ability to access SWS Broadband service.


We will always attempt to contact customers before taking any action to change, restrict, suspend or terminate a connection and will make every effort to reach a mutually acceptable resolution.

Who is likely to be affected by the Fair Use Policy?

In over 50% of the instances where we have contacted customers about excessive use customers have identified malware or a virus on a device which has been responsible. Ensuring your devices have up-to-date antivirus/malware software installed can prevent this happening.

Peer to peer or file sharing software, backup to a cloud/offsite server or HD (high definition) CCTV streams are examples of activities which constantly send and/or receive video and other very large files and tend to use bandwidth to capacity for sustained periods of time and can affect the quality of service for other customers during peak hours.

Managing use

Customers should ensure that file sharing and backups are scheduled to run outside of peak hours (4pm to 12am) and configure CCTV to operate in SD (standard definition).

If SWS enforce the Fair Use Policy

We will make every effort to contact you to discuss use before taking any action to restrict or limit your connection.

We will work with you to establish a mutually acceptable resolution (usually as defined in managing use as above).

If you are unable to make changes or restrict the data rate then SWS may take action to restrict the bandwidth available to the service you are using during peak hours.