Is Your Unlimited Broadband Actually Unlimited?

• Checked by hand 18 August 2026
• 17 providers, own documents only
• Law quoted from legislation.gov.uk
• Reviewed by Dr Alex J. Martin-Smith
• Next check 18 November 2026

• What the law actually protects
• "Unlimited" is not a legal term
• Fixed line: the good news
• 4G and 5G: the real thresholds
• Where documents disagree with themselves
• Are you actually being throttled?
• What to do about it

What the law actually protects

Most articles about traffic management start by explaining what it is. We are not going to, because we already have a page that does that. What almost nobody explains is what the law does and does not stop your provider doing, and the distinction turns out to be the whole subject.

The rules are in Regulation (EU) 2015/2120, assimilated into UK law and amended for exit by a statutory instrument in 2018. legislation.gov.uk currently records no outstanding effects on it, and Ofcom is the enforcement body. Article 3(3) opens with an unusually plain statement of principle:

Equal treatment is the default. A provider may still implement "reasonable traffic management measures", but the second subparagraph constrains them tightly: they must be "transparent, non-discriminatory and proportionate", they must "not be based on commercial considerations but on objectively different technical quality of service requirements of specific categories of traffic", they "shall not monitor the specific content" and they "shall not be maintained for longer than necessary".

The third subparagraph draws the hard boundary, and the exact words matter more than any summary of them. A provider must not "block, slow down, alter, restrict, interfere with, degrade or discriminate between specific content, applications or services, or specific categories thereof", except as necessary and only for as long as necessary, in order to do one of exactly three things:

And here is the part that surprised us

Read the words in bold again. What that subparagraph forbids is discriminating between particular services. Your provider may not decide that Netflix runs slower than its own video product, or that gaming traffic yields to browsing, outside those three narrow exceptions. That is a real and valuable protection and it is the reason UK broadband does not look like a cable package.

What it does not do is stop a provider slowing your whole connection once you cross a usage threshold, because a reduction that treats every application the same is not discrimination between applications. That sits under Article 3(2), which governs commercial terms, and Ofcom's guidance says so directly. Its list of compatible commercial practices includes "Application-agnostic tariff plans for a broad public", and paragraph A1.124 states that providers "may also specify contractual terms such as fair usage policies that are appropriate for a particular Internet Access Service. These must be communicated clearly to customers".

Which makes transparency the protection that actually bites

Article 4 is the provision to know, because it puts duties into your contract. Article 4(1)(a) requires "information on how traffic management measures applied by that provider could impact on the quality of the internet access services, on the privacy of end-users and on the protection of their personal data". Article 4(1)(b) requires "a clear and comprehensible explanation as to how any volume limitation, speed and other quality of service parameters may in practice have an impact on internet access services, and in particular on the use of content, applications and services". And the paragraph closes: "Providers of internet access services shall publish the information referred to in the first subparagraph."

Ofcom's guidance spells out what publishing means. Contracts "should specify the 'size' of the cap (in quantitative terms, e.g. GB), what that means in practice and the consequences of exceeding it (e.g. additional charges, speed restrictions, blocking of all traffic etc.)". A provider that applies a threshold is supposed to tell you the number. That single sentence is the most useful thing on this page, and the section on what to do uses it.

"Unlimited" is not a legal term

Here is a finding that reframes the subject. "Unlimited" has no definition anywhere in UK telecoms law. The word appears exactly once in the whole of Regulation (EU) 2015/2120, in a recital about roaming tariffs, and it is not defined there or anywhere else. It appears nowhere in Ofcom's residential broadband speeds code of practice. Ofcom does not define it and has no rule about what it must mean.

What governs it instead sits in two other places. The first is advertising self regulation: guidance written by the Committee of Advertising Practice and enforced by the Advertising Standards Authority, introduced in 2011 and reissued in April 2025. The second, and this matters because it carries far more weight, is consumer protection law: a misleading claim is actionable under the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008, and since 2025 the Competition and Markets Authority has had direct enforcement powers over unfair commercial practices under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, including the ability to seek redress for consumers. The ASA route is the quick one. It is not the only one.

The advertising test has two limbs, and an unlimited claim is likely acceptable only if both are met:

Together those two limbs explain something that looks contradictory. A provider can lawfully advertise a service as unlimited while operating a threshold, provided crossing it does not cost you money or get you suspended, and provided any slowdown is moderate and clearly explained. That is not a loophole. It has been the rule since 2011.

The other half protects you. CAP is explicit that "exceeding a particular usage level or using the service for a lawful activity will not in itself render a user illegitimate", and that a legitimate user "is a customer who abides by the service's T&Cs". Using a lot of data is not misuse.

Two recent rulings, and what they were actually about

The ASA has ruled twice on this in the last eighteen months. Both concerned mobile data plans rather than home broadband, which is worth knowing before you rely on them, but the reasoning transfers. Neither found "unlimited" itself to be misleading. Both found the provider had failed to put the catch where people would see it.

In May 2025 the ASA considered EE's unlimited SIM plans, which carried a 600GB fair use policy. On the claim itself: "Because users did not incur a charge or suspension and because the restrictions imposed were moderate only, we concluded that the claim that the data plans were 'unlimited' was not misleading." On presentation it upheld the complaint, finding that "the existence of the FUP could easily be overlooked because of its placement in an expandable section situated beneath the main body of the ad".

In July 2026 it reached the same result against Utility Warehouse over a 500GB threshold: "Notwithstanding that users did not incur a charge or suspension, and the restrictions imposed were moderate only, we considered that the existence of the FUP constituted a limitation and should therefore be made clear in the ad." It told the company "to ensure that their unlimited claims were directly qualified with the terms of their fair use policy".

Fixed line: the good news

We read the published policies of fourteen fixed line providers on 18 August 2026, taking every word from the provider's own site. Nine publish a clear "none" for data caps and "no" for managing heavy users, most of them in Ofcom's standard key facts format. Two more have no cap figure in any document we could find. Three could not be read at all.

4G and 5G: the real thresholds

This is where the limits live, and it is worth being precise about what kind of limit it is. None of the three operators selling 4G or 5G home broadband in the UK imposes a hard monthly cap. You will not be cut off, you will not be charged for extra data and your line will not stop working. What two of them do instead is change your priority.

The mechanism has a name. Mobile networks tag each user's traffic with a QoS Class Identifier, a number telling the network whose packets go first when a cell is busy. Both Vodafone and EE describe moving heavy users from QCI 8 down to QCI 9. In plain English: on a mast that is congested your traffic yields to everyone else's, and on a mast that is not congested nothing happens at all. How much you would notice depends entirely on local congestion. On a quiet cell it is invisible; on a busy urban cell at seven in the evening it can mean visibly slower speeds. No operator publishes measurements of the difference.

What about Starlink?

We could not read a single Starlink policy document. Every legal page returned a JavaScript shell with no readable text, and we are not going to characterise its current UK residential terms without having read them. Satellite is frequently the only option for a rural household, so this is the gap we would most like to close, and we will try again with a browser at the November check. If you are a Starlink customer, its terms of service and fair use policy are linked from the legal section of its site and are worth reading directly.

Where documents disagree with themselves

Reading fifty policy documents turns up something we did not expect and think is worth publishing: a few providers' own documents contradict each other. Not marketing against terms, which is common everywhere, but published policy against published policy. Article 4 puts a legal duty on providers to publish this information clearly, and a customer cannot follow a rule that exists in two versions.

Before the two genuine cases, one thing needs saying, because it is the trap this kind of article falls into. A provider that publishes a specific figure looks worse than one that publishes nothing, and it is not worse. Most of the providers in the table above reserve a right to restrict without ever saying what the restriction would be. The two named below are, in different ways, more forthcoming than that. We are naming the documents, not the companies' good faith.

toob: a specific consequence, in a policy its own key facts sheet denies

toob's traffic management policy, published November 2019, answers "No" to whether traffic management is used in relation to heavy users, "No" to peak hours, and gives the data limit as "Unlimited". toob's acceptable usage policy, version 3 of 17 June 2022, says this:

Read the condition, because it does a lot of work. This is not a volume threshold: toob publishes no GB figure anywhere. It is triggered only where usage is "negatively impacting other customers", which is congestion management rather than a usage rule, and congestion management is squarely within what Article 3(3)(c) and Ofcom's guidance permit. toob's residential range runs from 150Mbps up to 2,300Mbps, all symmetrical, so on the fastest tier a reduction to 100Mbps is a cut of around ninety six per cent, and on the 900Mbps tier around eighty nine. On the entry tier it is a third.

Is that "moderate only" within the advertising test? That is a question for the ASA and it has never been tested. Two things are worth weighing on the other side: 100Mbps is comfortably above the UK average fixed line speed and supports several 4K streams at once, and the measure only applies where somebody else is being harmed. And toob is the only provider in this entire survey that publishes what a restriction would actually be. Everyone else who reserves the right simply reserves it. The problem here is a stale 2019 document that answers "No" to a question its 2022 sibling answers "Yes", not the disclosure itself.

YouFibre: terms pointing at limits which are not there

YouFibre's residential terms were updated on 10 July 2026. Clause 7.12 reads: "Our Services may have monthly usage limits which are described in our Acceptable Use Policy. If you go over any of these limits, we may charge you for excess usage." The acceptable usage policy it points to has been in effect since 29 March 2021, contains no monthly usage limit or data cap figure anywhere, and states: "YouFibre do not have a traffic management Policy, although YouFibre may choose to introduce one in the future."

So the terms describe a document by reference to content that document does not contain. The practical reading is that YouFibre has no usage limits, which is good news for its customers, and nothing in this survey suggests it has ever charged anyone for excess usage. But a clause threatening excess usage charges by cross reference is an uncomfortable thing to leave in a contract updated last month, and it is the one place in this survey where a customer could reasonably fear a bill.

Vodafone: three numbers, three different products

Vodafone's 5G Broadband terms of May 2026 give 1TB. Its acceptable use policy of 8 April 2025 refers to usage exceeding "600GB per month twice or more in a 6-month period". Its traffic management key facts document, which carries no date, sets a flag at "200GB for two consecutive billing months". We initially read those as contradictory and they are not: they have different scopes, covering the home product, consumer services generally, and mobile broadband packages respectively. The difficulty is that a customer cannot easily tell which applies to them, and the document carrying the lowest figure is the one with no date on it. Naming the product each figure governs, and dating the key facts sheet, would resolve it entirely.

And a pattern that is not a contradiction at all

Several providers pair a confident unlimited promise with a reserved right to act. BT says "We don't slow down your broadband speeds, even at busy times" while its terms cite usage "significantly different to what we'd expect from the average customer". TalkTalk says its packages are "completely unlimited" with no "speed reductions, even at peak times", alongside a fair use policy barring "disproportionate or excessive" use. NOW says its plans are "truly unlimited and not subject to traffic management" while clause 3.6 reserves a right to "temporarily or permanently control or restrict your online activities". Hyperoptic says outright that it has no traffic management policy while reserving the right to introduce one "with or without notice". Virgin Media qualifies unlimited usage as "subject to Virgin Media's fair usage policy" and we could not find a published fixed line threshold behind that qualifier.

None of that is a contradiction and we are not presenting it as one. Every network needs a backstop against genuine abuse, and a reserved right that has no published threshold is very probably a right that is almost never used. The most likely explanation of Virgin's dangling qualifier is simply that there is no fixed line threshold, which would be good news. It is worth knowing the clauses exist so that nothing surprises you, and that is all.

Are you actually being throttled?

Almost certainly not, and it is worth saying that before anyone spends an evening on it. On a UK fixed line, deliberate throttling of an ordinary household is rare, and the great majority of slowdowns have a duller explanation. Work through these in order, because they are ordered by how likely each is to be your answer.

1. Test on a cable, not on Wi-Fi

   This one step resolves most cases. Wi-Fi loses speed through walls, floors and interference, and a phone in a back bedroom is measuring your Wi-Fi rather than your broadband. Plug a laptop into the router with an Ethernet cable and test again. If the wired figure is fine, nothing is being throttled and the problem is inside your home.

2. Test at three different times

   Try mid morning, early evening and late at night. A dip only between eight and ten in the evening is peak time contention, a shared capacity effect rather than anything aimed at you. Plusnet publishes exactly those hours as its peak window and every network experiences the same pattern. Our guide to speeds lower than advertised walks through the diagnosis properly.

3. Check whether it is everything, or one thing

   This is the question the law is built around. If one streaming service buffers while everything else is fast, that is a service or routing problem far more often than a provider one. But it is also the shape of the only behaviour Article 3(3) actually forbids, so if one service is consistently and specifically worse, that is the complaint worth making, and it is much stronger than a general one about speed.

4. On 4G or 5G, check your usage against the threshold

   This is the one case where the answer may genuinely be a policy. Look up your data used this month and last month in your account. If you are a Vodafone 5G Broadband or EE home customer above 1TB, or a Vodafone mobile broadband user above 200GB in two consecutive months, you are within scope of the published rule. Then check whether the slowdown only happens at busy times, because the flag only has an effect on a congested cell.

5. On a fixed line, compare against your guaranteed minimum

   If your provider has signed up to Ofcom's voluntary speeds code, your contract carries a personalised minimum guaranteed download speed, and that number rather than the headline is the one with rights attached. If your wired speed sits below it and your provider cannot fix it within its stated window, you may be able to leave without penalty. Check whether bundled TV or mobile lines are covered, because they often are not. Our guide to the minimum guaranteed download speed sets out how it works. This does not apply to 4G or 5G home broadband, which has no minimum guaranteed speed.

What to do about it

1. Find your provider's key facts document

   Most publish one in Ofcom's standard format, usually under a legal or terms section rather than in help. Search your provider's site for "traffic management" or "key facts indicator". It answers, in a table, whether anything is blocked, slowed or prioritised, whether heavy users are managed, and what the peak hours are.

2. Ask for the number in writing, and cite the duty

   If a provider says there is a fair use policy but will not say what the threshold is, quote the law. Article 4(1)(b) requires "a clear and comprehensible explanation as to how any volume limitation, speed and other quality of service parameters may in practice have an impact on internet access services", and Ofcom's guidance says contracts should specify the size of any cap "in quantitative terms, e.g. GB" and the consequences of exceeding it. Ask them to confirm the figure, the trigger and the effect. This is the single strongest request on this page because the duty is unambiguous.

3. If one service is specifically worse, say so in those words

   A complaint that a named application is consistently degraded while others are not engages the actual prohibition in Article 3(3), which is a far stronger position than a general complaint about speed. Gather evidence: same device, same time, wired, one service slow and another fast.

4. Complain formally, and get a reference

   If you are on one of the four grounds above, log a formal complaint and note the date, because the clock that eventually lets you go to an ombudsman runs from that date rather than from when the problem started. Our complaints and escalation hub sets out the timings and which scheme covers your provider.

5. If the advert hid it, tell the ASA, knowing its limits

   Reporting an advert is free and takes minutes, and you do not have to be a customer of the advertiser. But the ASA can only require the advert to change. It cannot get you a refund, compensation or a contract exit, and it generally will not consider adverts that stopped running more than three months ago. Beyond advertising, a misleading claim is also actionable under the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008, and the Competition and Markets Authority has had direct enforcement powers over unfair commercial practices since 2025 under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024.

Questions people actually ask

References

1. Advertising Standards Authority. (2025, May 21). Broadband and telecoms: unlimited claims. https://www.asa.org.uk/advice-online/broadband-and-telecoms-unlimited-claims.html
2. Advertising Standards Authority. (2025, May 21). ASA ruling on EE Ltd. https://www.asa.org.uk/rulings/ee-ltd-a24-1253564-ee-ltd.html
3. Advertising Standards Authority. (2026, July 29). ASA ruling on Utility Warehouse Ltd. https://www.asa.org.uk/rulings/utility-warehouse-ltd-a26-1331986-utility-warehouse-ltd.html
4. Committee of Advertising Practice and Broadcast Committee of Advertising Practice. (2025, April). Unlimited ads: advertising guidance. https://www.asa.org.uk/static/bdf28a2d-27ec-4b7b-bf3eea62a7c52830/Unlimited-ads-CAPBCAP-0425.pdf
5. BT. (2026). BT's approach to broadband traffic management. https://www.bt.com/help/broadband/bt-s-approach-to-broadband-traffic-management
6. BT. (2026). Broadband usage policy. https://www.bt.com/broadbandusagepolicy
7. EE. (2026). Mobile broadband. https://ee.co.uk/broadband/mobile-broadband
8. EE. (2026). Network traffic management. https://ee.co.uk/help/terms-and-conditions/broadband/network-traffic-management
9. EE. (2026). Mobile broadband traffic management key facts indicator. https://ee.co.uk/content/dam/help/terms-and-conditions/broadband/network-traffic-management/ee-mobile-broadband-traffic-management.pdf
10. Gigaclear. (2026). Acceptable use policy. https://gigaclear.com/acceptable-use-policy
11. Hyperoptic. (2023, October 23). Acceptable usage policy. https://www.hyperoptic.com/legal/post/acceptable-usage-policy/
12. NOW. (2026). NOW Broadband traffic management policy. https://www.nowtv.com/gb/help/article/now-broadband-traffic-management-policy
13. O2. (2026). Broadband. https://www.o2.co.uk/broadband
14. Ofcom. (2023, October 26). Net neutrality review: annexes, including guidance on Ofcom's approach to assessing compliance with the net neutrality rules. https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0018/270261/Annexes-Net-Neutrality-Review.pdf
15. Ofcom. (2025, November 19). Connected Nations UK report 2025. https://www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/resources/documents/research-and-data/multi-sector/infrastructure-research/connected-nations-2025/connected-nations-uk-report-2025.pdf?v=407947
16. Ofcom. (2026, February 17). Net neutrality 2025 annual monitoring report. https://www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/resources/documents/research-and-data/online-research/other/net-neutrality-/net-neutrality-annual-monitoring-report-2025.pdf
17. Plusnet. (2026). Key fact indicators for broadband traffic prioritisation. https://www.plus.net/help/legal/key-fact-indicators-for-broadband-traffic-prioritisation/
18. Regulation (EU) 2015/2120. (2020). Open internet access, Article 3 [assimilated UK law]. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/eur/2015/2120/article/3
19. Regulation (EU) 2015/2120. (2020). Open internet access, Article 4 [assimilated UK law]. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/eur/2015/2120/article/4
20. Sky. (2026). Broadband. https://www.sky.com/broadband
21. TalkTalk. (2026). Broadband traffic management. https://help-centre.talktalk.co.uk/Broadband/More_broadband_support/Broadband_traffic_management
22. Three. (2025, June 2). Home broadband terms for customers who joined or upgraded from 8 September 2024. https://www.three.co.uk/content/dam/threedigital/terms-and-conditions/paym-and-payg/three-home-broadband-terms-for-customers-who-joined-or-upgraded-from-8-september-24-effective-date-2-june-25.pdf
23. toob. (2019, November). Broadband traffic management policy. https://www.toob.co.uk/legal/traffic-management-policy/
24. toob. (2022, June 17). Acceptable usage policy, version 3. https://www.toob.co.uk/legal/acceptable-usage-policy/
25. toob. (2026). Home broadband. https://www.toob.co.uk/home-broadband/
26. Virgin Media. (2026). Broadband usage policy. https://www.virginmedia.com/help/broadband/broadband-usage-policy
27. Virgin Media. (2026). Acceptable use policy explained. https://www.virginmedia.com/legal/acceptable-use-policy/explained
28. Vodafone. (2026, May). 5G Broadband terms and conditions. https://binaries.vodafone.co.uk/gbnnsauqav4t/zD9OzqbhhKczHEoc27bna/75e4ef486fe23a04b883dcdb0a6ad933/5g-broadband.pdf
29. Vodafone. (2026). Traffic management key facts: mobile broadband packages. https://binaries.vodafone.co.uk/gbnnsauqav4t/769fgVGIddxf6pOYul047O/66167c34dd08bbbd21c3032b58ccb39b/traffic-management-mobile-broadband.pdf
30. YouFibre. (2021, March 29). Acceptable usage policy. https://www.youfibre.com/legal/acceptable-usage-policy/
31. YouFibre. (2026, July 10). Residential terms and conditions. https://www.youfibre.com/legal/residential-terms-and-conditions/
32. Zen Internet. (2023, May 4). Services acceptable usage policy. https://www.zen.co.uk/global/terms-and-conditions/services-acceptable-usage-policy/