Acceptable Broadband Use Policy

1. Introduction

Fibre Options Limited (hereafter ‘Fibre Options’) have adopted a philosophy that assumes the honesty and good intent of our subscribers, therefore our services are provided in as unrestricted a manner as possible to allow our users to have the richest Internet experience possible.
This Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) must be read in conjunction with our relevant Terms & Conditions of Service and Code of Practice and may be subject to change from time to time. It is the subscriber’s responsibility to ensure that they comply with the latest edition of the AUP at any given time. If you have any questions about any of our policies, please contact our Customer Services at support@fibre-options.com
This AUP may be revised, without notice, at any time, at the sole discretion of Fibre Options. Completion of the relevant application forms or connection to the service for the first time is deemed to be an agreement to our Terms & Conditions and AUP.
In the event of a breach of this policy, Fibre Options reserves the right to terminate your service with immediate effect, without recompense and delete any files held on our servers.
In addition this document along with our Code of Practice details our policies and safeguards that are in place to protect consumers and ensure fair and safe access to our services. It also outlines our policy towards the fair use of our broadband service and the steps that we might take if your use of the service adversely affects the quality of the service enjoyed by other users on our network.
Nothing in this Code affects your statutory or other legal rights. Whilst the code provides useful guidance as to the manner in which we operate, it does not form part of any contract between us.

2. General

Users may not mount an attack, by whatever means, against our system, or any other systems. Users may not run unauthorised mailing lists from, or through any of our machines, or mail servers.
Login names and passwords must be kept secret and not be communicated to any third party. Fibre Options must be notified immediately if they are compromised. If someone were to gain access to your account password, they could tamper with your files and your email. If you change your password, please keep a note of it as Fibre Options staff cannot gain access to changed passwords.
Users may not download or store illegal copies of commercial software. If commercial software is stored on our hard disk, we will delete the files and immediately terminate your service without recompense.
Any attempt to breach the security of any machine is forbidden. Attempting to do so will result in immediate account termination and possible further legal action. Users may not run any program that monitors network packet data or any program that compromises the privacy of network traffic.
Fibre Options reserve the right to suspend accounts or access to the network during investigation or suspected or potential abuse of this policy.
Fibre Options customers who engage in abuse of its network and/or the Internet will be notified that their behaviour is unacceptable and may have their accounts suspended or terminated if such abuse continues.
Fibre Options does not tolerate abusive behaviour from anyone and reserves the right to terminate, without notice or refund, the services of any customer who uses abusive, violent, verbally abusive or threatening behaviour towards Fibre Options, its staff, customers or other users.

3. Broadband

Permanently connected customers that provide their own web servers, email servers, news or any other type of service are totally responsible for those servers/services and their content.
You should ensure that you are aware of any laws regarding the material you are providing, including copyright laws.
If you are breaking the law we will co-operate with the relevant authorities and may also suspend or disconnect your service.
Broadband customers are required not to use the supplied connection for illegal purposes; this includes copyright violation and/or the transmission of illegal material.
The user agrees to refrain from sending or receiving any material which may be deemed to be offensive, abusive, indecent, hard-core, paedophile pornography, defamatory, obscene, menacing or as prohibited by current and future law. Fibre Options reserve the right to disconnect or suspend your service.
You must not gain or attempt to gain unauthorised access to any computer system(s) for any purpose. This is classed as a breach of this AUP and also such action may lead to criminal prosecution under the Computer Misuse Act.
You are prohibited from running port scanning or other software which is intended to probe, scan, test the vulnerability of remote systems or networks expect in circumstances where the remote network administrator has given express permission for this to be done.
Broadband customers should also be aware of their inclusive bandwidth quotas should any be imposed by the terms of their service. This quota is in place 24hours a day, 7 days a week on our network – we do not have peak/off peak hours, once the included bandwidth has been exhausted, we will charge for additional usage at our advertised rate.

4. Email

Sending and receiving email involves the same responsibilities as would be used when sending or receiving any other form of communication – written or printed mail etc. Most users fully understand what would be considered appropriate and acceptable when communicating with others and apply these considerations to their use of email.
You should not send emails that may cause annoyance, inconvenience or anxiety to the recipient.
You should not send any emails likely to cause distress, or any material which is classed of offensive, indecent, obscene, menacing or in any way unlawful.
You must not use Fibre Options mail services or our network to send email to any user who does not wish to receive it.
You must not use Fibre Options mail services or our network to send unsolicited commercial email (known as ‘spam’ or ‘UCE’) in bulk or individually.
You must not use the Fibre Options mail service or our network to deprive others of service (known as ‘mail bombing’).
You must not use false mail headers or alter the headers of email messages in such a way as to conceal the identity of the sender.
You must ensure that any email servers connected to our network and/or owned by you are not configured to allow open SMTP email relays.
Customers who abuse this service will be notified that their behaviour is unacceptable and may have accounts suspended, terminated or restricted.

5. Usenet (News)

Use of Usenet services, like email communication, is generally a matter of common sense in regard to communication. What is generally considered unacceptable in other forms of communication may also be unacceptable in postings to Usenet news groups.
You should acknowledge that some newsgroups accessible through our news service may contain language, pictures or discussion of topics intended for an adult only audience.
Fibre Options cannot and does not proactively monitor discussions or the content held within news groups on our servers.
The Material may originate from other servers and be transmitted as part of the normal Usenet news service.
Fibre Options does not accept any responsibility for the content or any of the postings made to Usenet – whether considered legal or otherwise.
Fibre Options reserve the right to discontinue access to Usenet or to any newsgroup at any time and for any reason.
You may not alter the headers of postings to newsgroups in an attempt to conceal the identity of the sender; this does not include the addition of characters to an email address or domain name in an attempt to prevent capture of email addresses by automated gathering software.
Fibre Options is unable to force any removal of material from other servers outside of their control. Fibre Options customers who engage in abuse of the Usenet network will be notified that their behaviour is unacceptable and may have their accounts suspended, blocked or restricted if such abuse continues.

6. Web Space

You will be responsible for the content of any web space that we might provide to you, including obtaining the legal permission for any works they include and ensuring that the contents of these pages do not violate UK law.
Should any web pages not conform to this then they will be removed.
Fibre Options reserves the right, without notice or explanation, to remove material which does not comply with company policy, such as material of an adult nature or pirated software.
Subscribers will be held solely responsible for any defamatory, confidential, secret or other proprietary material made available via your web sites. Fibre Options reserves the right to suspend any sites containing such material.
Login names and passwords must be kept secret and not communicated to any third party, except for agencies, such as web site designers working on your behalf, or those directly involved with the site in question. Fibre Options must be notified immediately if they are compromised. If someone were to gain access to your account password, they could tamper with files held on your site.
Technical support will only be provided for uploading, downloading and viewing pages. No support will be provided for HTML authoring or page design, although we may have support pages providing help with these topics.
The customer has sole responsibility for ensuring that any data is suitably backed-up. Fibre Options will not keep backups of your pages.
Fibre Options will accept no responsibility whatsoever for loss of data or information resulting from the use of this service.
If the account is suspended for any reason, such as non-payment, access to the customer’s homepage, both for viewing and uploading, may also be suspended.
On closing an account, the relevant data on the customer’s web space will be deleted.
By uploading to the web space, the customer will be deemed to have accepted and agreed to the Terms & Conditions of use of the web space service.

7. Internet Relay Chat (IRC) Specific

Users must abide by the policies of any IRC networks they use. We will co-operate with the administrators of IRC networks to identify abusive users and restrict their access to IRC. Users are reminded that harassment, threatening or slanderous behaviour on IRC is prosecutable under UK law.

8. Fair Use

As the broadband service we offer is delivered on a contended basis, a number of customers could be sharing the bandwidth at the same time.
Consequently the sending or downloading very large files or the use of ‘peer to peer’ and file sharing software (which itself may result in the transfer of very large files) is likely to have an adverse impact on the service quality for all users sharing that bandwidth. This results in a slower response for everyone accessing the Internet or sending and receiving emails, especially at peak times.
Although the vast majority of subscribers use their service considerately and their usage levels during peak hours do not disproportionately affect the shared network capacity, a very small number of subscribers using the service inappropriately can greatly affect the service. We therefore ask all subscribers to refrain from inappropriate use to ensure that the service can be used fairly by everyone.
If you regularly use the service inappropriately during peak hours, and we believe this is unfairly affecting other customers’ use of the service, we reserve the right to manage your bandwidth during peak times, which could result in reduced service speeds.
If you continue to use your service inappropriately we reserve the right to end your agreement with us and will give you notice before doing so.
While this policy applies to all our domestic and small business customers, it will only actually affect you if you’re one of the very few customers who make inappropriate use of the service. If you don’t use peer to peer, file sharing or other inappropriate software and you are not, for example, constantly downloading or uploading videos or very large files, you are unlikely to be affected by this policy.

9. Technical Support

Technical support exists for the benefit of Fibre Options customers, providing support for questions relating directly to our services. Technical support is here to provide the best service possible to our customers, but can, at times, be stretched by having to answer unnecessary calls or emails. When contacting Technical Support, please have all relevant details to hand.
If the problem doesn’t directly involve the Internet connection, for example – how do I send an email, how do I change the first page that is displayed when my web browser starts etc., this is a function of the particular software application (e.g. the mail program, web browser etc.). Please explore the various settings, options or use the in-built help menu (in the program you require help for) for instructions on such procedures. Before contacting us for support, you are obliged to check other documentation for answers to your question. This includes:

Documentation that was supplied with the account.
Our support web pages.