Fidelity Communications, on behalf of its operating subsidiaries that provide internet access services (collectively, "Fidelity") adopts this Internet Transparency Policy to disclose our network management practices, performance characteristics, and terms and conditions of broadband service.
NETWORK MANAGEMENT PRACTICES
General: Fidelity manages its network to provide high quality service to its customers. Fidelity cannot guarantee that it can prevent spam, viruses, security attacks, network congestion and other actions which can affect service, but does use various filters, monitoring efforts and other measures to minimize the effects of such actions.
Congestion: Fidelity has not experienced substantial problems with congestion; however, congestion events may occur in the future, particularly with regard to service capacity provided by third parties. Such service capacity is outside the control of Fidelity.
Where feasible, Fidelity will address congestion issues through improvements to its network or the capacity purchased from other providers. Such processes take time to implement and may not be feasible in all situations; therefore, Fidelity reserves the right to monitor and identify which customer accounts are using the greatest amount of bandwidth during periods of heavy congestion and to implement measures to address those issues. Fidelity reserves the right to manage the Internet traffic of high volume customers during periods of significant congestion. This means that the affected customers will still be able to access the Internet and engage in activities that they desire, but during certain periods of time they may experience conditions such as longer times to download or upload files, slower access and slower movements during online game playing. It is expected that any periods of traffic management due to congestion will be brief and infrequent.
Security: Fidelity undertakes no obligation to monitor or protect customer traffic from spam, viruses, denial of service attacks or other malicious, unlawful or unwarranted activities. Fidelity does not guarantee that it can protect customers from any or all security breaches. The customer is using this service at its own risk. Customers are cautioned to purchase their own spam filtering and antivirus software from commercial vendors to meet their needs; however, a customer that is subject to spam, virus, denial of service attack or similar malicious, unlawful or unwarranted activities is urged to contact Fidelity as soon as possible.
PERFORMANCE CHARACTERISTICS
Depending on customer location, residential broadband service is provided via our DSL and hybrid fiber/coaxial cable network. Pricing, service type, and available network speeds vary by area serviced by Fidelity. Fidelity does not have usage limits or usage-based fees on its customer base accounts. The pricing and levels of service provided by Fidelity can be found at www.fidelitycommunications.com/internet.
Customers on our DSL platform have access to service levels ranging from download speeds ranging from up to 1.5 Mbps to up to 10 Mbps with upload speeds from up to 512 kbps to up to 1 Mbps based on their distance from the office equipment. Not all customers will be able to attain the highest speeds and final determination of deliverable service will be made at time of install.
Customers within Fidelity coaxial cable plants have access to packages with download speeds up to 15 Mbps with upload speeds up to 1 Mbps. Certain markets where Docsis 3.0 technology has been implemented have access to download speeds up to 100 Mbps with upload speeds up to 2 Mbps.
Actual access speeds and delay times or latency are impacted by the length, capacity and congestion of transport facilities purchased by Fidelity from third party providers. Fidelity cannot guarantee that it will be able to obtain capacity from these third party providers at commercially reasonable prices if and when additional third party capacity is needed to reach Internet nodes.
Fidelity's ability to deliver the speeds set forth above may be affected by significant use of specialized services such as Internet-based video services. This is a growing area and its effect on Fidelity's ability to provide service at the speeds listed above is unknown at this time.
Fidelity also employs a data caching technology. With this, current popular content on the internet is downloaded to local storage within our own network. What this means for the customer is that when they visit these popular websites instead of having to download the entire part of it from the internet they only have to get the updated/dynamic pieces of the page. Static portions like site images/logos/videos are served up from the local servers at a faster speed than could have been done had it traversed the entire distance thereby creating a faster experience for the end user.
PRIVACY
Fidelity retains and stores certain traffic information for time periods required by federal and state law, including, but not limited to, the identity of the customer using a particular IP address during a specific period of time. Fidelity does assist law enforcement and provides traffic information that it may have available to it when requested pursuant to the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and other applicable national and state security, criminal and civil statutes, rules and regulations.
COMPLAINTS
If a customer has complaints about the service, they are urged to contact Fidelity. A customer always has the right to file a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission at http://www.fcc.gov.
SERVICE TERMS AND CONDITIONS
The Terms and Conditions for Service are found at http://www.fidelitycommunications.com/legal/terms-conditions. Such Terms and Conditions supplement this Policy, and control over any inconsistency with this Policy.
RESERVATION OF RIGHTS/AMENDMENTS
Fidelity may modify this Policy and other policies it has linked for the customer from time to time at its discretion.