Hi Jannie,
This might be a stupid question but is it not possible to roll over or "build up" your data if not used?
Sure if you pay for lets say 1gig you should be able to use whats left of it even after a few months? So if you go away for 2 months and come back during month 3 you should have 3gigs to use seeing that you have paid for month 1 and 2 already.
I'm just asking this because if you can build up free minutes that way why not data?
Ek vra maar net...
It's a good question and the answer that many have given here is one of capacity planning. Let me use the example ISPA recently used, which explains the problem quite clearly.
1. You pay R100 per month to park every day, for 30 days, in a parking lot.
2. The parking lot has a 100 parking bays.
3. For some reason you only park there for 20 days out of the month.
4. What happens the next month?
a. Do you get to use an extra 10 days for free? I.e. do you expect the parking lot to have 1 extra bay available, in case you decide to use it?
b. What if the lot did add the extra bay, in case you want to use it, but you never do? What happens to its operational costs?
5. What if 100 people do this every month, only use 20 of their 30 bays 'slots'. Must the owner now build 100 extra bays in case everyone shows up at the same time expecting their bays from last month to be available?
You can see the owner has basically two choices:
1. He does not accommodate roll-over, i.e. if you did not use your parking this month, you lost it. No carry-over.
2. He builds the extra bays and pass the cost on to his customers. He probably won't build capacity for the maximum demand, but will take an educated guess, say 30 extra bays for his 100 customers and then only when they're not already filled up.
Now, before anyone says it's a cr@p analogy; it's not. It's 100% relevant thus why ISPA chose it.
1. Just like a parking lot, a network has a fixed capacity.
2. Just like a parking lot, a network sells a product based on time (bays/month, Mb/s). Most people miss this bit, networks can't 'store' data. The time component is always there.
3. Just like the parking lot, if a network wants to provide roll-over, it must calculate the cost into its pricing. So the longer the roll-over period, the more expensive it becomes.
I've asked the question here many times; would you be willing to pay more for roll-over? Few people said yes.
