80 Gigs and still Going strong

Turtle said:
(1) Why is Telkom the only ADSL provider in the whole world for whom abusers "spoil it for everyone"? Why are ADSL providers everywhere else able to provide anything from 30GB monthly limits to unlimited services for far far cheaper and on much lower margins? Do other countries not have "abusers"?
Apparently I'm negative?
http://english.oteshop.gr/home/adslconnection.htm
OTE -- Greek telecomunications monopoly. Like Telkom, they charge ~R300 installation fee, ~R300 a month for 1024k line rental (they dont have anything higher than 1024K in Greece -- take note it's a .eu country), and that excludes ISP costs which incorporate =>3GB caps.

Please give me evidence that we're "the only ADSL provider in the whole world for whom abusers "spoil it for everyone"?". If this was the case, then why would international ISPs cap their consumers at all? Of course there are abusers.

Turtle said:
(2) If abusers are spoiling it for everyone, why isn't Telkom simply hard-capping like they force all the other ISPs to? They certainly have the infrastructure to do so already (for the ISPs), they could turn it on by just flipping a switch.
They will be doing so very shortly trust me. A few users wont make much of a difference to one month's profits for them. The majority of TelkomInternet DSL users aren't aware that Telkom isn't hardcapping -- if anything they're more conservative because of Telkom's 1NOV2005 announcement that they WILL be hardcapping.
If everyone knew about it, they'd all be abusing the network. That's South Africa unfortunately, and you know it's true. At this point in time there has to be a cap -- just not one so low. Between 30-40GB cap per month is ideal IMO.


And nGAGEd55:
What did Telkom say that I "beleive" ?
What I'm saying is based on my own opinions. Telkom didn't say 30GIG/mo is an ideal cap -- they said 3GB/mo is enough for everyone. Did I agree? no. So then?...
 
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beattheban are u telkoms anwser for a rep on the forums ?

kudos to oober ! I dont think its fair for u guys to blame him for being a high user he and every1 else pays A LOT for their adsl and for the amount we are paying we should be allowed to download more than 100gb and like some1 else said its only a small minority that uses more than 3gb and most of that minority is on the myadsl.co.za forums and telkom still calls us a minority
 
DigitalSoldier said:
every1 else pays A LOT for their adsl and for the amount we are paying we should be allowed to download more than 100gb
100%. Well said.

We are overpaying for what we get - and I too will push the limits this month while the chance is there;

It's just the mentality and ignorance of his post that got to me and made me "side" with Telkom's perspective.
I mean check the title of this post, and then read the post... Honestly you can't blame Telkom for doing what they do when you get idiotic kids like that.
 
fragtion_ said:
Greek telecomunications monopoly. Like Telkom, they charge ~R300 installation fee, ~R300 a month for 1024k (they dont have anything higher than that in Greece), and that excludes ISP costs which incorporate =>3GB caps.

Please give me evidence that we're "the only ADSL provider in the whole world for whom abusers "spoil it for everyone"?". If this was the case, then why would international ISPs cap their consumers at all? Of course there are abusers.
But you said it yourself, "Greek telecommunications monopoly" - they can charge what the market will bear. You seem to be contradicting yourself; first you claimed that poor Telkom are "forced to" cap at 3GB and charge high prices because of all the abusers. Then you admitted that it's because they're a monopoly and can charge what they want. Which is it?

It doesn't make sense to compare ourselves to countries that have done it wrong, because the existence of other 'Telkoms' elsewhere does not and cannot negate the point that MANY other countries are able to offer services for a tenth of the price with 30GB up to unlimited caps.

If everyone knew about it, they'd all be abusing the network. That's South Africa unfortunately, and you know it's true.
Actually I think that is completely wrong. Do you honestly believe that there is some "special", unique quality of South Africa culture (that is absent in S Korea, Japan, US, New Zealand, Australia, Europe etc.) that makes us more likely than all those countries to "abuse" broadband connections on a wide scale? I'm afraid you're going to have to give me far more convincing arguments to support this notion than "and you know it's true". What I know is true is that 95% of potential users couldn't care less about sitting download gigs and gigs of data ... for every person I know who would abuse, I can easily name ten who wouldn't, e.g. people like my mom, dad, gran, sister, other sister, boss, most of my colleagues, most of my friends, most of my friends friends and family members, etc.. they actually have lives. And that type of user would be the vast majority IF it was cheaper. (Are you in school BTW?)

Even Telkom admitted that only 4% of users were ever heavy users. Now you could argue "but they had the cap". But take Sentech MyWireless, even in the beginning when they were TOTALLY uncapped and encouraged "unlimited usage", their percentage of abusers also remained at a maximum of 4% of the user base. (And that's early-adopter-types! And they're South African! 96% of them didn't "abuse"! There is proof that you are wrong about South Africans.)

BTW, I'm on TelkomInternet, and I'm not abusing my connection ... my total throughput for this month is about 600MB.

My point is that everywhere in the world where 30GB is the minimum expectation, ISPs make this work via economies of scale: Sign up a lot of users (by making it cheap), the vast majority use much less than the 30GB, and a small minority use a lot. The light users subsidise the heavy users, and everyone pays a low flat rate. The business model works.

I do understand your reaction though to bragging about 80GB (a somewhat silly thing to do). But I don't agree that Telkom can honestly justify a 3GB cap because a tiny percentage of users do things like this. I agree that 30GB-40GB is a far more reasonable limit, and I think that Telkom could easily provide that and still make huge profits (but not without cutting into their diginet etc. cash cows).
 
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Think, maybe if everyone stayed under their three gig caps this month, Telkom will come out beginning of next month saying, "to prove three gigs is enough, we gave everyone uncapped international, and no-one manged to break th overly generous 3 gigs that they where allocated"

But if u think of it People overseas with say an *mb line, who are torrent leechers etc etc. They could easilty pull down a Terrabyte o month, im sure some abusers overseas must.

I think we should get an upstream and downstream cap, but say for example we have a 30Gig cap, we should get 15Gigs upstream, and if we finish our upstream first, it can start chewing at the downstream.
 
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WOW the bandwith police is out in full force today ... Chuck SAIX and go with IS then you don't have to worry about every byte. And really data/bandwith is not like oil or gold, it will not be used up. Really don't believe Telkom's lies. For what we pay (in my case R1000 per month) we should have uncapped accounts.
 
VJB 449 said:
For what we pay (in my case R1000 per month) we should have uncapped accounts.

I agree fully. Before this so-called bandwidth shortage I averaged about 26 gig with some months 32 gig on a 30gig per month account. So some months I subsidised some "abusers" and it did not matter. With an uncapped account I would most likely still average 26 gig and live my life without agonising about every little byte, especially with failed downloads due to ISP resets
 
fragtion_ said:
What did Telkom say that I "beleive" ?
fragtion_ said:
just FYI it's that 'minority' of bandwidth-eaters that DO in fact spoil it for all of us, and I base that statement on factual reports made by Telkom.
factual reports, by teklom, what a joke!
 
Heres the bet... If telkom didn't have caps i bet that most of the super users will milk the system for like 3 months then get over it. 99% of users after that will then use relatively low amounts of data...

And remember that most high end users were prob SMMEs that are backing up data or hosting web sites or something.

I do have a prob with people downloading hundereds of gigs of data from P2P. What the hell u gonna do with all that, watch it 1 maybe 2 times then stick it on DVD and never look at it again? Ok so one maybe 2 episodes of lost, south park family guy a week etc that are not going to come out here for a while is fine, but downloading stuff for downloading sakes is just lame. Get a lan party in a province of 20-30 guys and then get all the stuff u want. Prob faster too.
 
Oober,
80 GB of what?! I often have to download OS's and software from MSDN, but I can't imagine getting anywhere near there in a month... so what is it: mp3s, dvds and porn? Regardless of what Telkom thinks of it, it seems excessive by any home-user standard.
 
Scooby_Doo said:
And remember that most high end users were prob SMMEs that are backing up data or hosting web sites or something.
and running VPNs.

And i bet u that most, if not all of the stuff SMMEs did with ADSL were local, so they didnt even use much international bandwidth
 
Yikes u peeps are actually defending Telkom, what ever happen to uncapped which is the norm for the entire world
 
Well game Iso's these days are close to 4 gigs (1 DVD) There are atleast 2 or3 interesting games out a month. Then there are weekly episodes of TV Series (Lost, Prison Break, Rome, Invasion, Threshold, Weeds, My Name Is Earl, Top Gear, Fifth Gear, South Park, Reunion, Greys Anatomy and Desp Housewives) Yes I watch all of that.

Atleast 3 or 4 interesting movies out a month - which all seem to be 1.2 gigs these days.

Then MP3's, "Educational Movies" :D , Apps...etc

Plus you upload atleast half of what u download (Most member sites encourage a ratio of 1:1)

Can you see now how 80 gigs is not alot?
 
The reason why I download so much TV Series is because we are so behind. We have DSTV and pay for the programs we watch, but we get series 6 months and sometimes over a year later than the Americans do. I think the only thing we do get up to date is CNN.

Another example is quake 4 (One of the biggest titles of the year), which was released in 2nd week of October. I believe it will only be avail here end of November..most likely Dec (If it finally arrives by row boat)
 
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Scooby_Doo said:
I rate if P2P was banned out right network traffic will be at least half of what it is now.

half? i reckon without P2P, network traffic would be more like 1/10 of what it is now (international at least). but even if p2p traffic consumes a lot of bandwidth it is still not Telkoms place to decide what we can or can't do with our paid for bandwidth.
 
4cer said:
Think, maybe if everyone stayed under their three gig caps this month, Telkom will come out beginning of next month saying, "to prove three gigs is enough, we gave everyone uncapped international, and no-one manged to break th overly generous 3 gigs that they where allocated"
My excact thoughts. The whole "We were right, you were wrong" thing

4cer said:
I think we should get an upstream and downstream cap, but say for example we have a 30Gig cap, we should get 15Gigs upstream, and if we finish our upstream first, it can start chewing at the downstream.
If we have to have a cap, I think we should only be capped for downloads. Uploads should not count towards your cap. (to teach people the power of sharing :p )
 
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