Hey Everyone
Thanks for detailing your concerns regarding your caps and bandwidth usage.
I will try and explain how the bandwidth system works and why depending on your previous months usage there may be less of your cap available to you this month.
As you know we supply our bandwidth through IS. They send the bandwidth usage stats from their radius server to us at various intervals throughout the day. They cannot unfortunately send us this report every minute though. This means that our bandwidth reporting in the client zone is not instant - we receive the information and then process it and apply it to our clients.
This means that in effect you will probably only be capped after you have moved some data OVER your cap due to the time delay in which they report to us.
As you know we charge R29/GB of traffic you move. All the traffic you move is added to your account - Thus if you have moved extra data over and above your cap this month that amount will be carried over to the following month which will mean that you have slightly less of your cap this month because you used it last month.
Here is an example:
Let's assume that you have a 10GB account with us at R290 per month.
You are nearing your cap and you reach 9,97 GB as we process the latest data we receive from IS. You are still under your cap so obviously or system allows you to keep going.
In between the time we receive the reports from IS you move another 0,2 GB. When we receive the next traffic report our system picks up that you have now moved 10,17 GB so far for the month which is 0,17 GB over your 10GB limit. Our system now caps you for the month.
Thus when the next month starts you will have already used 0,17 GB's over and above your allowed cap from the previous month and this will be added to the current month's usage. Thus your remaining cap for the new month will be 9,83 GB in this example (10 less 0,17).
This same rationale applies to top ups. i.e. if you used the 10,17 GB's, was capped and then bought a 1 GB top up, the extra 0,17GB you had already made use of would be included as traffic already moved and subtracted from your 1 GB top-up.
If you are worried about going over your cap and having this carry over to the next month my suggestion is to watch out for the email and SMS notification we send you letting you know when you are reaching the end of your cap and then monitor your traffic in Client Zone.
I promise you that we ar ein no way sharing accounts nor will you ever pay for traffic that you don't move.
I hope this helps?
Thanks
I see now I did get an email from them at around 11 saying I'd reached my cap. Must have been perfect timing, cause I logged on to my router and changed the account while it was still active.
And unlike MTN, if I go over, it doesn't start charging me tons of $$$$$$$$$$
