Are you hurting your ADSL ISP?

rpm said:
Are you keeping breakage in mind?

Also: You have seen the basic costs. Do you think all the ISPs are lying about these rates?
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Even factoring in breakage, the R6 per GB excludes staff costs which are sizeable in most businesses so yes the numbers don't add up.You can only run a business at a loss for so long before something has to give.
Are the ISP's lying?Dont really know and dont really care. Just not convinced we are seeing the full picture.
 
I say terminate the abusers' accounts, it will result in a better experience for everyone.
 
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Maybe our ISP's should look at International models and stop trying to reinvent the telecoms Infrastructure in the whole of Africa with only a few South Efricans footing the bills + huge profit margins.
 
My usage trends seem to be dropping. In July I used 151GB's, August 126GB's and September 114GB's. To be honest, I could probably get by with as little as 50GB's per month, but I use more simply because it's available to me.
 
The per GB amount is that for international traffic only?
Not sure the article paints the full picture.
 
Scenario:
There are 10 ISPs offering uncapped services and dropping prices in order to remain relevant. Eventually 9 of them decide to scrap uncapped accounts and only offer capped products.

Indignant users decide to migrate to the last man standing... in their droves!

Based on the pricing in the article, would the last man standing be filing for bankruptcy in a few months time?
 
Eh, I dunno. If the problem was that bad, the ISPs would do something about it. They know who the heavy users are, they know who to throttle and shape and whatnot. The fact that someone did 1265GB in 1 month on Afrihost means that Afrihost knew about it, and decided to do nothing.

The article talks up an "unsustainable situation" without actually quoting any CEOs saying it's unsustainable, or pointing to any behavior (raised prices, worse service, etc) that would be the result of an unsustainable business model. So as far as I can see, Rudolph thinks it's unsustainable, but neither the ISPs or the market do.
 
MickeyD said:
Scenario:
There are 10 ISPs offering uncapped services and dropping prices in order to remain relevant. Eventually 9 of them decide to scrap uncapped accounts and only offer capped products.

Indignant users decide to migrate to the last man standing... in their droves!

Based on the pricing in the article, would the last man standing be filing for bankruptcy in a few months time?
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Well the reverting to capped only seems horribly stupid because the capped pricing has to be price competitive as well and capped as an unshaped lower contended product is asking for trouble. At the end of the day the clamour for higher quantity capped products to my mind doesn't help the case because it is built on demanding customers - wanting what you pay for - when what is actually desired is providing a basic level of service for a price and having a layer of add of benefits as circumstances permit. Telkoms pretty much hybrid capped products and Afrihost uncapped are largely doing that at the moment.

If there is a triggered course by an ISP who is wanting to trigger a drove move the target of filing for bankruptcy must be Telkom Internet ... <looks for tin foil hat>
 
Boris Becker said:
Let uncapped die. Cheaper capped accounts. Full speed FTW
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I agree. But ISPs must stop offering low caps. Caps must start from 50GB per month and move to 1TB and over.

Here are my suggested tiers for monthly usage:

0 - 64GB - low single person usage
50 - 128GB - typical single person usage
100 - 256GB - low family usage
250 - 512GB - typical family usage
512 - 1TB - gamer / small network usage (10 or less)
1 - 2TB - low small business usage
2 - 5TB - typical small business usage (10 - 25 people)
5 - 10TB - high small business usage
10 - 25TB - small ISP (under 100 users)
25 - 50TB - typical small ISP (100 - 200 users)
50 - 100TB - ISP (up to 500 users)

For now, a price of R10.24 per GB should apply (1c per meg), which means that the ISPs make a profit and consumers get a reasonably cheap deal. No ISP should be allowed to charge more than R15 per GB, by law, more than that is just greedy profiteering.
 
Fudzy said:
Same can be applied to the medical aid schemes. The few people paying higher prices are subsidizing the many who pay less but require more medical attention.
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I think you have it the wrong way around. Most people don't use their medical aid, and subsidize the ones who have serious medical conditions.
The many always subsidize the few who are actually costing the company.

Like DSTV: the many who subscribe to dstv for sport channels, subsidize the few who watch Blackbelt TV.



grim said:
I say terminate the abusers' accounts, it will result in a better experience for everyone.
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If they advertise it as unlimited, whats the problem with some people using it that way?
How does one abuse an unlimited offer..... by using it too much? That's like Netflix complaining I watch too many movies.

If Burger King has a problem with me drinking too much soda, they shouldn't advertise it as bottomless in the first place. Display "7 glasses maximum" if that's your limit.

Don't give me an option to unlimited services if you have a problem with me using it that way.
 
I don't follow that graph, if the ISP cost is R6/GB and the consumer price is R197 then 197/6=32.83 which means the ISP starts making a loss at about 33GB of usage, how many uncapped users use less than 33GB a month?

It's late, I only paid some attention to the table & graph, will read article tomorrow.
 
Its not the users. Its the people artificially keeping the price of bandwidth high. We should be paying like 10c per gig if all the cables connecting us to the rest of the world are utilized. At this moment I am paying double line rental just to afford the ISP a chance to make a living. We as consumers are torn a new one everyday, and now being singled out as the ones screwing over the ISP's is a bit unfair. Add the cost of the line to the equation to see how mush we as consumers are really paying.
 
Most international ISP's have a 275gig around that amount soft cap I think you only allowed to exceed it once in 3 months failure to do so will result in your account being throttled for a month
 
I think all ISP's can only blame themselves, I for one don,t see why the customer must be blamed for this. The way I see it they started Uncapped as a means for the big guys to steal all the customers away from the smaller guys who don't have the volume of customers to make this business model work. As this model can only work with high volume customers.

It serves them right as this is exactly what is stopping competition in this country. Small business can never succeed in this kind of environment, as you need super deep pockets to do business this way. Also ISP's make a lot of money with their OOB prices. I Down graded with Mweb to a 1gb cap acc. Guess what they set it up with a "SAFETY LOCK" of 2.5 gb @ R500.00. I tried to change that to 0gb but there is no functionality to do that the lowest you can go is 500mb @R100.00 so they deliberately is stealing from their capped acc users this way. This is obvious also bringing in a bundle for them.

I for one want what I pay for if I pay for 1 GB I want only 1 GB no more and no less. Same goes for uncapped if I pay for uncapped I want uncapped.
 
I wanted to keep my email as I have been doing business on this email for the last 6 years, all my customers and business connections have this email address. I will have to most probably have to use my gmail account from now on as Mweb is determined to be dishonest.
 
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