Mweb is the only major ISP that throttles uncapped accounts. The others shape based on their respective criteria. And those shaping policies cause regular folk to experience a degrading experience for the sake of the minority that abuse their accounts. I'm suggesting that it would better to implement harsh throttling, but at a level that will only affect data hogs. For those who are unthrottled, leave them unshaped. Hopefully it would make sense financially with the data hogs removed.
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Biggest ADSL bandwidth hogs in SA
- Thread starter Kevin Lancaster
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Mweb is the only major ISP that throttles uncapped accounts. The others shape based on their respective criteria. And those shaping policies cause regular folk to experience a degrading experience for the sake of the minority that abuse their accounts. I'm suggesting that it would better to implement harsh throttling, but at a level that will only affect data hogs. For those who are unthrottled, leave them unshaped. Hopefully it would make sense financially with the data hogs removed.
CAPS LOCK
Executive Member
If an ISP allows such consumptions at their prerogative/control, then I don't understand why mybb or anyone should label these users in such a negative manner, hogs?
Because they have a negative affect on the network. The cost per gig that their ISP is incurring with their usage far exceeds the cost price. So then shaping policies are introduced that affect more than just the data hogs. Which is why I'm asking why they can't scrap the shaping crap and rather throttle.
Curious as to how you came to this number?
PostmanPot
Honorary Master
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Deleted member 83147
Guest
Why is 600GB on a 10mb account "reasonable"?
I use under 100GBs on 10mb account, so 600GBs seems like a lot to me.
If you're gonna sell an uncapped account then don't complain about usage. The whole point of an uncapped account is that the user does not need to worry about how much cap is being used.
Purely thumb sucking. My household has loads of gamers and streamers, and even someone who updates large instrument sample libraries regularly for music sequencing. We've never managed more than 550-560GB in a month, so I figure no one should be able to complain with a throttling limit of 600GB.
As someone involved in the business, would you prefer having unshaped but throttled accounts? And if so, what thresholds (perhaps as a percentage of line utilisation) would you regard as financially viable?
My only complaint with the Mweb throttling was that the thresholds were sufficiently low that they look like cheap shaped capped accounts rather than an anti-data hog measure that shouldn't bother regular folk.
I get that argument, but the reality is that you have to deal with tradeoffs. Reduce the quality of the data or reduce the quantity of data.
Ideally I'd like large capped accounts that don't assume full utilisation. I don't want an account that's within a hair of my typical usage - I'd be happy to pay extra for some headroom. But most ISP's have fairly linear pricing for their capped accounts.
What do I know though. I'm not an ISP.
Edit: Forgot to mention - this is why I think throttled uncapped accounts could be great. No one wants low quality data, so obviously the only reason we don't all have capped accounts is because we can't afford the current prices of the large caps. So just offer a middle ground with a throttled account. The ISP doesn't have a risk of terabytes of usage and the user gets data that isn't shaped to hell.
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PostmanPot
Honorary Master
If you want to know what is financially viable with the throttling model just have a look at Vox's new uncapped thresholds. It's not pretty, and keep in mind they are making use of Telkom's new IPC deal.
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I remember a few years ago it was just over R5/GB. The internet was in a pretty poor way back then, so I'd like to think the cost is at least R2 or less per gig nowadays. So around R1200?
ISP's surely don't calculate their cost price like that though. The majority of users won't use so much data. The measure would be in place to protect against abuse.
Impossible to comment without knowing what prices those accounts are going for. If those are cheap uncapped accounts, then no surprises.
Yeah its incredible.
Cost is higher still than your expectation. And far, far fewer people use less than the break-even on uncapped accounts these days, as lower capped accounts become more popular...
Disappointing about the cost per gig for ISP's. I suppose the discussion is rather pointless without knowing how significant an expense the data hogs are. If Crystal Web threw every uncapped user who consumes, say over 25% line utilisation, consistently every month off the network right now, would it save you much money?
D
Deleted member 83147
Guest
Yip, on higher line speeds (10mb+) it makes little sense to go with an uncapped account (one of decent quality) unless you're planning on moving serious amount of data.
Capped accounts do the same thing at a fraction of the price.
25% doesn't work across the board for all uncapped line speeds, as no uncapped accounts are priced at this mark, especially as you get faster (take 20Mbps multipled by what you reckon IPC+international+other expenses costs and divide by 4 - it ain't what you're paying for 20Mbps, that's for sure - it would imply a 4:1 contention on uncapped - some unscrupulous ISPs run their contention at 50+:1). If I look at uncapped only, if we invoked a throttle policy on our uncapped with rather high "FUPs" we could reduce input costs by around 25% and push that back into the network to pretty much unshape everyone, at all times. It is something we have always considered, however there is a far better way to do this fairly than with throttle limits, and that's to use prioritisation instead. If you're throttled, you're throttled - that's it. With deprioritisation even those who are deprioritised can still get great performance when the network opens up a bit in terms of usage. But when the network gets tight those with less usage will be rewarded with better performance if they require it before you.
I'm very open to suggestions, and always have been, and quite enjoy these debates, even if we're excluded from the articles themselves. I'm also very open about things with MyBB members, having been on one side of the fence for a very long time and now for 2 years managing the commercial and business side and the realities thereof.
So, what's your ideal account? Likelihood is it's not the ideal account for everyone, and likelihood is everyone will have a different perspective on what the costs should be too...
You reckon all ISPs have their capped accounts set to a higher priority over uncapped on their network?