Cap Thievery ?

[Necuno]

(...back with the catchy title)

One thing i always wondered about was how does 'pre paid' to normal capped solutions being able to roll over or keep their total cap package they have bought from the isp stay there until used up and the normal one not being able to do just that:

[normal cap]
if X buys from IS 20G and sells it to John for R999 - then both parties has payed for that 20G of data usage, but now John only uses up 15G of the 20 - what happens to the other 5G which is not used now does X resell it as 5G or pool it together with everyone else's left over and then resell it as a big Cap ?

 

[Zyzzyva]

Who knows?

What probably happens is x sells user 20g account for says R1000. In its simplest sense, x only buys as much data as user uses. Thus if user only uses 15g then x gets the benefit of charging for 20 but only serving 15g.

Smaller isp's wouldn't really get benefit from buying 20g for all its big users outright because telkoms bulk discount amounts are massive. Isp's have to buy a ridiculous amount of gigs to get a sizable bulk discount (it goes up to 200 000 gigs if i remember correctly).

Im pretty sure many isp's oversell. eg they buy 10 000g from telkom, and sell that as 15000g since most users probably only use not more than 60% of their caps. This must be how cybersmart works.

I think the bigger an isp gets, the more buying power it would have for bulk discounts, and so the more likely it would be that they would have monthly unused gigs which they could pull together to offer their own "bulk account".

I may be wrong about all this, since i'm pulling most of it from my thumb. But I'm pretty sure that is how it works.

 

[Browser]

(...back with the catchy title)
if X buys from IS 20G and sells it to John for R999 - then both parties has payed for that 20G of data usage, but now John only uses up 15G of the 20 - what happens to the other 5G

Basically the ISP pockets the money.

That last 5Gb can't be resold as something physical could (your wording suggests something like this). Basically the ISP buys bandwidth in bulk and sells it to customers at a markup, net letting unused bandwidth rollover is like a bonus (R200 or whatever, depends) to the ISP. Though I don't think ISPs buy bandwidth in the sense of it being "prepaid" they have a bill at the end of the month for the bandwidth used (by their customers) so that 5Gb John Doe didn't use was never paid for by the ISP, but they got paid for it.

I just had a funny/scary thought, imaging bandwidth wasn't the only thing this applied to, say you buy a bottle of cooldrink and at midnight some F,,loon runs into your house and takes it while shouting "it doesn't roll over to the next day,,,sucker!". Just goes to show internet prices aren't the only thing buggered in this country but the business practices of ISP's are also underhanded.

 

[JohnnyQ]

Do the ISP's have to choose upfront what they want for the month, or do they get billed at month end for what they used?

 

[Necuno]

i think they order it on the fly from is as the client requests his packages.

 

[warichard]

GB's used by ISP's are always billed at the end of the month, it would make no sense having to order it beforehand or order it "as you need it".

 

[Necuno]

would be interesting to know why prepaid can roll over and non prepaid not.

exactly how prepaid works to non pre paid.....