Capped or uncapped: Which is best?

I am sure that if uncapped broadband was forced onto all consumers at a standard price it would be sustainable. That's how it works anywhere else in the world. You get a connection and and pay for the speed. We shouldn't even have the choice of capped products (except mobile) but let everyone pay say a total of R300 for 384, 500 for 512 and 1000 for 4mbit including the ADSL line. I am certain that business model would work and become profitable after about 3 months when everyone one has finished downlaoding that movie that they wanted for the past 5 years but couldn't get it due to capped.
 
Smiley_lauf said:
would be good to see where the source documents for usage stats are from in Sweden-I think the data is representing a skewed population.
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It probably takes total bandwidth over total population without adjusting for children, old people and people's bandwidth usage on mobile and work...
 
my point exactly--so if the bulk of the people are old (as in Sweden >60% are elderly) and others use internet at work, then this stats makes sense.
 
I am almost speechless ... Once again we are being fed crap from the fat cats , once again they think they are talking to Homo Erectus . We have left that cave long time ago , so now they have to wake up , too long we have no choice but to yield to there demands and pay vast sums of money for 3 gig . Now suddenly they have to work to get clients , they want to paint a dark gloomy picture and show themselves as the victim . BS!! How was MWEB able to do this uncapped for R219 then ? Why are you always telling us that it wont last ? What they are really doing is saying that they (ISP's) wont last .

I had to make do with 2 gig a month because it was all i could afford now for a bit more i can get uncapped adsl , yes it is throttled but that is the trade off we have to make , if it cant last , why are there people selling account for less than that of mweb's offering ? People have now been freed from the shackles of being capped , yet these companies still maintain selling gig's of data , the end is near for them , the writing is on the wall , or the blogs if you will . We the consumers have moved on , why must we go back to the old way of buying gig's ? When so a bit more we can have freedom ?

These companies are loosing clients everyday , they know and we know it . Yet they continue with this , it is time for them to wake up , they as the ISP's need to tackle on main problem , telkom . If mweb had a way to somehow by pass the last mile and hook up people for far less , who's fault would that be ? Ours for making use of it and enjoying the internet as it was meant to be enjoyed ? These companies lack insight and vision they have been caught with their pants down and now they are crying foul . Be gone with you!
 
czc said:
If uncapped is cheap enough everyone can use it. Who cares what their usage is.

Also 1.5 gig? Seriously? When I first got my telkom 1 gig account it was finished before the month was over and that was no youtube and no downloads. And now the quality on youtube is so much better. Do you seriously expect us to believe thats all people in Sweden use?
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Well, that is just the beauty of quoting average (mean) figures. If you have a large enough user base with low usage ( < 1 GB/month), then you can support a few "real" internet users, and still end up with a nice low mean usage figure. That is the whole premise on which uncapped accounts are based.

But the 1.5 gig figure is surprising. If you have (k-1) low-end users for every "real" user, then the relationship is 1.5 = (r + (k-1)*l)/(k), where "r" and "l" denote the assumed consumption of the two user classes. Picking a value of l=0.5 (out of thin air), you find that r = 0.5 + k. Simply put, at a ratio of 99:1, your "real" user can now use 100 gigs per month, which is still perhaps a bit low. So either the low-end users use even less than 0.5 gigs, or the ratio of low-end users to "real" users is even greater than 99:1.

So maybe they are just lying about the 1.5 gig figure :)
 
I can't believe some of the bullsh*t that the CellC and IS guys are saying. At least Gian from Afrishost is determined to make it work in future.

Reichelt said that the industry should not focus too much on a small portion of users who require high-end uncapped accounts, but rather on getting the majority of the population connected to broadband services.
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Uncapped has resulted in the cost of regular capped accounts being slashed to be able to compete, effectively making basic internet cheaper and more accessible. If it weren''t for uncapped we would have continued paying R30 -R70 per GB and nothing would have changed!
 
It doesn't make a difference. If I got cheap uncapped and I use only 2 Gigs a month.It's my account.At least I don't have to watch my bandwidth and if I need to download more I don't have to worry about.
At least that mean those who only use 2gig leave more bandwidth for the serious ddl'ers. And no last minute monthend rush to use the remaining 300Mb on your 3Gig monthly cap.

Plus at the end of the day you really capped by the line speed/month.There is a physical limit to what can be downloaded.I mean who needs to download the whole internet twice. :)

Most ISP are just really realy upset because they had been making a killing charging by Gig.All those poor users carefully horeding their MB's.Axxess now charge 199 for a service they used to charge 999 for. They must seriously hate Mweb now.

Free the Wed Mweb,Free the Web. :)
 
AnimateX said:
If we didn't have to pay the Telkom tax then R219 for internet access wouldn't seem bad at all, but it is more like R500 total if you include mandatory phone and ADSL rental. Telkom is a big reason we will still see low-usage capped accounts.
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I left out the line rental because you would be paying this whether you were on capped or uncapped.
 
What's sad is that the CEO of Cell-C is saying that in Sweden the average usage is 1.5 GB and that some people will accept such a moronic statement as it comes from an "industry expert". A quick browse revealed a 2008 study on MOBILE networks http://svensktelemarknad.se/PTS2008e/Cloudcomputing.htm stating that the average data usage is 1.8 Gb - yes that right, two years ago on mobile networks!

One of the problems that we seem to have in South Africa is that senior executives in the industry have no clue about what's really going on. This guy's a CEO?
 
LancelotSA said:
I left out the line rental because you would be paying this whether you were on capped or uncapped.
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Sure, but if a user was using 1-2GB a month his bill would go up from +-R350 a month to +-R500 a month if we forced everyone onto uncapped. So it would no longer be as affordable to those on restricted budgets. Was pointing out that Telkom's huge rentals are why that plan would have problems.
 
hammell said:
What's sad is that the CEO of Cell-C is saying that in Sweden the average usage is 1.5 GB and that some people will accept such a moronic statement as it comes from an "industry expert". A quick browse revealed a 2008 study on MOBILE networks http://svensktelemarknad.se/PTS2008e/Cloudcomputing.htm stating that the average data usage is 1.8 Gb - yes that right, two years ago on mobile networks!

One of the problems that we seem to have in South Africa is that senior executives in the industry have no clue about what's really going on. This guy's a CEO?
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On page 3 of this thread I pointed out that Sweden's average mobile usage more than doubled during 2008 and was sitting at 4.5GB/month in 2009 according to PTS (The Swedish Post and Telecom Agency). Reference: http://www.cellular-news.com/story/38914.php

He must think we don't have Google. Here is some more interesting data:

"USTelecom looked at the broadband use of seven nations in North America, Europe and Asia, and found average U.S. consumers transfer about 14.2 gigabytes worth of Web content to their Internet devices a month. South Koreans were by far the greatest users of bandwidth per month, at 24.5GBs, followed by France, at 14.3GBs, and the U.S.

Germans averaged 12.9GBs per month, Brits averaged 11.9GBs, and the Japanese averaged just 9.9GBs, according to USTelecom. The average broadband connection worldwide generates 11.4GBs of Internet traffic per month, or 375 megabytes per day, according to the Cisco Visual Networking Index, upon which the USTelecom study is based."

From: http://www.pcworld.com/article/185417/study_us_among_worlds_leaders_in_broadband_use.html
 
LancelotSA said:
With all due respect to AnimateX I don't think the ability to use Google immediately qualifies one as a CEO ;)
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That I agree with :p But thanks for the notion Smiley ;)

As my last note I will say this:

Look abroad internationally at the cheapest offerings and you will find it is not unusual to have an AUP in place on how much you can use. People who pay a bit more can avoid such limits.

When MWEB introduced their cheap uncapped they did it with no limits in place. Other ISPs had to compete on the same level and now it's a free-for-all situation which is causing heavy contention and shaping as a result.

On the other hand it might be a good thing as this will push providers to speed up the upgrading of networks but our infrastructure is still in an early state of growth, so it is going to be one painful ride.
 
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hammell said:
One of the problems that we seem to have in South Africa is that senior executives in the industry have no clue about what's really going on. This guy's a CEO?
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It's not that they don't have a clue, its that they lie through their teeth to try & protect their juicy profits!
 
jak3 said:
I can't understand the logic though. Their thinking is clearly being clouded the obvious short term pressures associated with a business model change.

If the avergae swedish 100meg user only uses 1.5 gigs then they must realize selling them those gigs at "cost plus a fair margin" is not gonna generate much income per customer.

1.5 gigs x R10 a gig = R15

Do they want R15 or do they want R100-200 made by luring their customers with an enticing up-sell in the form of an "uncapped" account.

Very low usage per user does not help the capped account's case, in fact it does the opposite.

Ignore everything they say. Having to change a business model is a very scary thing, and during scary times people sometimes say dumb things, which is exactly what is happening now.

Very low usage makes uncapped even more logical and sustainable, not the opposite.
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Lol, all this talk about unsustainable, and since they brough Sweden into the conversation... in Sweden the majority of homes have a a 100mb/s fibre connection 100 up and 100 down. these are uncapped and cost +- 10-15 USD per month.


1.5GB per hour maybe.
 
This very much a chicken and the egg situation In the time I have had Broadband I have moved from one to five Gig a month but without an increase in download speed that is where I will stay until Telkom
reduces its prices - this is where the block is, lower the price and usage will take off
 
Now if the CEO's of these companies believe the nonsense they spout in open discussion, can you imagine what idiocies they perpetrate on their poor employees.

I'm sure you all know how it works in a corporate - if they big boss says "loyal serfs, from tomorrow onwards, we will only sell pink elephants" then the loyal serfs are compelled to go and find pink elephants to sell whether said elephants exist or not (hell, they'll buy grey elephants and paint them if they have to) else they'll be out on their behinds.

No wonder these companies sell / push such swill - their CEO's are forcing them to.

Thank goodness for a little bit of competition - losing customers and revenue is a sure fire why of getting the CEO's attention that maybe, just maybe, he's misguided - and if not - well, his company will soon be out of business.
 
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