Then everyone wraps up their downloads in put.io? The relationship between an ISP and its customers must be sustainable - we can't simply release everything and shut up shop in 6 months time. People often get really upset (and rightly so) in SA about thresholds, shaping, throttling and so on, and it's largely a few incumbent ISPs' faults for this in the first place. I have no sympathy for them because they brought it on themselves by initiating price-wars in the first place in an attempt to gain market share.
Customers need to look at their usage patterns and select the correct product for their needs, not based on price alone but rather the quality of the overall experience as the deciding factor. Affordability obviously still plays a role, no doubt, but the responsibility is up to the ISP to ensure that a reasonably priced product is available, and is advertised honestly, to ALLOW the end user to select accordingly. We've come to the conclusion that no single account type will please everyone until we can offer uncontended ADSL at current prices. And that's not going to happen for a long time, or at least until there are some drastic changes in the wholesale market.
This is why we try to be transparent and open with you guys. ADSL bandwidth in SA is expensive. IP address space is expensive. Maintaining a network is expensive. Running a full-fledged, sustainable ISP is expensive. There's no beating around the bush. Having a price-war in the market without input cost reductions is short-term stupidity, and lands up with you having to later on make drastic changes to your, um, "corporate structure", and products, to the ultimate detriment of the wider market and end user.
What's happened in this market over the last year or so if mybroadband users are honest about this with themselves? It's gone backwards - business accounts now have thresholds; uncapped accounts now all tend to have thresholds, even those from ISPs who promised they never would; users are actively being encouraged to move to capped products by their ISPs; capped products are shaped; shaping is applied more than it's ever been before etc.
Why? Because uncapped pricing was dropped to the floor in an unsustainable manner, by ISPs with big budgets to do so in an attempt to gain market share - to the ultimate detriment of who? The consumer. Consumers now have a pricing and quality of service expectation that's often fairly unrealistic. What's this leaderboard of downloaders nonsense all about as well? While you're instituting new draconian shaping policies because your users are downloading too much? Consumers are played like the proverbial fiddle at the moment - having to change ISPs every few months because .
Our core values are not premised around being the cheapest in the market at all. You ultimately get what you pay for. We will have a cheap product, but don't expect much from it (from your average mybroadband user's perspective at least). Don't expect unshaped http downloads. Don't expect nntp and p2p priority in any way. And don't expect streaming priority. Rather, we have a correctly priced product for you if your usage demands require any mix of the aforementioned activities. And likewise, we're not going to try to market the entry-level product as anything more than it is. We have that responsibility.
Anyways, that's my Sunday rant over for now. Apologies for the lengthy answer to a simple question.
