Fair Usage Policy Debate
Ministerial statement
The Minister of Communications and Information Technology, Dr. Tarek Kamel, said in the July 2007 news that the ADSL would be turned from Unlimited to Limited with a Quota at a starting price of 45 LE (Egyptian pounds) for the 256k/64k and a 2GB limit for the download and so on. Due to the widespread use of local Linesharings that limited the ISPs subscribers and increased the burden of traffic upon the network. However, almost all the ADSL users, especially the students and users of unlimited ADSL, refused the offer. Most users had come to the conclusion that, if this plan were to be imposed, they would cancel their subscriptions because they wanted the Internet to be unlimited as is.
The plan was to start the limited ADSL Packages on the 1st of September 2007. It turned out that Dr. Tarek Kamel was to aim specific offerings at different price ranges for different individuals unable to subscribe to an unlimited package. As such, the unlimited packages remained as is, and available through all major ISPs with no changes in price, while the limited ADSL price ranges are now offered at a discounted price. with the existing unlimited policies with no fair usage policy except for ADSL2+
Introduction of ADSL2+
In April 2008, ADSL2+ was introduced in Egypt at speeds up to 24mbit. Now most ISPs have capped all the unlimited ADSL offerings to a quota of between 100GB and 150GB per month, calling it a Fair usage policy. All speeds from 256k/64k up to 24mbit are capped to up to 150GB per month. ISPs stated that the 150GB quota was huge and users could download up to 60 large movies, 10,000 large songs, browse endlessly and send up to 2 million e-mails a month. Most users are divided upon this capping especially those who are heavy P2P users. Going above the monthly quota would result in throttling speed of 64kbit/s for the rest of the month.
Alternative offer
There is an alternative offer from 256k to 2mbit ranging from 2GB a month to 15GB a month as a fair usage coverage with reduced prices to encourage low range users to the uptake of broadband.
Confusion about capping
Most ISPs, even though capping to 100-150GB a month, still claim the offers as unlimited. Also, comapines use vague and inconclusive responses about the Fair Usage Policy and its implementation of different packages. The ISP's websites got the FUP in English and placed in hard-to-navigate places plus most of the technical support and representatives are denying that any FUP is in place, which is felt by the end user to be in place. possibly in fear of customers cancelling their subscriptions at the thought of being capped.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Egypt
