Hardcapping Question

[valheru]

Hi All

A quick question around the whole hardcapping issue. I am not sure as to what the contract terms are on an ADSL subscription, but I assume that you are contractually bound when signing up for an ADSL line with Telkom in the same way that they are bound to provide the service for which you signed for.

Do they reserve the right to chop and change their service according to how they see fit even though you are paying them for what you originally bound yourself to? I have no idea how it works, and hope that someone can clarify this for me. The way I see it, if they are able to do this, then I should have the right as a consumer to terminate the contract as I am not getting what I originally signed up for.

 

[thisgeek]

Actually, Telkom's excuse is that it's the ISP who is hardcapping you, and not them. (Despite the fact that the ISP is required to do this because Telkom forced them to.)

 

[JouPaSeEpos]

Hi All

A quick question around the whole hardcapping issue. I am not sure as to what the contract terms are on an ADSL subscription, but I assume that you are contractually bound when signing up for an ADSL line with Telkom in the same way that they are bound to provide the service for which you signed for.

Do they reserve the right to chop and change their service according to how they see fit even though you are paying them for what you originally bound yourself to? I have no idea how it works, and hope that someone can clarify this for me. The way I see it, if they are able to do this, then I should have the right as a consumer to terminate the contract as I am not getting what I originally signed up for.

Your ADSL line connects you to a telkom exchange, if it still does then they are covered.
Did your ISP account change then take it up with them. Does your ISP work from SAIX/Telkom then move to IS, they also provide ADSL not provided by SAIX usage billing.

 

[HellTel]

Not sure I understand what you are tying to say here but you are bound to a contract that has terms and conditions and one condition is the cap issue.

So, once you are over the cap and agreed and signed the contract stipulating how much cap you were bound to, yes, they can hardcap you and yes, they will hardcap you, or will they?

To hardcap or not to ... that is the question

_________________

Things that make you go hmmmmmm ....

 

[Spindrift]

Actually, Telkom's excuse is that it's the ISP who is hardcapping you, and not them. (Despite the fact that the ISP is required to do this because Telkom forced them to.)

Disclaimer: I do not work for Telkom

Telkom does not force ISPs to hard cap. They are charging them per Gigabytes they are free to distribute the bandwidth anyway they like.

As an analogy, consider a sushi restaurant. Fish are being sold to them per kilogram and they are free to split this up and sell individual portion or go for an all you eat route. The second option involved charging a price for what would be higher than an average person could eat in hope that there will be more people who eat less than this than those who will eat more. Of course, there are strategies you can use to make sure people dont eat too much. I have seen this first hand. At one such restaurant, the waitrons would start to take their time serving you when you have eaten a lot. Another example is the all you can eat ribs, where they only bring you half of the previous portion in twice the time, for each new order.

 

[pope24]

Telkom does not force ISPs to hard cap. They are charging them per Gigabytes they are free to distribute the bandwidth anyway they like.

Exactly, the ISPs are choosing to hardcap both to protect themselves from the eventuality that they get billed for more GBs by SAIX than their customers paid them for. They are also protecting their profits as hardcapping means that all unused GBs are pure profit for the ISP.
This includes all unused portions of GBs because the ISP is not being charged per customer but on a pure usage basis so if I use 2.5GB and you use 2.5GB then between us the ISP is 1GB worth of pure profit with no associated costs.

As I understand the doublespeak from TelkomInternet they are not hardcapping until their predetermined average usage has been reached. So If I use more than the 3GB I have paid for then I won't be cut off until the theoretical average user gets to 1.4GB (as an example) when that gets hit then everyone who is over the 3GB limit gets capped.
This is a bit dangerous on their part because if the power users hit them hard early on in the month then it is possible for the the average usage to be achieved before the majority of the users use much of their bandwidth leaving TI in a position where they have to pay more (play play telkom money) to SAIX than they have received from their subscribers