Under 3GB Capping I would make mention of the following. I am not fundamentally against capping and can understand Telkom's concern about how ADSL can affect its fixed line business, but two aspects of capping really annoy me.
1. When a user is capped, they should not be prevented from receiving critical updates and virus updates from vendor web sites. User systems are exposed to any form of attack whilst the user is capped, as they cannot download this. This is irresponsible behaviour from a telco and ISP and the practice should be stopped, or at least a proper local download location made available for Windows Updates, Linux Distro updates and popular virus checkers such Norton Anti-virus and Internet Security (which Telkom provides us), McAfee, PC-Cillin.
2. If the objective is to preserve international bandwidth for other users of the system and mitigate any threat to Telkom's fixed line businesses, which I understand as the bandwidth is expensive, why is it ADSL users are discriminated against in the following forms:
<ul><li>We may not make user of local SAIX cache servers such as cache.saix.net, so we are forced to use international bandwith regardless of whether the data is in a local location or not. </li><li>All incoming and outgoing traffic is measured regardless of whether we established the session or not, thereby allowing any form of attack which a responsible ISP should assist to prevent anyway, decreasing the amount of available traffic we can make use of. This point along with the inability to reach international OS patch and virus update sites is a cause for major concern, especially in instances where users are DoS attacked, hits by worms from other users' systems and the like </li><li>The abitrarily assigned cap provides ADSL users with far less available data transfer ability than a 64K ISDN line on R7.00 call (which when used nightly amounts to a similar cost to ADSL). On a 64K ISDN line transfers of up to 5GB were possible every month without discrimination. I cannot comment on 128K ISDN as I never made use of that service. </li> <li>Lastly, ISP's such as M-Web and Tiscali allow the purchase of additional traffic without requiring the use of an additional account. Telkom Internet should do the same as they leave customers facing a monthly charge for two accounts, even when they may just want to pay an extra +/- R200 for one month.</li></ul>
