Agreed. What exactly is the point of the three gig cap? From what I gather it is to prevent those that telkom deems as "malicious users" from consuming large amounts of international bandwidth. Why is this done? South Africa is very far behind when it comes to the internet; we have to pay large sums of money in order to keep our international links and as virtually no internet content is produced here, the cost of bandwidth rests on the average internet user, instead of being offset by advertising revenue, <b><i>COMPETITION IN THE TELECOM INDUSTRY</i></b>, etc, as what happens internationally.
Why, then, does local traffic count towards this cap? Surely local bandwidth is far cheaper than international bandwidth, as less of it is required, as well as the fact that local traffic has a shorter distance to travel. I can certainly see why Telkom requires some sort of bandwidth restriction on users - in order to ensure they don't get bankrupted by a couple of users downloading huge amounts of content. My problem, however, lies with how they control the cap. Three gigabytes of content in a month is nothing, considering we are receiving a (theoretically) 24/7 512kbps connection, and as it currently stands once one reaches their cap, ADSL becomes virtually useless as it is impossible to even browse international websites.
As an extreme example (ignoring upstream bandwidth) - assuming there are 30 days on average in a month, which is equivalent to 2592000 seconds (30 * 24 * 60 * 60), and that the maximum download capacity of one of Telkoms ADSL links is 65536 bytes per second (512 * 1024 / 8), this yields 169869312000 bytes of downstream traffic per month, or in a more convenient format, 158.2 gigabytes of potential downstream traffic per month.
Obviously you would be hard-pressed to find someone who is even capable of reaching this theoretical limit - most users would probablly find it difficult to (meaningfully) use even a tenth of this - 15.82 gigabytes of downstream traffic per month. What it basically comes down to is either Telkom is under a lot of strain financially in order to justify imposing a 3 gig cap on <b>all</b> ADSL traffic, or they are simply abusing their monopolistic position and just plain-old ripping people off, 'cause we have no-one else to turn to. Somehow I'm guessing it's the latter case.
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