Diesal
Expert Member
I knew this was going to happen at some stage....
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Massive outcry about ADSL capping
- Thread starter Frankc
- Start date
who.is.michael
Expert Member
grok
Honorary Master
Afrihost may have been popular this last while, and rightly so, but any company that tries to sell me false advertising will be classified as evil.
I say again if your motor manufacturer did the same thing you'd be ready with a class action suit, why measure your ISP against a different set of rules?
Unless of course you're affiliated with them in some way.
CataclysmZA
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I'm not affiliated with any ISP that I know of.
You ask why an ISP should be measures by a different set of rules to other companies? Well, for one, you buy a car (or finance it through the bank, whatever) and that's that. Its yours, you get to keep and customise it as you like.
You get a say over what happens to it, and it if breaks its either up to your dealership or yourself to fix it. A car is, essentially, a product, as is bread, computer parts, and your clothes. You buy it, own it, and do whatever the hell you want with it. Once its yours, the manufacturers have no further obligations towards you aside from those set out in the warranty. If its out of warranty and you discover your ECU keeps on throttling your revs, its up to you to find a way to fix it, be it through the dealership you bought it from or a qualified service shop. Barring annoying accelerators in Toyota models and dodgy Audi TT spoilers, they don't owe you anything.
Why an ISP should be considered in a different light, however, is because you don't own your ADSL subscription. You don't have any right to an ADSL line, or a voice line, or the damn internet. Your line rental, data cap, and internet are provided to you as a service - not a physical product. You don't pay to fix it if it goes down, because its the ISPs responsibility to sort things out on your behalf. You paid them to do this; you pay for a service that is rendered to you. Its like Steam, a data service that delivers games and updates for those games over the internet - their service (like ADSL data) is a best-effort job (and for free), and can't always be guaranteed. Do you have the gist of things now?
The truth is, uncapped internet is a ways away for now, unless you're with MWEB. If anyone had told me a month ago that uncapped internet was coming at cheap prices, I would have laughed at them. I'm still laughing at those who cry "False Advertising!", because it isn't false advertising at all. Or at least, not in the true sense of the word. Telkom is the only company who is required to give you a specific line speed no matter what - I haven't seen any 4Mb/s users with a Speedtest score below 0.65Mb/s, so Telkom is doing its job of providing you an acceptable service with regards to line speed.
However, the ISPs from whom you accrue data cap from don't have to give you a specific minimum download speed - as far as I can remember, all of the current ISPs state in their FUPs that their services are a "best-effort", and if they have to throttle you to provide a "best-effort" service to you and to other people because you used too much cap, then that's within the law and within their FUPs and AUPs, which a lot of people don't take seriously.
Honestly, I've been scrutinizing every FUP and AUP I've been able to find over the last few days in order to find out which ISP is going to have the privilege of taking my money away from me, and I haven't found anything suspect yet, save for Afrihost making a huge mess of things by not communicating enough with their newly-aquired subscribers about the changes to their policies. If they had taken the time to do this, people wouldn't have been in as big a boil as they are now.
SilverNodashi
Expert Member
And where, exactly would they have gotten 10million users to test the service before they release it to the public? HOW, exactly did you want them to research this and see that it couldn't work as the people have demanded for it to work?
Hectic
Executive Member
Ever heard of test accounts? By not changing their t&c every couple of days.
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D34M0n7
Executive Member
Not 100% true.
Firstly I'd like to state that afrihost HAS made some false advertisements... They said UNCAPPED internet - but capped at 200GB ... thats not uncapped thats a large 200GB soft cap, by definition, not uncapped and therefore false. The advertisement regulatory people (forgot their name >.>) even said to themselves.
Right, now you say ADSL is a rented service and therefore we should not expect 100% uptime all the time. In a nutshell...
WRONG.
I pay them, for a service and I expect this service to be delivered.
If you have a maid, and you pay her a monthly rate and 3/10 times she does not arrive at your house to clean, do you say, Oh well, this is a service I'll just put up with it and not give a crap? Well, I'm not sure if you do that but Hell, I don't.
I PAY my ISP and there are standards, that are not currently being met, we should NOT wait, we should yell from the rooftops, we have waited since 2003 and we don't even have what we've been waiting for (honest uncapped, fairly shaped and affordable - by international standards, internet).
Yes these 'cheaper' uncapped services are new but these ISPs have been providing internet for ages, internet is internet is internet... must i go on. Yes, people DL more now but they knew this would happen, the thing is that their skrewups are affecting their customers, if I had a company and we made mistakes I'd at least deduct something off my customers monthly bill, instead of just expecting them to put up with it.
We complain because we are being wronged, we complain because we have been waiting for years, we complain because currently businesses have more rights than the customer, they can bully us and get away with it. Enough is ENOUGH!
People like you do not help, there are mistakes that need sorting, I'm not going to stand by and watch my money go down the drain, no, I'm going to let hell loose, as many others do.
Vrotappel
Bulls fan
Hopefully the new consumer act coming in later this year will sort out the one sided changes in AUP's. If you provide an uncapped service you must make sure you have the infrastructure for it.
FrankC, ek stem saam met jou. Maar ek dink daar is groter probleme as Telkom se monopolie waar ons as gebruikers moet teen stry. Persoonlik vind ek Afrihost se 'uncapped' diens waar die aflaai-spoed verminder word na 100gb maar net n bysaak en ons moet ons energie op die hoofsake rig. Waar bly die LLU!
Fact is that flat rate telephony, TV, radio, internet are the norm around the world.
+1
Just because there's no such thing as a free lunch doesn't mean the excess lunch from all the others who have paid can't be shared, so when there's enough people paying for the service you can ultimately offer more to customers who are utilizing it than what they paid for, by working with trends of which customers DON'T use much, etc. So under the right conditions, it then even becomes feasible to not have any caps implemented. So yes it's not a free lunch, but if handled properly it's pretty darn close - the guys benefiting sure can't tell the difference. Entrepreneurage! The ISP's that stop differentiating between capped and uncapped, and just offer a standard 384k/512k/4mbit/whatever package - as uncomplicated/simple as that, are the ones that are going to be able to offer 'uncapped' more easily. As soon as you separate and actively market the product as "uncapped", you lure in more guys who are going to max out their lines to kingdom come - so unless you can acquire a massive bandwidth pipe to accommodate that, it's unsustainable; offer a standardised account with no limit at a cost which would cover the average use, and publicity will rocket you into a position where you're buying so much wholesale bandwidth and at such a low cost, that you can afford to keep it uncapped even if there are a minority of users who use 100 times more than what they paid for. Free lunch to them, and the ISP can still make profit, and will make way more if it can be controlled properly. Not easy, but possible. No really, it's possible: as PeterCH points out, it's like that in most developed countries - so the sooner we can get out of our conservative 'cap' mentalities and force the ISP's to be more innovative (fortunately competition always seems to do that pretty well for us), the faster we're going to see prices drop and speeds go up
SA is getting there - soon the price for uncapped will be able to be so low, that assuming there's enough competition in the market, there won't be any need to offer 'capped' accounts separately (definitely should be seeing stuff like this by the end of 2011 thanks to the landing of WACS/ACE/Main One/EASSy submarine cables). Exciting times ahead =)
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joeman3264
Member
Well Said. D34M0n7 for president. As for FrankC, go man congrats for standing up and refusing to be served crap.
We all need to be like FrankC, then maybe service delivery would be taken seriously here in South Africa.
CataclysmZA
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Sigh...
And I'd like to add in here that Afrihost has not capped anyone to date. Nowhere on their FUP did it state they WOULD cap you at 200GB, you would just be under scrutiny because of the high amount of bandwidth you consume. There's no soft cap to speak of, so drop this point, its not valid.
I see that you can't differentiate circumstances. ADSL is a complicated and difficult service to administer and roll out to consumers. Its based on technology, a factor that guarantees you won't always get 100% uptime. No company has a 100% uptime rate, most aim only for 80%. There are standards that a company must aspire to, like a 99.99% uptime (essentially 5 minutes of downtime a year), but its not always possible.
In South Africa we do not have acceptable levels of service. Sure, a lot may be fine with it, but at the end of the day we're not ranked very highly according to the standards others have set. If you don't like the service at one company, or if it doesn't suit your needs, then find another that will; at least we have the freedom of choice here.
Also, I believe your analogy of the maid is incorrect. You have a human element here, who is capable of providing an acceptable service, but refuses to. Quite different from an ADSL service, I think you'll agree.
But here's the thing: we've had acceptable internet for ages. Expensive, yes, but acceptable. There have not been many major undersea cables that were lined up for us in the past decade, but now that Seacom has landed we can see the positive effects it will have in future. Once EASSY and the others land later this year, I don't think we'll have a lot to complain about. At that point, only the LLU will be our main gripe.
Hell, we're finally getting speed boosts from Telkom, for free!
Internet is not a simple service to deliver, there are too many variables that would affect service, the environment and distance being the two most prominent, as well as an ever-increasing user base. There's not enough to go around for everyone yet, so we'll have to contend for our place in the queue for quite some time.
Also, Afrihost have been quite good with refunds and pro-rata rates. They don't expect you to stick with them and wait it out, they'll happily let you go elsewhere if their service doesn't suit you.
And I'd like to add in here that Afrihost has not capped anyone to date. Nowhere on their FUP did it state they WOULD cap you at 200GB, you would just be under scrutiny because of the high amount of bandwidth you consume. There's no soft cap to speak of, so drop this point, its not valid.
I see that you can't differentiate circumstances. ADSL is a complicated and difficult service to administer and roll out to consumers. Its based on technology, a factor that guarantees you won't always get 100% uptime. No company has a 100% uptime rate, most aim only for 80%. There are standards that a company must aspire to, like a 99.99% uptime (essentially 5 minutes of downtime a year), but its not always possible.
In South Africa we do not have acceptable levels of service. Sure, a lot may be fine with it, but at the end of the day we're not ranked very highly according to the standards others have set. If you don't like the service at one company, or if it doesn't suit your needs, then find another that will; at least we have the freedom of choice here.
Also, I believe your analogy of the maid is incorrect. You have a human element here, who is capable of providing an acceptable service, but refuses to. Quite different from an ADSL service, I think you'll agree.
But here's the thing: we've had acceptable internet for ages. Expensive, yes, but acceptable. There have not been many major undersea cables that were lined up for us in the past decade, but now that Seacom has landed we can see the positive effects it will have in future. Once EASSY and the others land later this year, I don't think we'll have a lot to complain about. At that point, only the LLU will be our main gripe.
Hell, we're finally getting speed boosts from Telkom, for free!
Internet is not a simple service to deliver, there are too many variables that would affect service, the environment and distance being the two most prominent, as well as an ever-increasing user base. There's not enough to go around for everyone yet, so we'll have to contend for our place in the queue for quite some time.
Also, Afrihost have been quite good with refunds and pro-rata rates. They don't expect you to stick with them and wait it out, they'll happily let you go elsewhere if their service doesn't suit you.
marine1
Honorary Master
Wesley are you mad? They have throttled us so badly I wish I was capped
CataclysmZA
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Then move to Mweb, or stick to whatever package you were previously on, and satisfied with. None of the uncapped accounts are for heavy downloaders, only those who use less than 30GB a month.
NAG dude, I think you have mistaken some things here. I understand that all of this is new to us (uncapped for the people). If you tell me that I have uncapped, I will download millions of photos of people doing nothing and do the Farmville thing every minute of the day just because I have uncapped. Because it is a novelty for me, don't throttle me because I have friendfaced too much.
I have noticed on the forums that there is now specific soft cap/throttle threshold, but we have still been told that it is uncapped (but with a cap).
I am just pointing out the fact that I want what I was told that I will get. I agree with marine1, I might as well not use the interweb at all if it is going to carry on like this. Yes, I know I must wait for the other links to come on line but what happens if it is a stuffup then too?
I have noticed on the forums that there is now specific soft cap/throttle threshold, but we have still been told that it is uncapped (but with a cap).
I am just pointing out the fact that I want what I was told that I will get. I agree with marine1, I might as well not use the interweb at all if it is going to carry on like this. Yes, I know I must wait for the other links to come on line but what happens if it is a stuffup then too?
Exactly...People much rather stick with something they don't like while sitting and whining all over, than actually just really doing something about it by moving along. Posting on a forum each day, badmouthing a company and disputing their Toc's etc etc won't make them drop everything you agreed upon when signing up.
Ask your money back, and leave. That opens much more eyes. (You could mumble your displeasure as you leave if that would make you feel better)
It's displayed on the bottom of the signup page very clearly...But as South Africans we only read what we want to right?
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CataclysmZA
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The only company who would have true uncapped is MWEB at this point in time, as everyone else buys bandwidth from IS or SAIX at per-GB prices. I still see no cap, but if you could linky to whomever said that it was, I'd be happy to retract my statement.
Otherwise, move to MWEB and enjoy their service until the other companies fair better, then switch back. Download as much as you feel like at MWEB until you get used to having uncapped - for most, suddenly having uncapped is like winning the lottery; its great when you realise you have it, but the adjustment is often hard as you start to download everything possible, rather than just what you need.