MTN's "uncapped" broadband a con?

Uncapped in this country seems to mean your ISP will never cut you out of internet access no matter how much data you use. You cannot compare fix line broadband to mobile broadband, it's a totally different kettle of fish all together. Mobile broadband does not even come to close to fixed line broadband when it comes to carrying capacity. In the UK Iphone and Blackberry users alone are overloading cell towers in that country. You cannot use ADSL standards when dealing with mobile broadband, all said MTN are still ridiculous for that amount of money and to have such a drastic throttling system is not right. One second you flying at 14.mbs the next crawling at 128kbs it's too drastic at least have a tier system
 
mmmig said:
Uncapped in this country seems to mean your ISP will never cut you out of internet access no matter how much data you use. You cannot compare fix line broadband to mobile broadband, it's a totally different kettle of fish all together. Mobile broadband does not even come to close to fixed line broadband when it comes to carrying capacity. In the UK Iphone and Blackberry users alone are overloading cell towers in that country. You cannot use ADSL standards when dealing with mobile broadband, all said MTN are still ridiculous for that amount of money and to have such a drastic throttling system is not right. One second you flying at 14.mbs the next crawling at 128kbs it's too drastic at least have a tier system
Click to expand...

For the asking price a tiered approach to speed throttling would have been received much more favourably, say:

0 -3GBs = full speed, 14.4 or whatever
3-5GBs = 7.2GBs
5-10GBs = 3.6GBs
10-15GBs = 1.8GBs
15GBs+ = 512kbsp...

and maybe:
30GBs+ = 256kbsp...

Just a thought... but I doubt they could successfully implement this, based on their billing issues...
 
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Rouxenator said:
The only cap a user should experience is the cap implicated by the line speed. Thus, if you have a 384kbps uncapped account your "cap" will be about 100GB. On 4mbps your "cap" is 1TB and on 7.2mbps your "cap" is 1.8TB

What MTN is selling here is UNCAPPED 128kbps for R799 per month. What they ARE NOT selling is UNCAPPED HSDPA. In effect one could say they are selling UNCAPPED GPRS.
Click to expand...

Exactly right in any ISP offereing the work uncapped can be used freely if they never cut you off BUT if they associate a product with a speed e.g. 4Meg uncapped then if the account is not uncapped if there is throttling after reaching a usage threshold.

With respect to MTN they should be prohibited from using any reference to speed with the "uncapped" including the words 3G (=384k) HSDPA (1.8/3.6) or even broadband as 128k is not broadband. (or was the ruling that broadband starts at 128k I can't remember but Telkom removed 196k. In the old days anything above 64k was broadband as it required channel bonding)
 
Read the fine print carefully, the package is uncapped, you can up and download as much as you like, but the package is throttled after exceeding a certain amount of bandwidth.

It is still a crap deal and MTN will catch a few crappers
 
LOL - what does ISDN cost these days ? Cause on ISDN running in dual channel mode (full speed) you get 128kbps. Would be interesting to see how this compares.
 
well i like it - 50 bucks to download 1.2GB is much cheaper than R300 for that same Gig at vodacom.

no good for surfing, but downloading hell yeah!
 
Here we have 2 words which have completely different meanings which seems to be confusing 90% of the users here.

1. Uncapped - Your data won't be cut off.
2. Throttled - Your speed will be severely restricted.

hammell said:
Let's do the maths - let's just say that you use 10Gb at full speed - so you're then throttled to 128 kbps. That works out to (assuming you max it out) to 1.4Gb per day which is 42Gb per month. Add the 10Gb at full speed and that's 52Gb per month. WHICH IS NOT AN UNCAPPED ACCOUNT. If I were an ISP and said that I'm selling an uncapped account but limited you to 0.0001kbps, technically I'm not uncapped - fair? Don't think so...
Click to expand...
Q) Can you download for the whole month and not exceed your data cap?
A) Yes you can.
Conclusion - Must be a uncapped account then.

Q) Is it fair to throttle the speed?
A) No it isn't.
Conclusion - Big business isn't fair. Who would have thought.

Chilternburt said:
Its a total con.... Uncapped must mean exactly that, no throttling after a certain limit is reached... thats BS!
Click to expand...
Here we have the whole uncapped/throtteling word mixup happen again.

Q) Can you download for the whole month and not exceed your data cap?
A) yes you can.
Conclusion - Must be a uncapped account then.

Q) Will your speed be throttled after a certain amount of data?
A) Yes it will be.
Conclusion - Your speed is severely restricted.

Q) Will that mean you will hit your data cap?
A) No since there is no data cap.
Conclusion - Must be a uncapped account again.
 
I'm guessing there site is also on the "uncapped" package.
Feels like the site is running at 128K.
 
Crowley said:
Q) Is it fair to throttle the speed?
A) No it isn't.
Conclusion - Big business isn't fair. Who would have thought.
.
Click to expand...

Silly conclusion, if a conclusion at all. MWEB (Very Big Business) seems to be pretty fair with there uncapped / throttled offering.
But just had to point out there are fair and unfair large and small businesses and whats fair is matter of opinion.
 
Curtix2 said:
Silly conclusion, if a conclusion at all. MWEB (Very Big Business) seems to be pretty fair with there uncapped / throttled offering.
But just had to point out there are fair and unfair large and small businesses and whats fair is matter of opinion.
Click to expand...

+1

To say "big business isn't fair" is indicative how how we in SA seem to accept poor business practices.
 
I dunno why everyone is having a fit about this. This is the same policy in the UK. When I lived there, I was with Vodaphone, got a Nokia and paid £30 a month for 'uncapped' data, which had a fairusage policy of 3gb. At the end of the day, if you hit you're cap, you're not disconnected, you just got pushed down to 128k, but it means no more bundles and OOB. Yes, SA is more expensive, but you should be used to that by now.
 
I think it would be seen as less of a scam if the throttled speed was something like 384k, not 128k! The problem with 128k is that it's barely usable on the modern Internet. So you're effectively capped because browsing will be next to impossible.
 
Another of these capped-uncapped offerings.

IMO throttling the client just after 3Gb's to 128kb/s is just not on. If they specified that it's a throttled uncapped service, then it would be closer to the truth.

But for some it'll be great to have some connectivity after hitting 3Gb without having to worry about getting a sky-high bill at the end of the month.
 
Well too bad iBurst did not use this in their marketing when they launched. Didn't they have EXACTLY this product where you got like x GB and were throttled to 64kbps afterwards? Imagine if they called the product "uncapped" ? :) Or did they?

Funny enough when iBurst REMOVED this everyone went ballistic! . So somehow people still actually USED this throttled-but-not-capped type of service alot more than one would think.

So as much as it might be a con, to the iburst users, if you could choose:

3GB a month and then throttled to 128 kbps
vs.
3GB a month and cut off.

What would you pick?

As it is:
3GB on Vodacom/MTN costs : R650 .....[correct me if i'm wrong].

So paying R100 p/month for 128kbps uncapped " sounds pretty good to me.

And i mean that's R100 , without any line-rental / analog line rental and all that...
 
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In the real world the odds are that the 128Kb/s will also be an "up to" scenario, which means attained speeds might even be lower than that.
 
I'm sure some people will benefit because one can download around 33GB a month with this offer. Just see a lot of irational whining going on. If you don''t like the product, don't use it. GAH!!!
 
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