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Question of the Day: Do you think Bafana Bafana will win tonight?
Somebody please explain what happens when capped
- Thread starter KnKyJ
- Start date
Smoke starts coming out of your router or usb modem with the error message "telkoms profit margin is dropping under 300% on your adsl line" thus cutting off your international bandwidth.To get this problem fixed the only known patch (95/98/xp/2000)is a one way plane ticket out of telkom land and into the 21st century.Hope this clears up alot of the issues about the cap for you guys.[
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]Quazzi
Well-Known Member
This is what happens from my experience (and I'm open to corrections here).
Everyone has a cap of 3GB. This means that as soon as you hit over 3 Gigs of uploads/downloads (upload = u sending information, download = u receiving information) you get assigned an ip address in the range 165.165.(1-4).xxx and you get placed on a DNS server that restricts your speed to international servers.
The restriction however is so strict that trying to connect to an international server is virtually impossible or so slow that you get fed up waiting for a page to load (which may take hours) that you cancel the request.
Now from what I gather and from what I've read in previous postings, you can get away with an extra 1 Gb (roughly) of bandwidth if you are close to your cap and don't disconnect for the duration of IP assignation. In other words, say I'm on 2.9 Gig of total bandwidth on tuesday night. If I connect up on Wednesday morning and download the whole day without disconnecting, I'll get away with whatever bandwidth I've used for the day or for the duration I've been connected. The next time I connect up, I'll be capped.
To elaborate further, the cap is only enforced for any international access. This means that even though I'm capped, I can still access local (South African) servers and pages. This also means that I can still download as much as I want (at a pretty decent speed) and send e-mail, play games or do whatever I want to do, but only on local servers. I don't know if this holds for any server in Africa but my gut feel is not.
Now to describe how the cap works: any bandwidth is added to the cap. So local and international bandwidth both clock up. This means that if I access only local sites, I'm eating away my access to international sites. This is a huge moot point and my opinion is that local access should not be clocked up as bandwidth - cap us on international only (upload and download). To have local bandwidth added to our usage is unfair.
I hope this answers your question. If I've left anything out, you guys are welcome to add on to the explanation.
Everyone has a cap of 3GB. This means that as soon as you hit over 3 Gigs of uploads/downloads (upload = u sending information, download = u receiving information) you get assigned an ip address in the range 165.165.(1-4).xxx and you get placed on a DNS server that restricts your speed to international servers.
The restriction however is so strict that trying to connect to an international server is virtually impossible or so slow that you get fed up waiting for a page to load (which may take hours) that you cancel the request.
Now from what I gather and from what I've read in previous postings, you can get away with an extra 1 Gb (roughly) of bandwidth if you are close to your cap and don't disconnect for the duration of IP assignation. In other words, say I'm on 2.9 Gig of total bandwidth on tuesday night. If I connect up on Wednesday morning and download the whole day without disconnecting, I'll get away with whatever bandwidth I've used for the day or for the duration I've been connected. The next time I connect up, I'll be capped.
To elaborate further, the cap is only enforced for any international access. This means that even though I'm capped, I can still access local (South African) servers and pages. This also means that I can still download as much as I want (at a pretty decent speed) and send e-mail, play games or do whatever I want to do, but only on local servers. I don't know if this holds for any server in Africa but my gut feel is not.
Now to describe how the cap works: any bandwidth is added to the cap. So local and international bandwidth both clock up. This means that if I access only local sites, I'm eating away my access to international sites. This is a huge moot point and my opinion is that local access should not be clocked up as bandwidth - cap us on international only (upload and download). To have local bandwidth added to our usage is unfair.
I hope this answers your question. If I've left anything out, you guys are welcome to add on to the explanation.
cubehre
Active Member
I use Telkom for my ADSL and I have a UNIX box in a rack at UUNET. After being capped, my website at UUNET looks like it's hosted in Abu Dabi. I mean this claim that once capped you can still access ZA sites is bull. Telkom must interconnect to UUNET via Russia or something. It's either that or there are just soooo many suckers that are capped... all stuffed into the pis-straaltjie that's meant to be the "degraded international access" group.
My word of advice - the last week of the month, I suspect sees about 90% of ADSL users being capped and forced to share a 300bps line... so the best thing to do is to hold out and postpone all serious downloads until then... You'll have the full ADSL line (meant for the 10000 users) open coz you'll only be sharing it with about 3 other people.
ps. Has anyone ever seen anything close to 512K download, or wait 256 for that matter?
The most I can get by accessing local sites is 50K and that's on a good day.
My word of advice - the last week of the month, I suspect sees about 90% of ADSL users being capped and forced to share a 300bps line... so the best thing to do is to hold out and postpone all serious downloads until then... You'll have the full ADSL line (meant for the 10000 users) open coz you'll only be sharing it with about 3 other people.
ps. Has anyone ever seen anything close to 512K download, or wait 256 for that matter?
The most I can get by accessing local sites is 50K and that's on a good day.
<blockquote id="quote"><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by cubehre</i>
<br />ps. Has anyone ever seen anything close to 512K download, or wait 256 for that matter?
The most I can get by accessing local sites is 50K and that's on a good day.
<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">
Are you getting confused between kilobits-per-second and kilobytes-per-second? I regularly see my download speeds (both local and international) top 50 kilo*bytes*-per-second, which is the most I could expect out of a connection rated at 512 kilo*bits*-per-second. Albeit that's usually at night or weekends...
<br />ps. Has anyone ever seen anything close to 512K download, or wait 256 for that matter?
The most I can get by accessing local sites is 50K and that's on a good day.
<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">
Are you getting confused between kilobits-per-second and kilobytes-per-second? I regularly see my download speeds (both local and international) top 50 kilo*bytes*-per-second, which is the most I could expect out of a connection rated at 512 kilo*bits*-per-second. Albeit that's usually at night or weekends...
paf
Well-Known Member
<blockquote id="quote"><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by seanl</i>
<br /><blockquote id="quote"><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by cubehre</i>
<br />ps. Has anyone ever seen anything close to 512K download, or wait 256 for that matter?
The most I can get by accessing local sites is 50K and that's on a good day.
<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">
Are you getting confused between kilobits-per-second and kilobytes-per-second? I regularly see my download speeds (both local and international) top 50 kilo*bytes*-per-second, which is the most I could expect out of a connection rated at 512 kilo*bits*-per-second. Albeit that's usually at night or weekends...
<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">
I've been monitoring mine for a while (not through a speedtest but by the actual throughput I get through my ADSL connection).
The absolute best I well get is 56KB = 450kbits/s.
That again, is at the best of times. I'd say it's averages at about 300kbit/s - but I work mostly in the evenings and I access only intl stuff. Anyway, I'm reasonably happy with that.
<br /><blockquote id="quote"><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by cubehre</i>
<br />ps. Has anyone ever seen anything close to 512K download, or wait 256 for that matter?
The most I can get by accessing local sites is 50K and that's on a good day.
<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">
Are you getting confused between kilobits-per-second and kilobytes-per-second? I regularly see my download speeds (both local and international) top 50 kilo*bytes*-per-second, which is the most I could expect out of a connection rated at 512 kilo*bits*-per-second. Albeit that's usually at night or weekends...
<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">
I've been monitoring mine for a while (not through a speedtest but by the actual throughput I get through my ADSL connection).
The absolute best I well get is 56KB = 450kbits/s.
That again, is at the best of times. I'd say it's averages at about 300kbit/s - but I work mostly in the evenings and I access only intl stuff. Anyway, I'm reasonably happy with that.