Streaming account options for the Cape

SL1v3R said:
So with Crystal Web and Web Africa both having IPC capacity issues in the Cape life is pretty miserable for some of their streaming reliant customers even on capped accounts. What are some good home capped alternatives suitable for streaming? A 120gb capped account is currently going for approx R400 on both Crystal Web and Web Africa (IS backbones).
Click to expand...

The ETA for an upgrade is next week and all reports are that things are on track. Received an update from one of the epic networking people at IS earlier today.

Also home capped accounts are different to premium home (uncapped) and business capped accounts. I am not entirely understanding why a person wants to use a home capped account for streaming - they can perform the function but the general philosophy of capped accounts doesn't quite match the group behaviour that occurs with streaming.
 
Paul Hjul said:
The ETA for an upgrade is next week and all reports are that things are on track. Received an update from one of the epic networking people at IS earlier today.

Also home capped accounts are different to premium home (uncapped) and business capped accounts. I am not entirely understanding why a person wants to use a home capped account for streaming - they can perform the function but the general philosophy of capped accounts doesn't quite match the group behaviour that occurs with streaming.
Click to expand...

Please refer to your own site where It states that the home capped account has priority bandwidth suited for streaming, gaming etc...

http://crystalweb.co.za/crystal-clear-home-capped.php
 
Paul Hjul said:
The ETA for an upgrade is next week and all reports are that things are on track. Received an update from one of the epic networking people at IS earlier today.

Also home capped accounts are different to premium home (uncapped) and business capped accounts. I am not entirely understanding why a person wants to use a home capped account for streaming - they can perform the function but the general philosophy of capped accounts doesn't quite match the group behaviour that occurs with streaming.
Click to expand...

Why is that Paul? As far as I understand with capped you pay for a set amount of gigabytes and use it as you will. It remains generally unshaped unless there severe network problems not?

Uncapped does not make sense to me due to the price of uncapped 20Mbs accounts.
 
lestoran said:
Why is that Paul? As far as I understand with capped you pay for a set amount of gigabytes and use it as you will. It remains generally unshaped unless there severe network problems not?

Uncapped does not make sense to me due to the price of uncapped 20Mbs accounts.
Click to expand...

A capped account represents an allocation which the user is able to use on the network.

So providers seek to use balancing predicted demand (the number of gigs sold) vs capacity supplied and tend to drop focus on other network demand management techniques. However you are working with a total usage prediction as well as overall capacity. The N1 highway can carry thousands of cars and millions of vehicles can drive over the road during a year but the Western Bypass still gets congested.

Now if a provider does not shape traffic (and the term is highly imprecise) if all users are demanding bandwidth at the same time things get messy.

Now your particular situation - where the pricing on a 20Mbps uncapped offering is the reason why caps are a valid tool in product management but they remain pretty blunt. What is particularly troublesome is that because of the history of DSL in SA where shaping was initially against media streams (voice in particular) and to limit downloading while pushing web browsing (and remember on 384k lines ...) the idea of taking up an account as being "unshaped" (and check in with any network engineer as to how fuzzy and fluffy the term is - it is best to use it in contrast to shaping as a method by which an ISP dictates user traffic in order to squeeze more customers onto less capacity) in order to do anything other than browsing causes a whole host of problems. A highly contended unshaped pipe is a lot worse that a highly contended shaped pipe and if you have a less contended pipe it becomes viable to have less shaping ...
 
Paul - traditionally (way before CW) we had CAPPED accounts - these worked well at all times until some bright spark brought out SOFT CAP.

Then another bright spark brought out UN-CAPPED and then the wheels came off.

CAPPED accounts always performed better than UN-CAPPED for all protocols (Telkom ISP and Afrihost - before MTN) as expected as you would be paying more for a fixed amount of "UNSHAPED - UN-THROTTLED - call it what you want - data.

Now your CAPPED account (Home CAPPED) seems, in my experience to be worse off, you have taken the worst features of both CAPPED and UN-CAPPED. i.e. P2P NNTP forced to dl in graveyard shift and shaped to hell the rest of the time as per a UNCAPPED account.

I understand you guys started with uncapped and added in the capped accounts but you can see that your "capped" is nowhere close to "capped" in the early days of ADSL.

In fact the whole ADSL scene has gone backwards wrt CAPPED vs UNCAPPED with ISP's offering watered down offerings.

Sorry mate , still not impressed after month 2.
 
actually traditionally - as in when DSL services arrived in SA
accounts were capped and shaped

when alternatives to Telkom were introduced the two variables used in marketing products were quantity (size of cap) and whether the data was shaped.
the you had "shaped" vs "unshaped" accounts and paid considerably more for unshaped data



Now you are sitting with customer situation where there is a pressing demand for mispriced ad hoc on demand data usage. Some providers are meeting this demand by providing those services on over-contended pipes and the alternative is to enable shaping in favour of latency sensitive traffic.
 
Last edited:
Well this is quite disconcerting. Wanting to do some streaming now and then. Was going to go for a capped account with Web Africa. Most streaming would happen after work, like 6pm to 10pm. Doesn't have to be HD.

What's the streaming like on weekends on a capped account?

Waiting for Telkom to install my line...only ordered it on Tuesday, wish I knew somebody who could get it done quicker!
 
I'm on Afrihost and most of my usage is streaming over 4MB line. AH works nicely for this in my case.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X