Telkom ADSL soft cap performance tested

rpm, please do an article on the new Telkom capping policies on their uncapped accounts. They updated their AUP on the 21st of Feb, but no where do they mention soft capping.
 
Leaving aside video streaming and downloading how is the browsing performance on soft-capped uncapped accounts?

My tests on a soft-capped 20GB capped account seem to indicate that browsing (int & local) is actually enhanced - subjectively very snappy. However, you can forget video streaming of any type and downloading is throttled to about 384kbs.
 
browsing is crap... I think your entire connection is throttled to 1/4 line speed
 
Why didn't I foresee this, sigh, thank FSM for Afrihost.

telkom.jpg

I want my 20gb local back :mad:
 
Tpex said:
I want my 20gb local back :mad:
Click to expand...
When I first heard that the soft-cap was going to REPLACE 'hardcap + local-only' rather than just 'hardcap', I panicked as I knew what was coming. I made some noise to ranger (telkom rep on these forums) and indicated that such a change would cost them customers such as myself who have been making good use of the local-only bandwidth provisioned by Telkom as part of the accounts we had chosen to purchase - it allows us to manage our Telkom bandwidth such that we can get through a month without running out of bandwidth or having to go the badly-shaped uncapped route. His response was "Only 2% of customers actually utilize the local-only portion", in other words "we don't care about you if most customers will be happier with the changed package"

What I can't understand is why they had to do away with the local-only as well? Doesn't it seem possible that they could have indeed implemented the soft-cap for international use once blended is depleted, yet at the same time retain the classic local-only bandwidth at line-speed until depleted, as before? Surely as the years go by, you would think that their network is improving -- so why make such a regressive/crippling move? In a way it felt like we were back in year 2003 when DSL was introduced and soft-cap was the first norm

So if I dared try to play a multiplayer game in the packet-loss haven that is the soft-cap realm, and someone in my household subsequently opened facebook, then since local traffic now falls into the same pool of bandwidth as blended, so too does gaming fall into the same 384k of bandwidth, so I'd begin lagging uncontrollably. Needless to say I became fed up very quickly with the new reality, cancelled my account in favour of another ISP, and so far that's proving to give me greater value and less headache for my money's worth. I guess you fall into the insignificant "2%" margin too? Perhaps you should follow suit - I assure you the grass is greener on the other side :)
 
fragtion said:
So if I dared try to play a multiplayer game in the packet-loss haven that is the soft-cap realm, and someone in my household subsequently opened facebook, then since local traffic now falls into the same pool of bandwidth as blended, so too does gaming fall into the same 384k of bandwidth, so I'd begin lagging uncontrollably. Needless to say I became fed up very quickly with the new reality, cancelled my account in favour of another ISP, and so far that's proving to give me greater value and less headache for my money's worth. I guess you fall into the insignificant "2%" margin too? Perhaps you should follow suit - I assure you the grass is greener on the other side :)
Click to expand...
Definitely considering it now, I took this package for the whole deal, 10gb Intl and 20gb local, now Telkom have changed the deal.
 
Sigh ... the TI Tracker team needs to pull finger and get things back to normal. I recieved a flood of these emails for various capped accounts last night:

In keeping with our continuous transformation towards improved services and customer experience, Telkom Internet will be conducting system maintenance.

In light of the maintenance being performed your ADSL notifications sent regarding the data usage on your Telkom internet account will not be delivered during the month of February.


Telkom Internet would like to take this opportunity to apologise for any inconvenience caused during the month of February ...
Click to expand...

@Ranger - I assume that there will be no nightly reporting for March?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X