Telkom Internet Capped/Uncapped User Feedback (Pt2)

Please can someone advise me on what I am doing wrong? I am still new to ADSL (first time signing up for any ADSL service was in December with Telkom). I signed up through the call centre and no one ever mentioned that the uncapped service I asked to sign up for (2mbps uncapped) was in fact a capped service, and I never received any documentation from them to read or sign, so finding out that I actually have a capped service was a big surprise.

The first couple of months went fine and in May my speed suddenly dropped. I phoned the call centre and was told I was nowhere near the cap for 2mbps (this was the first I heard of there being a cap on the uncapped account I had). The query was escalated to 2 other departments, who also couldn't identify the problem, and so a technician was sent out. The technician also had no idea why she couldn't get my account working at full speed, until she got hold of a senior technician at the office about an hour later, who told her I was throttled. According to him, an email was sent out to all customers the month before about the new rules. I never got such an email and neither did a friend of mine who also has ADSL. He also had no idea that his uncapped account was not uncapped as he was told. Both my friend and I are with Telkom Internet as our ISP, so they do have our correct email addresses. The bill always arrives on time via my Telkom email address.

Last month I used less bandwidth than in May, thinking I would avoid getting throttled again, but then was throttled anyway at lower usage than May. I phoned Telkom again and was told I was not capped, yet I couldn't browse any pages until I logged in and accepted an agreement on the Telkom site, after which browsing was at 8kb/s. In fact I had no idea that a Telkom usage tracker even existed until I was presented with this page. The call centre said they were subscribing me for daily email notifications so I could monitor my bandwidth usage - I am still to this day waiting for any notifications to show up.

So after this happened, I did a search and found these forums. I haven't spent that much time reading through all the posts, but I did see others mentioning that traffic between midnight and 6am is not counted towards the cap. I didn't know about this either. So I thought I would try it out this month and schedule most of my downloads (the reason I wanted an uncapped account) between midnight and 6am. During the day, I did max 25% of what I usually do on the internet, and this morning the TI usage tracker is sitting at almost 10% usage for the month.

I don't understand what I am doing wrong here. Does the free zone not apply anymore? The only way it could be at that usage amount already is if they counted the midnight to 6am downloads I scheduled :wtf:
 
Please can someone advise me on what I am doing wrong? I am still new to ADSL (first time signing up for any ADSL service was in December with Telkom). I signed up through the call centre and no one ever mentioned that the uncapped service I asked to sign up for (2mbps uncapped) was in fact a capped service, and I never received any documentation from them to read or sign, so finding out that I actually have a capped service was a big surprise.

The first couple of months went fine and in May my speed suddenly dropped. I phoned the call centre and was told I was nowhere near the cap for 2mbps (this was the first I heard of there being a cap on the uncapped account I had). The query was escalated to 2 other departments, who also couldn't identify the problem, and so a technician was sent out. The technician also had no idea why she couldn't get my account working at full speed, until she got hold of a senior technician at the office about an hour later, who told her I was throttled. According to him, an email was sent out to all customers the month before about the new rules. I never got such an email and neither did a friend of mine who also has ADSL. He also had no idea that his uncapped account was not uncapped as he was told. Both my friend and I are with Telkom Internet as our ISP, so they do have our correct email addresses. The bill always arrives on time via my Telkom email address.

Last month I used less bandwidth than in May, thinking I would avoid getting throttled again, but then was throttled anyway at lower usage than May. I phoned Telkom again and was told I was not capped, yet I couldn't browse any pages until I logged in and accepted an agreement on the Telkom site, after which browsing was at 8kb/s. In fact I had no idea that a Telkom usage tracker even existed until I was presented with this page. The call centre said they were subscribing me for daily email notifications so I could monitor my bandwidth usage - I am still to this day waiting for any notifications to show up.

So after this happened, I did a search and found these forums. I haven't spent that much time reading through all the posts, but I did see others mentioning that traffic between midnight and 6am is not counted towards the cap. I didn't know about this either. So I thought I would try it out this month and schedule most of my downloads (the reason I wanted an uncapped account) between midnight and 6am. During the day, I did max 25% of what I usually do on the internet, and this morning the TI usage tracker is sitting at almost 10% usage for the month.

I don't understand what I am doing wrong here. Does the free zone not apply anymore? The only way it could be at that usage amount already is if they counted the midnight to 6am downloads I scheduled :wtf:
I sympathise with your plight. It's important to get the terminology correct, because ISP's seem to delight in confusing their customers with it. According to feedback, you don't get capped. You get 'throttled' so your service "behaves like a 384k line". Many complain that that's also untrue and speeds are far lower.

The reps here are advising uncapped users to commence downloads between midnight - 6am.

What is odd is that Telkom have extended their NightSurfer offering to capped accounts and that all their downloads overnight are not metered.

That leaves us with the question about what we actually bought. Uncapped certainly doesn't give us many great benefits in comparison. Especially since streaming is rather kark and torrents go quite slowly during the day compared to other ISP's.

What they have told us is that because Mweb complained, Telkom has to make a profit on the uncapped. So if they limit the unlimited, they use less data and can sell it to other users (capped & business).

My objection is that this glass ceiling on how much we can download is too low. I've not reached it yet, but it's supposed to be around 100Gb on a 2 Meg line. You can't compare usage directly because some download exclusively overnight, which is not counted.
 
Just queued 13gigs for tonight @ 12. Lets see if this bar gets any green by the morning.
02.07.2014.PNG
 
I learnt to start at 00h10 - just to be safe! :D
00:05:22 ipcop PPP has gone up on ppp0
00:05:05 ipcop Scheduler dial
00:05:02 ipcop PPP has gone down on ppp0
00:05:01 ipcop Scheduler hangup
00:05:01 ipcop Scheduler select profile 1

Belt & Braces - my IPCop scheduler lets me start a new session, just to be sure :)
 
I signed up through the call centre and no one ever mentioned that the uncapped service I asked to sign up for (2mbps uncapped) was in fact a capped service.

We don't agree on some aspects of the call centre objectives, which are at the root of this issue (products not being adequately explained). I have engaged with some people on ensuring that pros/cons of capped/uncapped are made more clear on product collateral (e.g. website). There seems to be some movement here ...

The query was escalated to 2 other departments, who also couldn't identify the problem, and so a technician was sent out. The technician also had no idea why she couldn't get my account working at full speed, until she got hold of a senior technician at the office about an hour later, who told her I was throttled. According to him, an email was sent out to all customers the month before about the new rules. I never got such an email and neither did a friend of mine who also has ADSL.

So, you are complaining about not being informed that your account was being managed (which has always been the case).

He also had no idea that his uncapped account was not uncapped as he was told. Both my friend and I are with Telkom Internet as our ISP, so they do have our correct email addresses. The bill always arrives on time via my Telkom email address.

The email address you select for your bill doesn't currently get published to us. Product management didn't want any usage notifications for uncapped initially, so at present tracker doesn't offer uncapped users the ability to enable email notifications, I don't know if they have logged a request to change this ...

Last month I used less bandwidth than in May, thinking I would avoid getting throttled again, but then was throttled anyway at lower usage than May. I phoned Telkom again and was told I was not capped, yet I couldn't browse any pages until I logged in and accepted an agreement on the Telkom site, after which browsing was at 8kb/s. In fact I had no idea that a Telkom usage tracker even existed until I was presented with this page.

For precisely these reasons (you didn't know you were being managed in May, you didn't know that uncapped products have a Fair Usage Policy, and that you can see your status), we implemented redirection to the tracker, so that users could:
- be aware of the reason why their internet was slower
- be aware of what they can do to avoid being managed

I tested the Fair Usage enforcement at the end of June during our peak times, and was always able to reach in excess of 300kbps, youtube worked ok.

So after this happened, I did a search and found these forums. I haven't spent that much time reading through all the posts, but I did see others mentioning that traffic between midnight and 6am is not counted towards the cap. I didn't know about this either.

We have asked product management to request that this information be put on the relevant pages on tracker (instead of just in email communiques, which is their usual approach :-().

So I thought I would try it out this month and schedule most of my downloads (the reason I wanted an uncapped account) between midnight and 6am. During the day, I did max 25% of what I usually do on the internet, and this morning the TI usage tracker is sitting at almost 10% usage for the month.

I don't understand what I am doing wrong here. Does the free zone not apply anymore? The only way it could be at that usage amount already is if they counted the midnight to 6am downloads I scheduled :wtf:

If you PM me your username, I can provide you some details, once-off.
 
Unusually high latency today...

Local Tracert

Tracing route to news24.co.za [41.86.110.143]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms Billion.400G [10.0.0.2]
2 8 ms 8 ms 8 ms ti-224-32-01.telkomadsl.co.za [105.224.32.1]
3 12 ms 10 ms 10 ms ti-224-0-06.telkomadsl.co.za [105.224.0.6]
4 11 ms 10 ms 11 ms ti-224-0-13.telkomadsl.co.za [105.224.0.13]
5 11 ms 11 ms 10 ms rrba-ip-hsll-1-wan.telkom-ipnet.co.za [196.25.39.37]
6 12 ms 11 ms 10 ms rrba-ip-lir-1-gig-3-0-0.telkom-ipnet.co.za [196.43.11.134]
7 11 ms 10 ms 11 ms rrba-ip-se-2-gig-2-0-0-102.telkom-ipnet.co.za [196.43.25.138]
8 12 ms 11 ms 11 ms gigabitethernet1-1-2.vic-pr-1.mweb.co.za [197.80.4.118]
9 40 ms 39 ms 39 ms tengig-0-7-0-3-vic-p-1.mweb.co.za [197.80.7.1]
10 40 ms 39 ms 39 ms tengig-0-0-0-0-cpt-p-2.mweb.co.za [197.84.4.46]
11 35 ms 35 ms 36 ms vl-11-cpt-hscore-1.mweb.co.za [197.84.5.238]
12 38 ms 38 ms 38 ms 196.28.178.66
13 37 ms 37 ms 38 ms gig5-1-cpt-opt-65-1.optinet.net [196.41.133.234]
14 36 ms 35 ms 37 ms OPTI-CPT-N1-Hosting.optinet.net [197.84.196.6]
15 37 ms 38 ms 37 ms 197-84-208-146.cpt.mweb.co.za [197.84.208.146]
16 36 ms 36 ms 36 ms 41-86-110-143.mweb.co.za [41.86.110.143]

Trace complete.

International Tracert

Tracing route to thinkbroadband.com [80.249.99.130]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms Billion.400G [10.0.0.2]
2 * 7 ms 8 ms ti-224-32-01.telkomadsl.co.za [105.224.32.1]
3 11 ms 10 ms 10 ms ti-224-0-06.telkomadsl.co.za [105.224.0.6]
4 11 ms 10 ms 10 ms ti-224-0-13.telkomadsl.co.za [105.224.0.13]
5 11 ms 10 ms 12 ms rrba-ip-hsll-1-wan.telkom-ipnet.co.za [196.25.39.37]
6 20 ms 20 ms 20 ms nngy-ip-hsll-1-gig-2-0-0.telkom-ipnet.co.za [196.43.51.250]
7 109 ms 108 ms 109 ms if-3-0-1.core1.COV-Cochin.as6453.net [116.0.85.1]
8 145 ms 223 ms 145 ms if-14-0-0.core2.MLV-Mumbai.as6453.net [209.58.105.37]
9 252 ms 251 ms 251 ms if-10-3-1-0.tcore2.MLV-Mumbai.as6453.net [180.87.39.61]
10 248 ms * 248 ms if-2-2.tcore1.MLV-Mumbai.as6453.net [180.87.38.1]
11 427 ms * 425 ms if-9-5.tcore1.WYN-Marseille.as6453.net [80.231.217.17]
12 256 ms 254 ms * if-8-1600.tcore1.PYE-Paris.as6453.net [80.231.217.6]
13 423 ms 423 ms 424 ms if-2-2.tcore1.PVU-Paris.as6453.net [80.231.154.17]
14 286 ms 231 ms 231 ms 80.231.153.66
15 235 ms 235 ms 235 ms ae-60-60.csw1.Paris1.Level3.net [4.69.168.62]
16 230 ms 230 ms 230 ms ae-61-61.ebr1.Paris1.Level3.net [4.69.161.77]
17 250 ms 239 ms 239 ms ae-43-43.ebr2.London2.Level3.net [4.69.159.89]
18 231 ms 231 ms 231 ms ae-104-104.ebr1.London2.Level3.net [4.69.159.109]
19 234 ms 234 ms 235 ms ae-48-48.ebr1.London15.Level3.net [4.69.159.78]
20 235 ms 235 ms 234 ms ae-118-3504.edge3.London15.Level3.net [4.69.167.86]
21 232 ms 231 ms 232 ms BYTEMARK-CO.edge3.London15.Level3.net [212.187.193.10]
22 233 ms 232 ms 312 ms te2-1-9.star10g.bdr-rt3.thdo.ncuk.net [80.249.97.17]
23 233 ms 235 ms 233 ms te1-1-1-31.core-rs2.thdo.ncuk.net [80.249.97.85]
24 233 ms 233 ms 232 ms www.thinkbroadband.com [80.249.99.130]

Trace complete.

International Speedtest
Downloaded 10.0 megabytes in 56 seconds. (179.65 KB/s)

Local Speedtest
Downloaded 8000.0 kilobytes in 39 seconds. (201.31 KB/s)




Test End Timestamp
2014/07/02 17:59:18.43
 
After having run on generators for 2 days (due to the municipal power failure in Centurion on Monday afternoon), possibly while integrating a mobile generator (to allow servicing one of the generators that had been running for 2 days), it looks like there was a power failure on some feeds in one of the Telkom Data Centres.

At this stage, it looks like the only customer-impacting aspect was a failure on the caching system used for Telkom Internet subscribers. Some other internal systems are impacted as well.
 
Things are slow as hell at the moment, browsing is a pain and pages take long to load or sometimes just stop.
 
Things are slow as hell at the moment, browsing is a pain and pages take long to load or sometimes just stop.

Same here. Its never like this and tonight I got a great line up scheduled for 12am :(

EDIT: Suddenly back to normal :confused: I hope it stays like this now
 
Last edited:
Same here. Its never like this and tonight I got a great line up scheduled for 12am :(

I think you will be ok. It seems like it's only browsing that's an issue. just checked and torrents are coming down at full speed, youtube 720p is also fine on my 2Mb/s line.

There's definitely a browsing problem though. Might be related to that cache server ranger mentioned.
 
I think you will be ok. It seems like it's only browsing that's an issue. just checked and torrents are coming down at full speed, youtube 720p is also fine on my 2Mb/s line.

There's definitely a browsing problem though. Might be related to that cache server ranger mentioned.

If you really are in KZN, then no.

The caching failure we are working on recovering now only affects the Northern region (Gauteng).

Some changes were made to the caching system in Durban last night though, and some bandwidth changes as a result of that change are pending. I'll have a look at some stats once we have Gauteng's cache healthy again.
 
Streaming still buffering slightly especially on Hulu here in the deep south. Everything else (gaming ping, torrents, http downloads) seems fine. I'm guessing Telkom's network is more congested in the beginning of the month before heavy users start getting throttled?
 
First time in many weeks that streaming and browsing is absolutely useless for me.
Having some very unpleasant flashbacks to February/April when this was the benchmark...
Speedtest good, actual experience not so much.
4mb, Randburg
 
If you really are in KZN, then no.

The caching failure we are working on recovering now only affects the Northern region (Gauteng).

Some changes were made to the caching system in Durban last night though, and some bandwidth changes as a result of that change are pending. I'll have a look at some stats once we have Gauteng's cache healthy again.

Thanks for the feedback.
 
If you really are in KZN, then no.

The caching failure we are working on recovering now only affects the Northern region (Gauteng).

Some changes were made to the caching system in Durban last night though, and some bandwidth changes as a result of that change are pending. I'll have a look at some stats once we have Gauteng's cache healthy again.

Yes in KZN, browsing is back to normal again. Wonder what it was.
 
i think i will just be happy getting my line up and running any speed will do,logged my fault on friday was told 2 working days to fix and almost friday again so in 2 days its a week of no internet.Havent seen any telkom trucks in the area for a while just getting their automated sms everyday.
 
i think i will just be happy getting my line up and running any speed will do,logged my fault on friday was told 2 working days to fix and almost friday again so in 2 days its a week of no internet.Havent seen any telkom trucks in the area for a while just getting their automated sms everyday.

Wrong thread....
 
Managed to pull about 8gigs last night between 00:00 and 06:00 and the bar still has no green.
Although I'm starting to think this might be a futile exercise with the kid on holiday...

03.07.2014.jpg
 
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