warichard
Well-Known Member
Hi Guys,
Seeing a lot of anger towards the changes coming ahead, luckily this is not (at least not yet) a change that every ISP is likely to make, purely because the way in which it is priced makes it difficult to impossible to construct affordable or fixed-price accounts (as an example, if we wanted to stay within the regulatory framework then we would have to do away with any fixed pricing on our ADSL and charge users for any additional usage beyond their "international portion of cap") - the regulation, in the context of Telkom's interpretation thereof, is completely unreasonable and unworkable, and only serves to harm the consumer in the end.
Luckily, the current way of pricing/dealing with access is still available to us and other ISP's, and I'm pretty sure that until this gets sorted between SAIX and ICASA you're not going to be seeing much in the way of changes.
That said, there is still one huge problem with this whole configuration of Telkom, it solves only one SMALL problem of the regulation we're talking here ("local bandwidth shall not be subject to the cap") and that is, how do we as ISP's provide for the ability for us to switch a single username to shaped, unshaped or local only without requiring a username change (as in the past shaped, unshaped and local only is determined by the name of the DSL realm your account is on - the bit after the @ sign - and the 3 different types of access needed 3 different realm names). Telkom has now solved that, and is providing that to ISP's come November.
What it doesn't do is stop local access from using your initial 3 or 4 or 10GB's of international bandwidth, which, from how I understand the regulation SHOULD read, is what should be happening. That isn't and local access still eats away at your international portion of cap, after which, we as ISP's have a choice, do we cap the user (as normally happens now) or do we set the user to local only (and we get charged local rates per GB). We're currently opting to keep our current products using the former, and looking at how we can build additional products with the additional option(s) we've now been given.
If we wanted to stick to what everyone feels the spirit of the regulation should be (where you don't get charged for additional local usage, and local usage is "uncapped") we would have to factor a certain amount of local GB's into the cost of our fixed cost accounts, even if we only factor in an additional 27GB of local on to a 3GB account, it means that 3GB account which costs you currently R199 will have to end up costing you R500-odd, an increase of nearly a factor of 3 - clearly this is both unreasonable and unfeasable given the way the ADSL market works.
Seeing a lot of anger towards the changes coming ahead, luckily this is not (at least not yet) a change that every ISP is likely to make, purely because the way in which it is priced makes it difficult to impossible to construct affordable or fixed-price accounts (as an example, if we wanted to stay within the regulatory framework then we would have to do away with any fixed pricing on our ADSL and charge users for any additional usage beyond their "international portion of cap") - the regulation, in the context of Telkom's interpretation thereof, is completely unreasonable and unworkable, and only serves to harm the consumer in the end.
Luckily, the current way of pricing/dealing with access is still available to us and other ISP's, and I'm pretty sure that until this gets sorted between SAIX and ICASA you're not going to be seeing much in the way of changes.
That said, there is still one huge problem with this whole configuration of Telkom, it solves only one SMALL problem of the regulation we're talking here ("local bandwidth shall not be subject to the cap") and that is, how do we as ISP's provide for the ability for us to switch a single username to shaped, unshaped or local only without requiring a username change (as in the past shaped, unshaped and local only is determined by the name of the DSL realm your account is on - the bit after the @ sign - and the 3 different types of access needed 3 different realm names). Telkom has now solved that, and is providing that to ISP's come November.
What it doesn't do is stop local access from using your initial 3 or 4 or 10GB's of international bandwidth, which, from how I understand the regulation SHOULD read, is what should be happening. That isn't and local access still eats away at your international portion of cap, after which, we as ISP's have a choice, do we cap the user (as normally happens now) or do we set the user to local only (and we get charged local rates per GB). We're currently opting to keep our current products using the former, and looking at how we can build additional products with the additional option(s) we've now been given.
If we wanted to stick to what everyone feels the spirit of the regulation should be (where you don't get charged for additional local usage, and local usage is "uncapped") we would have to factor a certain amount of local GB's into the cost of our fixed cost accounts, even if we only factor in an additional 27GB of local on to a 3GB account, it means that 3GB account which costs you currently R199 will have to end up costing you R500-odd, an increase of nearly a factor of 3 - clearly this is both unreasonable and unfeasable given the way the ADSL market works.
enough said