I don't agree with you there. I believe that Telkom's intentions were to roll out a decent ADSL, and that they have factored in the possible migration from leased line and ISDN. The cap was a soft cap to start with, and had things been different, I believe it would have stayed that way. The fundamental aspect of a variable IP would have made the distinction between ADSL and other services. The capping, albeit soft at the time may have contributed to making that disctinction as well.
Many telco's use some form of volume capping in their offering, the actual size of that cap is what's being the issue here. I was told by both Steven White and M_web, that this will change in the future where a tiered volume cap will be offered and priced accordingly. I understand that this may take some time to implement as the complexity to manage individual capping is more than what is currently applied.
However, as we all know, marketing plan looks brilliant on paper and turns out quite different when implemented. I'm not trying to make any excuses here for Telkom, because they are flatly denying that they have screwed up and instead of addressing the problems, they are comming up with 'reasons' why it's so crap and putting certain restrictions in place without due notification.
Following are the reasons:
1) Bandwidth is not guaranteed
This one covers just about any problem we may have and from a legal perspective, we can't do anything about it.
2) 3GB Volume capping
This has been there since inception and again, legally, we have no case
3) International bandwidth is very expensive.
This is used in the same sentence as 1). We should ask them to explain how they derive at this point. How much does it cost? If i look at out premiums compared to other Telco's, we are paying about 4 times as much. Is that not sufficient premium to cover the additional expense of international comms?
4) The server is congested
On this point we could argue that Telkom should be responsible for ensuring that this condition does not occur. Even though they can use 1) to try and get out of it, I still think that any ISP has the responsibility of not overselling their capacity.
5) You have been capped
We all know the result of being capped. Yet, do we know what this condition actually mean? Has Telkom ever explained this to anyone's satisfaction? M-Web has said that the cap will degrade your service to just under 64KBits/second. Bah, that's the normal service.
My belief is that the volume cap is not the major issue, but rather the port capping/deprioritising, congestion, overselling, crappy modems and overall bad service. You already have a solution to your volume cap, get another account. But does it help? NO, because we still sitting with the fundamental problems of the network not being up to it, and Telkom's emergency ruling of applying port capping to get themselves out of this mess.
The reason why I stated up front that Telkom is not doing this deliberately and there are no conspiracy theories, is because they stuffed up big time and it's evident in the way they responded that they did not anticipate these issues up front. That is why they are introducing and changing these restictions ad-hoc without due notification.
History:
Soft volume cap when they launched, not enforced
Volume cap based on international traffic only
Volume cap based on out OR in traffic
Latest - Volume cap on the aggregate of both in and out
Somewhere in between these actions they just threw in port capping/deprioritising.
These are symptoms of a dam springing a leak and Telkom are just patching the holes.
It's called <b>crisis management</b>
What Telkom should have done, and I think the writing was on the wall in early February this year, was to <b>STOP</b>.
<b>NO MORE subscribers until we've solved the network congestion problem without having to apply port prioritisation. That is the point we should be driving at, not capping. You have accepted this service knowing that there was a 3GB cap. It's a non-event, it's not negotiable.</b>
]
]