Telkom Softcap and Nightsurfer, how does it work?

Totempole

Totempole

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I've been looking at the Telkom softcap offerings. On paper they look quite good, but I'm not exactly clear on how it works.

So let's say you have the 10GB cap package on a 2Mb line. From what I've read, when you reach your cap, your internet is throttled to around 384K. There were rumours that P2P, Youtube and other streaming services would be totally blocked. Is this still the case?

My second question relates to the Nightsurfer hours. Does reaching your cap have any impact on the performance of your Nightsurfer downloads, or are they full speed regardless of whether you're capped or not?

Thanks in advance for the replies.
 
Totempole said:
I've been looking at the Telkom softcap offerings. On paper they look quite good, but I'm not exactly clear on how it works.

So let's say you have the 10GB cap package on a 2Mb line. From what I've read, when you reach your cap, your internet is throttled to around 384K. There were rumours that P2P, Youtube and other streaming services would be totally blocked. Is this still the case?

My second question relates to the Nightsurfer hours. Does reaching your cap have any impact on the performance of your Nightsurfer downloads, or are they full speed regardless of whether you're capped or not?

Thanks in advance for the replies.
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P2P , YouTube and Streaming will still work but severely throttled basically making is unusable.

If you reach you cap and in softcap mode the speed will be the same 384K in nightsurfer mode. The purpose of nighsurfer mode is more for scheduled downloads like your P2P and and data consumed in this times will not be counted towards your cap.
 
ElementZero said:
P2P , YouTube and Streaming will still work but severely throttled basically making is unusable.

If you reach you cap and in softcap mode the speed will be the same 384K in nightsurfer mode. The purpose of nighsurfer mode is more for scheduled downloads like your P2P and and data consumed in this times will not be counted towards your cap.
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That's a dealbreaker for me then. :(

Thanks for clearing that up for me though. :)
 
Will the speed be 384k no matter if you have a 1mb or a 40mb line?
 
It's quite silly that speeds stay throttled during nightsurfer period. Even soft-capped accounts should be unthrottled during that time if there is an abundance of bandwidth during those hours for them to offer it as 'free'.... a dealbreaker indeed.
 
fragtion said:
It's quite silly that speeds stay throttled during nightsurfer period. Even soft-capped accounts should be unthrottled during that time if there is an abundance of bandwidth during those hours for them to offer it as 'free'.... a dealbreaker indeed.
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Basically its there to keep people as much off the internet as possible between 7AM-midnight. Basically there just isn't enough bandwidth even for capped users. So they want to incentivise staying as far from your cap as possible.
 
I actually give Telkom kudos for the whole softcap thing. If people work cleverly, they can really use it to their advantage. My dad has been going nuts recently with downloads during the nightsurfer time after I showed him how to schedule stuff. He's not a mega downloader, but he's on the 10GB, 2Mbps package for R199pm. So far for this month, he's knocked around 37GB without even really touching his cap.
 
ambroseg1 said:
Basically its there to keep people as much off the internet as possible between 7AM-midnight. Basically there just isn't enough bandwidth even for capped users. So they want to incentivise staying as far from your cap as possible.
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I don't understand how your response ties in to the point of the discussion at all. The question was: Why would they limit speeds of softcapped users during nightsurfer period? -- this applies to users who A) Are already capped, and B) who are browsing between 12am-7am. So both of your points were completely irrelevant. Just saying :)
 
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