Uncapped ADSL – what does it mean?

haha... fortunately most of the public are clever enough to see through all the lies. I am OK with a flat rated uncapped offering that is throttled during business hours because you can still use it to the max after hours. But any "uncapped offering" where you are charged an ongoing fee for extended usage is a flat out lie. That much is just common sense.

The rule of thumb is... if there is any kind of cap or limit attached to the offering, then it is not uncapped.
 
Only in SA would people have to talk about true uncapped.
 
I think someone high up in the ranks of ICASA is getting payback cuts to just sit and do nothing about the regulations or they just to incompatant to know what to do and its screwing up the country and delaying progress to that of 1st world countries but then again SA and the rest of Africa will never get there and those reasons I will not name most ppl know y
 
Well there definitely is a terminology issue here, and yes it is a South Africanism, mostly because data and bandwidth (yes both) cost so much here.

Basically and by law, capping refers to the termination of service when a specific threshold is reached. The law defined this and made it unlawful for ISP's to do, expecially on local. This does not then mean that you can download as much as you want for free, simply that they cannot terminate your service.

These new cheap "uncapped" services therefore do relate to the "lawful" (should that be awful) definition, in that they do not terminate your service, they simply bill the cr*p out of you.

Other "uncapped" and "data unlimited" services, the more expensive ones where you don't pay for overusage (though if they feel you broke the EULA, they might) will still start to limit your usage after an allocated transfer rate. This is called a rolling throttle, which occurs every 10 days and aggregates your usage over the last 10 days to determine by how much / whether to throttle your service, usually to around 128Kbps (Even on a 4 Mbps line!)

There is no feasability for true uncapped, unbilled, unlimited, unthrottled, unshaped packages in this country, and even in the US now, ISP have begun introducing caps, albeit extremely high ones, just to crack down on those really sick bandwidth abusers (200 GB data a month!).
 
The terminology used with bandwidth is confusing as heck:

- Bandwidth =
1. The width of the transmission medium. e.g. A bandwidth of 348 KB/s = Correct.
2. A measure of how many bits you have used. e.g. 3 GB of bandwidth. = Correct.

You could say: Here, a product offering with 384 bandwidth and 3GB of bandwidth. :confused: Need more adjectives!

- UNCAPPED =
1. No maximum allowance of bandwidth consumption before you are cut off = Correct.
2. Pay per unit of bandwidth consumed = Correct.
3. Pay per unit of bandwidth consumed after a specific initial allocation = Correct.

You could say: Our brand new internet offering is uncapped at R9 per MB after the first 1GB. :confused: Need more adjectives!

:D
 
ICASA was once again asked for feedback about the ADSL regulations and what is meant by “Local bandwidth usage shall not be subject to the cap”, but the regulator did not provide any information by the time of publication.
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It's going to be a long long wait. Even longer than waiting for support ...
 
Looks like all we ever do is wait and wait and wait and in the meantime back at the ranch we getting screwed over so badly its scary
 
You can fool some of the people some of the time.

But you cant fool all of the people all of the time.
 
If u take it Telscum has had the monpoly for what 14-15 years now and I have a friend quiet high up in the ranks he says that a phone call in Mauritius
costs almost nothing where here in our own country we are paying through our back teeth for the same service and the list goes on and on also the reason y we havent seen any new Telcoms companies except for Neotel etc.. is that our last minister of Telecoms refused 35 to enter into the country at a personal level because she didnt want Telkom to lose its monopoly. Now tell me how on earth do us as consumers fight that we cant hence y we are so far behind everybody
 
What does ICASA actually do? Enjoy boozy lunches with Telkom fatcats and the like to ensure a prosperous future for "all"?

Our system of internet can be compared to something like "pay per second" TV. Ludicrous.
 
Pilgrim said:
How can a capped account be uncapped? FFS...
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Because the ISP's chose to use the definition of cap as terminate.

It's the same as contract cellphone accounts. You get in bundle usage, then you get out-of-bundle pay per second/minute. This is a non-capped service, but it does not mean it is free.
 
Hi,

I'm responding as the person responsible for the R39 uncapped advert. I've been in the ISP business - providing access - for 15 years and I participate in various global forums for the governance of the Internet infrastructure.

My dictionary defines a cap in this context as: "an upper limit imposed on spending or other activities e.g. a cap on legal immigration". This is my understanding of the term and as an ISP we believe that the term cap is a swearword. It creates grief for people who need access but have been cut off because they reach their cap. It also has been a way for the big ISPs to convert customers and obtain revenue for bandwidth which is NOT used by the customer (i.e. when we started offering this product - almost three years ago - the average usage on a 3GB account at one of the largest ISPs was 1.1GB, in this case the ISP collected moneys for 3GB and pocketed the profits made when the customer only used 1.1).

I admit that our offering is different because we advise our customers to buy the 'least' amount of bandwidth that they use in order to make sure they are not paying for what they don't use (e..g in December most people go away and use a fraction of what they have paid for). This almost always works out cheaper for the customer and because we're delivering metered bandwidth we can afford to deliver the highest quality of bandwidth. The economics does not allow for fixed price uncapped services to be of the best quality and we try to provide the highest quality connectivity.

One of the reasons we developed the 500MB unshaped uncapped product is for gamers (mostly WOW) and individual share traders that need low latency connections for this specific purpose. We also support these users to setup their routers (and clients) to be able to use both shaped and unshaped when they need to.

Rudolph, I respectfully disagree with your comment that post paid uncapped accounts are not uncapped. By definition they are, and any presupposition in the market that these are not uncapped is wrong. I also respectfully request that anyone that accused us of 'lying' please backup your statement, it is unjustified.

In future please refer to a "fixed price uncapped service" as a fixed price uncapped service. Caps are not good because it means people pay for bandwidth they don't use. In the South, metered bandwidth is essential if we want any access to high quality bandwidth. Metered bandwidth also puts South Africa (and Australia) in a good position for the future (in the North there will be more demand for metered bandwidth as quality does not continue to improve and as users have more demands for IPTV and VOIP).

We do also provide competitive fixed price uncapped services but these are for a different market segment. As another example think of the retired person (we support the South African Association of Retired People - SAARP) who a) cannot afford to pay for a 1GB account when they only use 200MB and b) don't know why the Internet is not working when they are cut off (and can't afford to sit waiting at the end of a support IVR). For them the R39 option is ideal. Similarly a user that uses 1.3GB will only pay R69 prepaid + R27 postpaid [300(MB) x 9c] = R86 as opposed to have to prepay for 2 or 3GB. For those users that don't want a fully uncapped service (in case their machines/connections are exploited) we also use a term called provisioning, where we will provision their account with what you may refer to as a security 'cap' - although they don't pay for that.

I hope that you can consider my comments and hopefully I have explained well enough for you all to see the benefits of a prepaid/postpaid uncapped service.

Sincerely,

Alan
 
Thanks for explaining Alan.

Rudolph, I respectfully disagree with your comment that post paid uncapped accounts are not uncapped. By definition they are, and any presupposition in the market that these are not uncapped is wrong.
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Well, if you run out of money (prepaid) or have to stop usage because your bill will be too high (postpaid) - then for all practical purposes you ARE capped, even if the service is advertised as uncapped. So there exactly lies the dilemma.
 
I think we will probably see a paradigm shift here, where we will see more packages like mobile phone packages. You have Pay-As-You-Go, TopUp and Post-Paid Contracts. All of these are useless without roll-over, as MraL said, you end up paying for something you don't use. There is fairly enough choices of these newer type of packages, and yes sometimes the wording can be deceptive, but use common sense and read the fine print.
Don't knock a product because you think everything should be handed to you for free. This will not work in a world run by monopolistic telecoms etc... I think that a R35/month post-paid contract has a business case, where you want to use your connection whenever, but not lose out if you go on holiday or get put on night shift for a month. Until the standard packages start offering roll-over, these sort of packages and pre-paid are the only way you get your full moneys worth without paying R2000/month.
 
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