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.
Great, thanks for taking the time to explain your view to the MyBB members.
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).
Yes, thus,
you cannot put uncapped and the limt of 500MB together. You are playing mathematical magic tricks that are great for the kids, but what about us adults...the ones that have to do the real world calculations...
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.
Yes, a beautiful gesture of goodwill on your part. It still does not equate to "Uncapped"...No matter how many times you say it.
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.
This is where I go "Wow!" You mean people spend only 3-4hours a month in online games...? I use 500MB up in 3-4hours in Secondlife...when I throttle the speed to 50k/s, which is just playable then, at a real rate of about 39k/s on my 384k speed.
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.
You're wrong. No matter how many times you say it.
"Uncapped" cannot be put together with the "500MB", or whatever amount. There, I backed up my statement with a mathematical fact. Your definition is hokus pokus.
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).
If we must refer to real uncapped, that is, the uncapped term you are aware of, but are trying to obfuscate, as "fixed price uncapped service", then shall we refer to your product as "pay as you use uncapped service"? True, no?
Also, do not try the old telkom trick of telling us there is a scarcity of bandwidth in SA.
Firstly, now suddenly, with SEACOM here, telkom can, without even blushing, for their blatant greed and callousness, increase the SAT3 capacity tenfold. Please, do try bulls**t us.
Secondly, with all the cables coming, your statement becomes even more insulting.
Thirdly, your ultimate insult to us, is that we are a population of about 47 million, of which 10,5% or 4.59-million people only, are using the internet.
http://www.mediaclubsouthafrica.com...&id=101:south-africa-online&catid=36:media_bg
Thus, even with SA Broadband subscriptions showing a growth rate of 60%, of that small 10.5%,
do not compare our bandwidth availability with places like Europe, at 50.1% internet user penetration, or the USA, where the penetration is 73.9%. http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm
Even more insulting, when you realise that the USA, with a population of 305,529,237 million, for Jan. 1, 2009, therefore has 225,786,106,143 million internet users.
http://www.usnews.com/articles/opinion/2008/12/31/us-population-2009-305-million-and-counting.html
That's 5 times our entire population....Even if every single person in SA had 4Mbps uncapped, we could not saturate the cables that are here, over the next few years.
As for this future you speak of...
http://mybroadband.co.za/vb/showthread.php?t=188139
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.
Great.
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
Yes, thank you. We do see the obvious benefits for clients. I hope you don't mind us not believing that you should use the word "uncapped", the way you do.
"Pay as you use uncapped service" is being truthful.
Sincerely,
Wayne
)
