Webafrica
A friend of mine who is the MD of an ISP says one of his clients have got an uncapped webafrica account. Aparently they don't care much for email and browsing and have NAILED the line 24/7 with all different p2p progs possible and got........160GB!! A little calculation confirmed this, if 512 runs at full speed for 30 days you can technically get 160GB.
No this worries me as I also agree with what someone said above that right now yeah these lines are DAMN fast and pumping the data down and pretty soon everybody is going to jump on the webafrica bandwagon and do the same thing, what then?
I had a very honest conversation with a guy at webafrica when I first saw that they have uncapped. after I asked him if he realises what they are doing and that there will be certain, and quite a few, users who will rape this line and would they be able to carry this kind of payload. he said yes they did their homework and it's feasible to them. As long as p2p is shaped they can still provide the uncapped service. Personally, and I am a leecher, i prefer p2p to be shaped. Why not, it is unfair for other users to have their sessions be slow and crap just so that leechers can suck illegal, or legal, data. And their nothing more annoying to me when i want to do RDP or citrix admin from home and it being slow. The guy from webafrica said p2p is on the lowest priority, not shaped to a fixed limit, which is good, thats the way it should be everywhere at all ISP's(in SA) in my eyes, everyone will be more happy.
My only reassurance is that webafrica have been in this business for quite some time and have quite a reputable reputation for having good service. They are a full on hosting company which should have LOADS of bandwidth, from my new best friends UUNET, and i hope that more and more heavy users shouldn't affect the speeds so badly. Hey I am COMPLETELY happy with running kazaa at 128k for a whole month, thats 26GIGS! I don't think most peopel can watch, listen, perve and read more than that anyway.
I wouldn't touch ALLYOUCANEAT with a bargepole:
1. they get their bandwidth through telkom
2. They encourage heavy usage
3. People are saying there is a soft cap when you d/l too much for too long
4. They havn't been around long (i stand to be corrected)
5. They do not disclose their shaping mechanisms
All i want, and I hope this is what webafrica is going to provide me as after 7months of nagging telscum we finally getting ADSL installed, is that only p2p is shaped(lowest priority), games and VOIP(skype, msn, gnomemeeting, ect...), SSH, RDP, Citrix(and all other low bandwidth services that need low latency) is on highpriority and the rest on a medium priority. Do that and I think MOST people will be happy.
Oh and just wanna add, burn telkom burn! One day the consumers will have the tables turned and screw telkom AND have good service.
cheers