noxibox said:
I don't think it really matters. They make no effort to enforce the cap, apparently preferring to use 'manipulation of statistics' as an excuse to charge for overuse when they've had weeks to enforce the cap. In my case they capped me a full two weeks after they claim my account went over. There's no excuse for that. When the account shut off I assumed I had gone a few hundred megabytes over, but no, they claim it is nearly 4 gigabytes over. On the other hand my local monitoring shows less than 3Gb for the entire month.
These comments are completely unfounded. We do enforce the cap and we warn you in advance when your cap will be exceeded. You guys have asked for long session timeouts, which we have provided, so most of you know that it is possible to exceed the amount that you have bought depending on your circuit speed and if you can guess when we check the statistics. As an example, if you download 2.999Gigs and reauthenticate 1 second before we do the capping, then you have the full session timeout to browse before you actually are stopped. So if the session timeout is 24 hours and you are on a 1Mb circuit you can download an additional
24hr x 60 min x 60 sec x 1Mbits / 8 bit = 10800Mbytes
= 10.5Gigs
There is even a worse case scenario which is not instructive to document here.
For this reason (shrintonin), you may be able to guess when the session timeout is in the first month, but never in any subsequent month as it changes on a per user basis and sometime on a per month basis depending on your browsing patterns. If you happen to overrun your Gigs as noxi appears to have done and you "top up" your account, the overrun will count against your topup, this is because we sell bandwidth in 3Gig increments and the price is based on 3Gigs not on 7 Gigs. Furthermore, if you do not wipe out your 3Gigs in one day (as some of you do), you will receive a warning giving you a summary of the statistics as well as an indication as to what day you are likely to run out.In addition you can get your statistics by going to
www.cybersmart.co.za and clicking on the adsl usage button, then logging in with you adsl username and password. We cap on these statistics not on any statistics that you may have got by logging onto to any other website. The cynics amoung us will ask why should this be different since the statistics are gathered from the exchange. The reason is we only start counting you traffic from your session starttime which is more beneficial to you. As an example, say you re-authenticate at 23.59 on the last day of the month and download flat out, you will have a couple megs in the old month and potentially a number of Gigs in the new month. Telkom for instance will apportion some of the traffic to the old month, some to the new month. We will apportion no traffic to the new month as we calculate the statistics from the session starttime which is 23.59 of the previous month. Please don't be clever and try to do this, because there is software that monitors this type of abuse and if we detect that your are doing this, the abusive gigs will count against further gigs that you buy.
Everything I have documented here is listed in the terms and conditions that you agree to when you signup. Some fancy lawyer was paid a whole lot of money to write these terms in conditions in plain english and not legalise so that they could be understood by us mere mortals.
There has been a number of fairly negative comments surrounding the fact that we do not disclose how we provide this service. I find it quite bizarre that this industry finds it necessary to demand the business plan of their suppliers. I don't see pick n pay divulging how they manage to sell Kauaui products cheaper than Kauaui outlets. Nonetheless for all those wondering I will give you a hint - it starts with an I.
One final thing is that noxi appears to be unhappy with the service he has received from us because he appears to have managed to download 7Gigs on his 3Gig account. Our greatest concern is that he feels he was cheated. As a token, we will give noxi 8Gigs back at no charge (ie double the amount that he feels that he was cheated). Since I have absolutely no idea who noxi is, he will unfortunately have to disclose himself to me - my number is 083 275 0616 and I am not using a nom de plume. Further to that if anyone can show there is an error in our billing or our capping we will give that person 24 months worth of 3Gig accounts for free. We have providing connectivity solutions that are a little different to everyone elses since 1998 and we will continue to do so. We acknowledge that we can only remain in business if we have the support of the internet community, so if anyone else on this forum feels they have been cheated or have any questions regarding this service or our company in general they are also most welcome to phone me on my cell (please within daylight hours).
Regards
Laurie
ISP's should deal with unhappy clients!
btw that email thing is teh awesome, cause it shows you your current avg usage per day, projected total and proj overrun etc.. most of which you calculate every now and then anyways if you like me watch the bandwidth with sasa ever morning.(Ok its a bit much but i'd hate to find a virus or something opening ports on my pc etc).
