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This is a very basic version of just why 24/7 full speed is a problem for ISP's
TLDR Version: You are slowing others down and costing ISP's more money than you pay.
ISP's buy capacity, your R500+- a month for 4mbit does not cover the cost of 4 dedicated megabits to you they have to work out how much they need due to peak demands and prioritize traffic, apply shaping if needed to give everyone the best experience they can as in some cases there is no extra capacity to buy.
If there are capacity problems people suffer, an example being Afrihost in Cape Town with the IPC there being 3gbit shaping has to be applied earlier than say Johannesburg (They have 8 Gbit there). Capacity is not infinite so an ISP can either not justify or not be able to buy more.
Extreme Example (With no shaping applied, imagine your household)
Imaging you have two people with 4mbit accounts, one only uses a account from 8pm to 8am and the other from 8am to 8pm, only 4mbit of capacity would be needed for them both to have full speed no matter what on anything. What happened if a third 4mbit person joined who used the line 24/7 now no-ones going to get their full speed no matter what.
Apply the above example with more complex rules on a larger scale, a 3gbit pipe unshaped would only cater to +-7500 4mbit users maxing their line 24/7 (if there were no traffic rules).
So here you are paying your R500 a month yet doing massive ammounts of downloading for your account size (eg 1mbit users get warned at lower gigs than 4mbit ones and 10mbit ones at higher than 4mbit ones). If you have no speed limits you are taking up what could be multiple accounts worth of usage, you are causing a problem.
You have become someone who is costing them more than you pay for, if there are a lot of people you are slowing down the experiance for other people and as a result degrading their service as well.
You are dead weight that needs to be leashed.
Various ISP's do this in different ways, Afrihost has a shaping system for if you are causing a problem, mweb has this rolling window, internet solutions has massive capacity but if they got saturated you could bet that AUP would be used against you.
You could say "Why dont they just tell us how much you can do before you get shaped ?" Well think about it, as soon as you know how much you do you know how much you can push the system, traffic will increase so that you dont waste those extra gigs come the end of the month.
Think people, download only what you actually want to and not for the sake of downloading.
This is a very basic version of just why 24/7 full speed is a problem for ISP's
TLDR Version: You are slowing others down and costing ISP's more money than you pay.
ISP's buy capacity, your R500+- a month for 4mbit does not cover the cost of 4 dedicated megabits to you they have to work out how much they need due to peak demands and prioritize traffic, apply shaping if needed to give everyone the best experience they can as in some cases there is no extra capacity to buy.
If there are capacity problems people suffer, an example being Afrihost in Cape Town with the IPC there being 3gbit shaping has to be applied earlier than say Johannesburg (They have 8 Gbit there). Capacity is not infinite so an ISP can either not justify or not be able to buy more.
Extreme Example (With no shaping applied, imagine your household)
Imaging you have two people with 4mbit accounts, one only uses a account from 8pm to 8am and the other from 8am to 8pm, only 4mbit of capacity would be needed for them both to have full speed no matter what on anything. What happened if a third 4mbit person joined who used the line 24/7 now no-ones going to get their full speed no matter what.
Apply the above example with more complex rules on a larger scale, a 3gbit pipe unshaped would only cater to +-7500 4mbit users maxing their line 24/7 (if there were no traffic rules).
So here you are paying your R500 a month yet doing massive ammounts of downloading for your account size (eg 1mbit users get warned at lower gigs than 4mbit ones and 10mbit ones at higher than 4mbit ones). If you have no speed limits you are taking up what could be multiple accounts worth of usage, you are causing a problem.
You have become someone who is costing them more than you pay for, if there are a lot of people you are slowing down the experiance for other people and as a result degrading their service as well.
You are dead weight that needs to be leashed.
Various ISP's do this in different ways, Afrihost has a shaping system for if you are causing a problem, mweb has this rolling window, internet solutions has massive capacity but if they got saturated you could bet that AUP would be used against you.
You could say "Why dont they just tell us how much you can do before you get shaped ?" Well think about it, as soon as you know how much you do you know how much you can push the system, traffic will increase so that you dont waste those extra gigs come the end of the month.
Think people, download only what you actually want to and not for the sake of downloading.
