Uncapped ADSL: How much data may you use?
Over the last few days a slew of affordable uncapped ADSL offerings entered the South African ADSL market.
MWEB was first to surprise the market last week with its uncapped ADSL services starting from R219 per month, but this announcement was quickly followed by uncapped offerings from both Vox Telecom/@lantic and Afrihost at lower rates than the initial MWEB announcement.
These uncapped offerings, typically priced between R200 and R600 per month depending on speed, can mean per-GB pricing of well below R1/GB. This pricing in itself is completely unsustainable, but an uncapped business model typically relies on low-end subscribers subsidizing high-end users.
Many ISPs have Acceptable Usage Policies – aka Fair Use Policies – to protect their business model and ensure that all users on their network receive an acceptable level of service. According to one research report 1% of broadband customers use 30% or more of the available bandwidth during peak hours – something which ISPs want to avoid through Fair Use Policies.
These fair use policies differ significantly from country to country and ISP to ISP.
International standards
There are varying ways broadband service providers protect their networks and structure their ‘fair use’ policies.
Telecom New Zealand’s uncapped offering does not have a ‘soft cap’ usage limit, but they ‘manage’ all the traffic on the network to optimise the experience for everyone on the plan. “When the network is busy (generally inside the hours of 9am and 2am) you may notice reduced speeds, in particular you are likely to see reduced speeds in relation to file sharing traffic and online gaming,” the company says.
BT in the UK also throttles the speed of ‘heavy users’ on their broadband plans. “BT continuously monitors network performance and reduces the speed available to very heavy users,” the company’s fair use policy states. “Customers who are classified as very heavy users will experience significantly reduced speed at peak times for a period of 30 days, or for as long as very heavy use continues.”
India’s Airtel recently faced a consumer backlash after it introduced its Fair Usage Policy which saw subscribers’ services being throttled if they exceeded 25GB of usage in a ‘certain period’.
Comcast in the US on the other hand implemented a policy to cap monthly broadband usage at 250 GB per month in late 2008, something that did not go down well with some consumers.
Australia’s BigPond steers clear of throttling high-end users by only offering capped accounts. The highest account size is 200 GB and retails for around R1200.
MWEB Uncapped ADSL
MWEB CEO Rudi Jansen explains that they are planning to keep their service completely uncapped and unshaped as far as possible. Jansen made it clear that there will be no port prioritization, no shaping, no throttling and no capping on the service for the most part, and that shaping may only kick in during very busy periods to ensure good service levels for the user base as a whole.
Jansen further explains that they have no desire to set an unacceptable usage limit after which users will be reprimanded. Abuse will be handled on a case-by-case basis, and it will basically be users which are not using the service as a residential access medium.
Jansen explains that it will not be fair to use an uncapped residential ADSL service to host a large Internet Café or Torrent Server (hence business type services), and that they have specifically launched affordable uncapped ADSL business services which can be used as business solutions.
Strict Fair Usage Limits
Other ISPs have a stricter ‘Acceptable Use Policy’ – aka ‘Fair Use Policy’.
Afrihost says in their terms and conditions that they “reserve the right to terminate any account whose usage affects our other clients internet experience negatively. We reserve the right to investigate and possibly terminate any account that moves 100s of GBs per month”
SAINET also have set ‘fair user’ standards where abuse of the network is based on the drawing of monthly usage reports by SAINET. Excessive usage on the SAINET ADSL network is 62GB on a 384 Kbps account, 75GB on a 512 Kbps account and 100GB on a 4096 Kbps account.
Vox Telecom has also indicated that they will have a Fair Use Policy to protect the majority of their users against network degradation, but the exact details of this policy are not yet available.
Uncapped ADSL Fair Use Policies << How much is too much?
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