New uncapped ADSL fair use policy
Uncapped ADSL accounts have become very popular in the local ADSL market after MWEB launched their affordable uncapped accounts in March this year.
To date MWEB has signed up and ‘converted’ no less than 70,000 uncapped ADSL subscribers, clearly indicating the popularity of unlimited broadband accounts.
Pricing remains a critical component of any ADSL service in South Africa, but the Fair Use Policies for uncapped ADSL offerings have started dominating discussions over the last few months.
Fair Use Policies (aka Acceptable Use Policies) essentially describe what users can expect from their uncapped broadband service and what penalties will be applied if they fall outside of what an ISP sees as fair usage.
MWEB CEO Rudi Jansen has recently clarified their Acceptable Use Policy, making it clear that MWEB’s ‘uncapped means uncapped’ – as long as you play by the rules.
“The issue of our shaping policies has been raised a few times, and the question asked as to whether or not we throttle line speeds to curb downloads. I’d just like to clear this up for everyone. MWEB doesn’t throttle line speeds,” said Jansen.
“Our Uncapped ADSL plans are exactly that, Uncapped. And they’ll remain so! We are, however, constantly monitoring the performance of our network to give you guys a top quality service. From time to time we uncover a small number of users that aren’t using the service within our Acceptable Use Policy.”
New Internet Solutions/Axxess Uncapped ADSL accounts
Internet Solutions (IS) has recently informed its stakeholders that it is repackaging its Basic Uncapped and Express DSL services from the 1st of August 2010. These two services will be replaced by ‘a range of new services that are more relevant to the local market’.
IS said that in designing their new range of uncapped services they focused on sustainability and will be introducing a fair usage policy. “In short, the new products will offer a great service for light and moderate users and the introduction of a new 1024kbps service will help fill the gap in both pricing and throughput,” said IS.
The basics of their new uncapped ADSL Fair Use Policy have now come to light with Axxess’ uncapped ADSL services. The new IS uncapped ADSL ‘User Policy’ takes aim at the top users in preference to set usage values.
The basics of the new policy are as follows:
- 10 day Rolling Window – If you’re in Top 20% of IS users for this connection speed, you will be shaped
- User Policy applies 24/7, Weekends & Public Holidays
- For the 4096 Kbps Basic Lite Account, if you’re in Top 50% of IS users for this connection speed, you will be shaped
- For the 4096 Kbps BasicAccount, if you’re in Top 20% of IS users for this connection speed, you will be shaped
It is interesting to note that there are no rolling thresholds and no rate throttling, and that unlimited data usage is allowed. Two concurrent connections where the account speed is shared between the two connections (4Mbps = 2 x 2Mbps) are also allowed.
Shaping the top users in preference of speed throttling is a strategy which clearly takes aim at P2P file sharing users which can potentially burn through hundreds of gigabytes per month.
This strategy may encourage some high-end uncapped ADSL subscribers to start using Virtual Private Server and related services which are specifically designed to ‘un-shape’ torrent file downloads which may bypass the IS shaping policies.
Uncapped ADSL fair use policy << comments and views
Loading ...