South Africa’s biggest ADSL bandwidth hogs

The latest data usage statistics from South African Internet Service Providers (ISPs) show that some uncapped ADSL subscribers consume well over 1TB per month.

ADSL bandwidth is a shared resource, and in an uncapped environment high-end users are typically subsidized by low-end users. This is the only way to offer an affordable uncapped product.

For example, Afrihost‘s “Bandwidth usage rankings” show that one user consumed 1.9TB per month using a 10Mbps uncapped ADSL account. This translates into an effective price of R0.42 per GB.

The cost to provide a GB of ADSL data is multiple times higher than R0.42, which means that Afrihost’s ADSL business model relies on many uncapped subscribers consuming only a few GBs per month.

The following table shows Afrihost’s top uncapped ADSL bandwidth users over a 31 day rolling period.

Afrihost is not the only ISP which has to deal with uncapped ADSL subscribers consuming large amounts of data.

Openweb CEO Keoma Wright revealed that their top uncapped ADSL users consistently consume more than 1TB of data per month. In March 2013, Openweb’s top user consumed 1.65TB of data.

Cybersmart CEO Laurie Fialkov previously said that they had four users who exceeded 2TB of data usage per month. The top user consumed just over 3TB of data (3,005GB).

Fialkov explained that these users typically ran their uncapped accounts on two ADSL lines – breaking the agreement with their ISP.

Cybersmart invested in new equipment to guarantee that an account is only used on one line, and that fair use policies are enforced.  The results on the ISP’s top data users show the difference.

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