Broadband caps: How much is enough?
Since the launch of ADSL in late 2002 monthly data usage limits – also known as caps – have become the norm with South African consumer broadband services.
Telkom’s 3 GB cap has been the de-facto standard since 2002 despite the fact that the Internet has changed significantly since then. Bandwidth intensive websites like YouTube emerged while file sharing services have become commonplace.
Neotel changed the mindset a bit with its uncapped and high-usage offerings, but the real change only arrived when MWEB launched their affordable uncapped ADSL services in March this year.
Despite these offerings the majority of local broadband consumers still have to contend with monthly usage limits of between 1 GB and 5 GB per month. This is mainly as a result of Telkom’s current product offerings and because most broadband users in South Africa are using mobile broadband services from MTN and Vodacom as primary connections.
Most knowledgeable Internet users know that a few GBs of data is simply not enough for extensive Internet use, raising the question as to how much is enough?
Average broadband data usage
Cisco released its Visual Networking Index (VNI) Usage report in October 2009, providing an overview of how much data is consumed by broadband users, and what this data is used for.
According to the Cisco study the average broadband connection generates 11.4 gigabytes of Internet traffic per month, or 375 megabytes per day, which includes 4.3 gigabytes of visual networking applications (video, social networking, and collaboration) traffic per month.
An interesting finding was that peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing is 38 percent of global broadband traffic, down from over 60 percent two years ago. While still growing in absolute terms, P2P is growing more slowly than visual networking and other advanced applications.
It may surprise some Internet users that nearly one-third of all file-sharing Internet traffic is non-P2P. Web-based file-sharing, newsgroups, and FTP account for 32 percent of all file sharing traffic.
High end users remain the bane of any uncapped service provider’s life, with the top 1 percent of broadband connections accounting for more than 20 percent of total Internet traffic. The top 10 percent of connections are responsible for over 60 percent of broadband Internet traffic, worldwide.
Uncapped, or at least much higher caps, the way to go
World Wide Worx MD Arthur Goldstuck says that uncapped is the way to go with ADSL. Goldstuck argues that there is no shortage of international bandwidth, and that Telkom can easily free up bandwidth to allow for much higher data usage on their ADSL packages.
In the case of very high usage where a small group of users start to influence the overall network performance, Goldstuck suggested interventions like traffic shaping rather than capping high end users.
Goldstuck added that if Telkom is not keen to launch uncapped services then increasing their current usage limits at least tenfold should be considered. This will equate to data caps of between 10 GB and 50 GB, well within international standards.
Broadband caps << how much data do you need per month?
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