Vodacom cracking down on BlackBerry “abusers”

A number of Vodacom subscribers using the operator’s BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS) have reported experiencing improved speeds in the last week or two.

The timing of the apparent speed improvement caused some users to wonder whether it was linked to the takedown of Megaupload, a popular file hosting site.

Users probably drew a parallel between BIS performance and file sharing services due to information revealed by Vodacom last year (2011) that a small proportion of BlackBerry users are consuming the lion’s share of the available BIS bandwidth.

However, Vodacom and MTN refuted any assumptions that there has been less traffic through their BIS links after Megaupload went offline.

Since early in February Vodacom have implemented mechanisms to deal with BlackBerry users downloading “extremely large amounts of data”. Vodacom CEO Pieter Uys previously said that some subscribers use over 300GB per month and are often school-going teenagers.

Vodacom emphasised that they did not make any changes to its BIS policy, but added that they have made good progress in cutting down usage outside the terms and conditions of the BlackBerry service.

“This has reduced instances of misuse slowing the service for other users,” Vodacom said.

It is understood that this clamp-down on terms of service violators is not an automated system that shapes or throttles users that go over a certain data usage threshold.

While usage is monitored, it is done so over a number of months and a human, not a computer, determines whether a particular subscriber’s usage patterns falls outside the BIS terms of service.

Such users then have their speeds throttled to minimise the negative impact they are having on the BIS network as a whole.

Uys previously reassured “normal” BlackBerry users (who do not download large media files) that Vodacom’s solution to this problem would not affect their services. This system seems to live up to that promise.

MTN was contacted for an update on how their plans to address this problem are going, but did not respond by the time of publication.

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