Megaupload takedown improving SA BIS speeds?

After the United States government shut down file sharing site Megaupload, some BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS) users reported seeing dramatically improved speeds on their BlackBerry devices.

Users may be drawing parallels 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.

These users typically download movies and TV series from torrent sites, said Vodacom CEO Pieter Uys, adding that this practice was outside the terms and conditions of BIS.

Vodacom was asked whether they had recently increased the bandwidth available on BIS or if they had noticed less data consumption through BIS since Megaupload went offline and Filesonic stopped offering public downloads.

Nomsa Thusi, head of corporate communications at Vodacom, explained that the average data consumption rate on their network is increasing and that any increase in speeds was purely coincidental.

“The two websites that you have quoted [Megaupload and Filesonic] are independent from both Vodacom and RIM’s network infrastructure and have no direct relation to the performance speed on BIS,” Thusi said.

MTN responded with a similar statement when asked about traffic on its BIS.

“Judging from the last few days of traffic,  there is certainly no impact on our network, traffic levels are the same, with the same peaks,” said Devan Chetty, general manager of core & IP planning at MTN SA.

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