Why uncapped wireless broadband is always a terrible idea
Telkom uncapped LTE subscribers recently complained when the company announced it would change the way it enforces its fair use policy (FUP).
Initially, the company wasn’t forthcoming about the exact details of the changes – making customers even more irate.
However, Telkom eventually revealed it would throttle subscribers in stages, based on their monthly usage.
Telkom is not the only company to offer uncapped wireless broadband services in South Africa.
FNB is currently running a trial uncapped LTE service on iBurst’s network, and Neotel has offered its NeoBroadband Wireless service for several years.
Neotel’s product has a key difference, though: it had a cost-linked, usage-based FUP from launch – with prices varying by maximum allowed speed like an uncapped ADSL service.
History repeats itself
Telkom’s uncapped LTE service is not the first uncapped wireless broadband product to buckle under the weight of its popularity.
Sentech launched its MyWireless broadband service in 2004, offering an uncapped alternative to the prescribed 3GB caps Telkom had on DSL.
MyWireless enjoyed a strong uptake, but poor service levels dogged the broadband provider.
This resulted in consumer backlash that damaged the reputation of the company and product, something which Sentech never recovered from.
Sentech MyWireless was discontinued on 30 November 2009.
The simple reason uncapped wireless is a bad idea
The reason uncapped wireless services will inevitably suffer from performance problems is simple: spectrum is limited, while demand for data constantly grows.
Even the fairly-large chunk of spectrum (60MHz) which Telkom used for its initial LTE and LTE-Advanced roll-out in the 2,300MHz band will only go so far.
In simple terms, as more people connect to a tower, the finite network capacity provided by the electromagnetic spectrum is spread thinner.
Eventually, the tower becomes congested and network performance suffers.
To restore the quality of service to the level it was before the tower became congested, a network provider would either need to get more spectrum, which is usually impossible, or build more towers.
Putting up more towers is not trivial. Besides the costs involved, it can take months to get the necessary permissions.
This is why offering uncapped broadband over a wireless access network is a bad idea.
When limited capacity meets near-infinite demand, all you’ll end up with are unhappy clients who feel let down by their provider and unhappy providers who feel abused by their clients.
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