Telkom uncapped LTE subscribers recently complained when the company announced it would change the way it enforces its fair use policy (FUP).<\/p>\n
Initially, the company wasn\u2019t forthcoming about the exact details of the changes – making customers even more irate.<\/p>\n
However, Telkom eventually revealed it would\u00a0throttle subscribers in stages<\/strong><\/a>, based on their monthly usage.<\/p>\n Telkom is not the only company to offer uncapped wireless broadband services in South Africa.<\/p>\n FNB\u00a0is currently running a trial uncapped LTE service on iBurst\u2019s network<\/strong><\/a>, and Neotel has offered its NeoBroadband Wireless service<\/strong><\/a> for several years.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Telkom\u2019s uncapped LTE service is\u00a0not the first uncapped wireless broadband product to buckle under the weight of its popularity.<\/p>\n Sentech launched its MyWireless broadband service in 2004, offering an uncapped alternative to the prescribed 3GB caps Telkom had on DSL.<\/p>\n MyWireless enjoyed a strong uptake, but poor service levels dogged the broadband provider.<\/p>\n This resulted in consumer backlash that damaged the reputation of the company and product, something which Sentech never recovered from.<\/p>\n Sentech MyWireless was discontinued<\/a><\/strong> on 30 November 2009.<\/p>\n The reason uncapped wireless services will inevitably suffer from performance problems is simple: spectrum is limited, while demand for data constantly grows.<\/p>\n Even the fairly-large chunk of spectrum (60MHz) which Telkom used for its initial LTE and LTE-Advanced roll-out<\/strong><\/a> in the 2,300MHz band will only go so far.<\/p>\n In simple terms, as more people connect to a tower, the finite network capacity provided by the electromagnetic spectrum is spread thinner.<\/p>\n Eventually, the tower becomes congested and network performance suffers.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Putting up more towers is not\u00a0trivial. Besides the costs involved, it can take months to get the necessary permissions.<\/p>\n This is why offering uncapped broadband over a wireless access network is a bad idea.<\/p>\n When limited capacity meets near-infinite demand, all you\u2019ll end up with are unhappy clients who\u00a0feel let down\u00a0by their provider and unhappy providers who feel abused by their clients.<\/p>\n Truly uncapped mobile broadband would be great, but it will always fight a losing battle against physics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":179626,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_threads_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[20879,35,31196,34765,32644],"class_list":["post-183254","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-wireless","tag-fair-use-policy-fup","tag-headline","tag-sentech-mywireless","tag-uncapped-lte","tag-uncapped-wireless"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183254"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=183254"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183254\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":183448,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183254\/revisions\/183448"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/179626"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=183254"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=183254"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=183254"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}History repeats itself<\/h3>\n
The simple reason uncapped wireless is a bad idea<\/h3>\n
Now read: Telkom has changed its Uncapped LTE fair use policy \u2013 here are the new data limits<\/a><\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"