The price of uncapped ADSL accounts has steadily been declining over the last few years, with some uncapped 384 Kbps offerings selling for as low as R 499 per month.
One of the most popular uncapped accounts is Axxess’ 384 Kbps Uncapped Express+ service retailing for R 999.00 per month. This account’s international bandwidth is supplied via the SAT3 cable, promising a more responsive service than some competing services which rely on satellite bandwidth.<\/p>\n
“The Uncapped Express service is best suited to users that require ‘unrestricted’ but affordable ADSL access. People who don’t want to be restrained by monthly downloading caps,” Axxess explains on its website.
This uncapped account can be used on any ADSL line, and while line speed limitations and ten day rolling thresholds (5 GB in the case of a 384 Kbps service) apply to this account, these restrictions are only applicable on weekdays from 8am to 8pm.
Many Uncapped Express+ subscribers are taking advantage of this offering to download large amounts of data during off-peak periods when full line speeds are available. During August one 384 Kbps subscriber used 873 GB – working out to R 1.14 per GB.
This is however not the only user who exceeded 800 GB’s over the last month. The top 5 users, four of whom are 384 Kbps subscribers, all used in excess of 800 GB during August while the next five biggest users all used between 760 GB and 800 GB.<\/p>\n
At a price of under R 2.00 per GB Internet Solutions, the wholesale supplier of the Uncapped Express service may well make a significant loss on accounts where subscribers typically use a few hundred Gigabytes per month.
These losses may be recuperated through the under utilization of bandwidth by low-end subscribers, but in South Africa the relatively high cost of uncapped accounts means that users will typically make the most of their unlimited monthly usage limit.
Neotel has also recently indicated that they were surprised by the high usage on their uncapped NeoConnect Prime offering. The telecoms provider said that they expected usage a bit over 15 GB per month, but what they found was that a monthly usage of around 100 GB was not uncommon.
This, Neotel said, was a clear indication of the need for high bandwidth, high usage accounts in the country.<\/p>\n