Uncapped from Telkom

[Vector1]

Anybody got any idea if Telkom would ever change their attitude with regards to uncapped, shaped or unshaped accounts similar to what several ISP's already have on offer. And what is happening with the P2P issues between Telkom and certain ISP's?

B.T.W. It certainly is not as if Telkom does not have the technology to provide proper service at market related prices. Personally I feel that Telkom should ship up or ship out.

[Ron2K]

Moved to the correct section.

I'll post my views this evening, when I have sufficient time to do so.

[Stuart]

Last I saw, Telkom were very definitely not considering uncapped. The companies that have done it have shown that it's not really a very viable option in the present climate in South Africa. Every uncapped offering by every ISP to date has proven to be substandard. I think there is some way to go before we can seriously consider uncapped Internet a legitimate option in South Africa.

[DeathStrike]

Really Stuart? i am quite happy on my mweb uncapped? although i can only speak for the 384k line. i don't think its been bad at all.

interested to see what Ron has to say.

[Ron2K]

OK, time for me to weigh in here.

The big problem for an ISP at the moment is the cost of provisioning bandwidth to end users. International prices have come down, but local is still a problem - the biggest problem at present being IPC links (which is what ISPs with their own networks have to use to connect to Telkom's ADSL infrastructure). The figure that I've heard is that Telkom currently charges ISPs in the region of R2,000 per megabit - that means that it would cost them R8,000 to supply a single 4 Mbps uncapped customer with that amount of dedicated bandwidth. Businesses may be willing to pay that much, but not your typical home consumer. 4 Mbps home user uncapped accounts retail in the region of R500 these days, so you can get a rough estimate of how many users are sharing that IPC pipe - this typically means that some form of quality of service has to be implemented, and hence you get either the severe shaping that is typical amongst uncapped products, or you are limited to how much you're allowed to download.

Basically, the bottom line is this: in the current networking climate in South Africa, an ISP can either offer a lot of data at low quality, or less data at higher quality. It's simply not feasible for anyone to offer a lot of data at high quality at prices that home users are willing to pay, which I think really sucks, particularly as that's what most consumers really want. (Give me a rock-solid reliable 50GB-100GB package that I can afford, and you'll make my day.)

[Nuke]

Currently bandwidth is around R5500 vat ex per megabit 50/50 international/local split. The prices from Neotel/AfricaINX/BCS is all around the same if you pick it up from a POP like Teraco. It doesn't even include the connection to your own POP. If I remember correctly prices directly from SEACOM is around the same, but then you only get international access, no local.
Just to give you an idea of what "cheap" bandwidth via SEACOM costs.

[Stuart]

Really Stuart? i am quite happy on my mweb uncapped? although i can only speak for the 384k line. i don't think its been bad at all.

interested to see what Ron has to say.

I have a 4096 uncapped Mweb account at home and it is shaped to death most of the day. I don't game online anymore, but unless I am on in the early hours of the morning I rarely get to do even a simple thing like viewing YouTube videos without buffering issues. And if I try anything P2P full speed is a dream, except for perhaps 2-3 hours during the early hours of the morning.

Mweb's uncapped is certainly the best of the South African lot at the moment, but it's far from ideal.

Webafrica's Titan offering at the office is generally a more pleasurable experience, although even there hitting full 4 mbps is a bit of a rare treat.

[-Prometheus-]

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[Nuke]

We pull around 1.2TB a month through a Mweb business bonded line. They have not said anything about that at all. My biggest problem is that the Cisco 2811 bonding router is not fast enough to support even a constant 10Mbps traffic, the CPU goes to 100% and the router starts dropping packets if it stays at that speed.

[-Prometheus-]

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