Telkom’s Internet service provider intends enforcing its fair-use policy on its customers in what the operator claims is “in the spirit of enhancing the Internet experience of all its users”.
Until now, Telkom ISP — the name of its service provider business — has “exercised much leniency” in enforcing the policy, it says. “As a result, the usage of a few users has had a negative impact on the network and on the online experience of fellow users,” Telkom says in a statement.
“Delivering a high-quality broadband experience is becoming increasingly challenging as the trends towards bandwidth-intensive applications become more apparent in the everyday lives and businesses of our customers,” Arnold Van Huyssteen, a Telkom managing executive, says in the statement.
“The contention for available network capacity is also growing and our customers are becoming increasingly concerned about fairness and equitable service and this has prompted us to carefully rethink our bandwidth management policies to the benefit of our entire customer base.”
Telkom says it “understands the need to do its part in containing any negative impact on the broadband ecosystem as a whole”.
“We will be taking action when certain trends are spotted that may have resulted in a poor customer experience for the average user on our network.”
The company says capped bandwidth users (so-called soft-capped users, who experience a degraded service when they use up their monthly allocation) are prioritised on its network. They enjoy a higher priority than uncapped users.
It says it reserves the right to apply restrictions on an uncapped account if the usage trend is determined to be affecting the user experience of all the others on its network. Such restrictions may include throttling throughput speeds or shaping bandwidth to limit the use of bandwidth-intensive protocols and applications. — © 2014 NewsCentral Media
