Telkom on Thursday announced plans to offer uncapped LTE broadband to consumers in selected suburbs at prices starting at R599/month for early adopters. But there are a few strings attached.
The operator says the SmartBroadband Uncapped High Speed Wireless promotion is the first such LTE wireless plan in South Africa to offer unlimited access to the Internet for a fixed monthly fee. Users must, however, sign up for a 24-month contract. As part of the deal, they will receive an antenna and installation at their homes at no extra cost.
But consumers are already wondering what the catch is. The company says that “normal” fair-use policies (FUP) will apply. But what does that mean?
According to the legal terms and conditions attached to the uncapped LTE offering, Telkom “reserves the right to apply restrictions on an uncapped account if a customer’s behaviour is determined to be affecting the user experience of other customers on Telkom’s mobile broadband network”.
“Such restrictions include but are not limited to throttling a customer’s throughput speeds to an appropriate proportion of the actual port speed and/or shaping a customer’s bandwidth to limit the use of bandwidth intensive protocols and applications,” it says.
“Examples of customer behaviour which compromise Telkom’s network performance include, for example, causing network congestion, include running excessive concurrent Internet sessions or accessing excessive bandwidth intensive protocols such as peer-to-peer, application-to-application, application-to-server [and] news servers protocols.”
“In the event of such behaviours, Telkom reserves the right to terminate the account of a SmartBroadband Uncapped Wireless customer whose usage is continuously affecting Telkom’s network performance.”
Telkom says the SmartBroadband Uncapped Wireless service will offer uncapped data for all traffic types except bandwidth-intensive protocols or applications, which will be capped at 50GB.
The service will be offered at full speeds (with no time limit applied) for all traffic types except bandwidth-intensive protocols or applications that are at full speed between 12am and 6pm if within the 50GB cap.
“Once a subscriber reaches the 50GB cap, the bandwidth-intensive protocols or applications shall be throttled to 128kbit/s speed for the rest of the month. Full speeds shall resume at the beginning of the next calendar month.”
Bandwidth-intensive protocols include BitTorrent and Usenet services.
“Bandwidth-intensive protocols and applications shall also be throttled across the network to 128kbit/s during peak network periods of between 6pm and 12am to manage the network quality of experience and quality of service for all users.”
Telkom says that in order to make customers aware of when their behaviour is compromising its mobile broadband network performance, it will provide them with such information “as is practically available”.
“Once usage is indicated as being dangerously high, Telkom reserves the right to suspend the relevant customer’s usage within 24 hours of usage having reached such levels. Customers who are restricted by Telkom in the aforementioned manner in a calendar month will be returned to full service profile at the beginning of the next month.” — © 2015 NewsCentral Media
- Read also: Telkom debuts uncapped LTE broadband
- This article was updated to reflect the 50GB soft cap on “bandwidth-intensive protocols”
