The launch of 4Mbps uncapped DSL services for under ZAR500 a month seemed too good to be true to Brett Haggard at the time. As it turns out, it was ...

So uncapped DSL Internet connectivity has arrived in South Africa and we should all rush out and get ourselves completely unlimited access for between ZAR200 and ZAR500 a month depending on our line speed? Er, no. The last time I checked, ‘uncapped’ means that there’s no threshold above which you’ll be punished for excessive use of your Internet connection. If this is also your definition of ‘uncapped’, you’ll be sorely disappointed with what’s on offer from the ISPs selling these services today. The devil’s in the details and in the case of these ‘uncapped’ Internet connections, the little red-skinned servants of satan are carefully hiding in the fine print. And ironically they’re wielding data caps instead of tridents. Let’s say you go for the highestend ‘uncapped’ DSL offering available at the moment – a 4Mbps link that costs about ZAR500 per month. With one of the ISPs offering this service, namely Afrihost, you’re likely to encounter a number of slowdowns in line speed as you consume more and more capacity, until you reach the point where your line becomes completely unusable. And because Afrihost is not cutting your service off, the claim is that you’re not being capped. The approach being used by most of the other ISPs doesn’t employ capping. Instead, they offer a 4Mbps link that does not perform at its rated level. And the reason of course is overcontention, ie the practice of loading way too many people on the same piece of infrastructure. Now, contention can be a good thing if it’s used correctly. The problem is that the line between contention and overcontention is a fine one. The basic argument for contention is that different users don’t all make use of their respective 4Mbps bandwidth allocation at exactly the same time. So, the argument goes, when many users are allowed to make use of the same bandwidth allocation, they will do so at different times, thus enabling them to share a single piece of backhaul infrastructure and therefore the cost. However, common sense dictates that it’s pointless allowing for so much contention to take place that the end-user experience dwindles to the point of an Internet connection being unusable. Unfortunately it seems as if common sense has flown out of the window. The ‘uncapped’ services being offered today are either soft-capped through line speed reductions as certain thresholds are exceeded (we’re looking at you, Afrihost), or too heavily contended. And in reality neither of these is a worthwhile outcome. Ironically, the only uncapped service that seems to be performing as advertised – and at face value offers what the words ‘uncapped DSL’ denote – is the service from M-Web: the company that started off the latest battle in the war for ISP market share with the launch of an affordable uncapped service a month ago. Personally, I think the majority of players in the market were premature in their launch of uncapped DSL services – their infrastructure was not ready for it and they were far too ambitious on pricing just to be seen to be competitive with M-Web’s offers Users have had to discover the hard way that the service levels on offer are not what they had expected from the products’ descriptions, and were buried deep inside the terms and conditions. ZAR500 for an uncapped 4Mbps link seemed too good to be true at the time and, in hindsight, it was. The point is, ISPs should have charged ZAR1,000 a month for these services instead of ZAR500 a month and delivered a worthwhile service level. And then let the economies of scale and natural progression of things drive the costs down to the ZAR500 per month mark – as slow or gradual a process as that would have been. Instead they have upset the market and delivered a set of empty promises. It’s a pity, really. The only thing we can hope for is a stabilisation of these services and for increased pressure to be placed on the mobile networks so that they fall in line with the fixed-line ISPs’ costings – or at least for them to pretend that they have the end-users’ interests at heart.