Beware Uncapped ADSL

When I decided to switch over to using Showmax and now having canned them because it was mostly repeats and very old movies, I switched to Netflix. My downloads were truly like the Mweb ad, ‘mother buffer’, very slow, and extremely frustrating. YET, I was using an UNCAPPED line! I’d even migrated with Telkom from 2mbps to 4mbps. So why was I experiencing the dreaded buffering problem. Having phoned TELKOM and a few other ISP providers I wasn’t getting much help.

Eventually, I found out that MOST ISPs supplying UNCAPPED do so at a hidden price. In some cases the ISP will throttle your bandwidth from somewhere between 50GB and 70 GB of usage. What does this mean to the layman. What happens is when you get to a certain point of bandwidth usage, the ISP starts to throttle your usage, meaning your still have uncapped, but you are not given the full bandwidth capacity when you reach their throttle limit. This means buffering occurs, your data’s priority is reduced.  Like the data moves from the wider area of the bottle to the bottle neck. SO READ THE SMALL PRINT and find out at what point they start to do this. Rather check what your average usage is per month, and request the next Capped level up.

When I checked what my average account usage was a month, it was around 60GB to 70GB. So I downsized from Uncapped to 100GB, and of course I was offered 140GB, but this was split over day and night usage of 70GB/70GB. I’m not a night hawk, so I have no use for the night split, but that’s what ISPs do to try and cover unused bandwidth during the night.

So beware these special offers, it’s in the interests of the ISP to get you to take the most expensive package, where as when you take what you need, they want you to use the bandwidth so they don’t throttle the data, in the hopes you’ll need to add more prior to the end of the month.

So far I haven’t needed to upgrade, and have found that the Capped version has been far better.