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ADSL Caps
ADSL South Africa (Broadband South Africa), 12 November
2007
It is no
secret that ADSL caps in South Africa are unacceptably low. Worrying though is
that ADSL caps in South Africa range from 1GB to 3GB while the average ADSL cap in other OECD countries that do
have a capping policy is 21 GB per month.
What’s an ADSL cap?
A "Cap" on an ADSL line is simply a limit to how much memory one
can download per month. It is usually measured in GB (gigabytes) and once depleted, (Hard Cap) your ADSL internet connection stops
working or (Soft Cap) you are switched to a throttled
service (slower connection) or have the option to buy additional bandwidth.
New research done by the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and
Development (OECD) has found:
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ADSL capping acceptable practice– ‘Explicit bit/data caps are imposed on broadband connections in 20 of the 30 OECD
countries. There we no bitcaps among surveyed firms in Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea,
the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and the United States’ (What size Cap is acceptable?, MyBroadband, 12 November 2007).
In other words, ADSL capping is still acceptable practice in
the majority of OECD countries although countries such as Finland, France, Germany and others have already done
away with ADSL caps.
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High ADSL caps and high top-up rates
- ‘The average bit cap size, with countries that do have a capping
policy, is 21 Gigabytes (GB) of traffic per month. In 29% of cases this is however a soft cap
where the ISP reduces download speeds to an average speed of 82 kbit/s after the monthly usage
limit is reached’ (What size Cap is acceptable?, MyBroadband, 12 November 2007).
Furthermore: ‘In the remaining 71% of offers, users who
reach their monthly bit cap pay an average of USD 0.03 per additional MB (USD 34 per additional GB) until the
end of the month’ (What size Cap is acceptable?, MyBroadband, 12 November 2007).
In other words, the average ADSL cap is 21 GB per month
internationally and in 29% of cases going over the limit users are switched to a throttled service (slower
service) and in 71% of the cases users have to pay on average about 20c per additional MB or R230 per
additional GB.
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