Telkom uncapped local ADSL bandwidth – did it miss its own deadline?

By: My Broadband

Telkom assured ICASA that it will have uncapped local bandwidth by 1 November 2007, but the company remains mum on this promise.

At the recent ICASA Complaints and Compliance Committee hearings in Sandton Telkom told the regulator that “Telkom has committed to ICASA to be in compliance with respect to the regulation ‘local bandwidth shall not be subject to the cap’ by 1 November 2007.”

It however remains uncertain as to whether Telkom has implemented any changes to its current hard capping procedures, and requests for information from Telkom remain unanswered.

Many experts have also questioned the company’s commitment to abide by these regulations.

One commentator said that “Telkom’s excuse [of needing over a year to implement the needed changes] is basically bull. It will take us a matter of minutes to implement such a system and even with extensive testing it is a matter of hours rather than months.”

Telkom plans to introduce a system where users are capped on international bandwidth once they reach their monthly usage limit, and thereafter they will be charged for any usage of ‘uncapped’ local bandwidth after this point.

The measurement of monthly usage before the cap will be done on both downloads and uploads of local and international traffic.