The 30GB accounts that some providers are currently offering are completely irresponsible says Rob Gilmour, RSAWeb Director.

Higher cap accounts are provided using Telkom RADIUS authentication process, once users exceed their 3GB cap, the ISP just returns a bit of data saying that they haven”t exceeded the cap. They can do this because all traffic accounting info is stored on the ISP’’s server and not on telkom’’s side.

These ISP’’s offering these huge caps say to Telkom that they are just using local bandwidth which is uncapped at the moment. This allows some ISP’’s to circumvent Telkom’’s capping policies.

Telkom is using this loophole to gain market share and take customers away from other service providers that use the IPConnect service to provide ADSL accounts. This is entirely anticompetitive. Telkom are encouraging this because they are gaining market share at the moment from other wholesale ISP’’s, and in October/November they are going to ”apparently” introduce a different method of billing to prevent this ”abuse”.

Providing this service to the market is irresponsible as the pricing model will change drastically in the near future and many of the people utilising the accounts are not aware of that fact.

The cost that telkom has proposed is between R50 and R55 per GB for resellers. This would make the current R299 30GB accounts cost about R1500, clearly unviable at this point in time.

In the near future, 30GB accounts will either not exist or be 5 to 10 times more expensive than they currently are.