What size Cap is acceptable?

People often ask what an acceptable monthly ADSL cap will be. We take a look at international benchmarks.
The excessively low monthly ADSL usage limits is a very contentious issue, especially after Telkom cancelled uncapped, free local bandwidth in November 2005.
Current ADSL subscribers generally have to be content with a monthly usage limit – or cap – of between 1 GB and 3 GB.
But how does this compare with international standards? New research from the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) helps shed some light on the matter.
International capping
According to the OECD, 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.
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.
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.
Local standards lacking
Local broadband providers generally have flagship products with monthly usage limits ranging from 1 GB to 3 GB per month. This is also the case for Telkom’s recently launched Do Broadband ADSL offerings.
Local monthly usage limits are therefore on average 10 times less than international capping standards.
It is however somewhat encouraging that the per-GB top-up rate for ADSL – which generally costs R 70-00 per GB – is far lower than the R 221-00 average found overseas.
The low local broadband caps have various undesirable results, including the fact that it impedes the South African IT and online market.
Many consumers place their trust in Neotel to introduce true broadband offerings with internationally comparable usage limits, but only time will tell as to whether the second national operator will measure up to these expectations.
Source: mybroadband.co.za