With Telkom’s announcement that data caps on its TelkomInternet AllAccess products would be permanently increased at no additional charge, MTN launched themselves into the data fight by revealing that they won’t be throttling customers who exceed their “fair-use” limits.
The unthrottled access is limited to its “Uncapped Lite” and “Uncapped Pro” contracts in 2010, and customers who reach their monthly limit won’t be subjected to line speed restrictions from now until the end of January 2012.
Prior to the announcement, once Lite customers reached a volume of 3GB a month and Pro customers reached a 10GB data volume, the line speed was dropped to 128kbit/s.
Although, MTN hasn’t officially made the announcement yet, as a MTN spokesperson who wanted to remain anonymous, told Tech Central that MTN is “simply aligned the unlimited Internet promotion to this campaign”, referring to their annual Yello Summer campaign.
There also seems to be no plans to take the promotion beyond the January 2012 cut-off. “At this stage, MTN has no plans to make this a permanent offering. However, we will continue to monitor our customers’ feedback and evolving needs. Should there be a high demand for such unlimited Internet offering, MTN will again respond to the needs of our customers,” the spokesperson said.
According to Tech Central “MTN emphasises that the fair-use policy is required to ‘control users who tend to download large files continuously and thereby negatively impact the experience of other users’”.
Currently, Uncapped Lite now costs R299/month and Uncapped Pro is around R899/month.
Charlie Fripp – Consumer Tech editor
"now until the end of January 2011."
January 2011 has come and gone! Is this a typo?