Consumers short-changed by IT terms

Debate is raging in the Internet service provider (ISP) community over exactly what the terms “capped” and “shaped” mean, forcing the industry association to come up with a proper code for its members.

Skyrove CEO Henk Kleinhans says consumers are being short-changed by ISPs who advertise that their services are unlimited, while they are not. He believes a time will come when regulatory bodies, such as the Independent Communications Authority of SA (ICASA) or the Department of Communications will be forced to step in – as British regulator OFCOM did in the UK – to sort out the issue.

Over the past five years, changes in the structure of the telecommunications sector have seen an increasing number of ISPs offer “unlimited” ADSL services. However, these come at a cost, not only in price, but also in that the “unlimited” amount only relates to local browsing, while most South African Internet users tend to access international sites.

Furthermore, the use of “shaping” is practiced by local ISPs on metered traffic to ensure that each packet of data complies with the traffic contract. This is also termed “throttling” as it imposes delays and so limits bandwidth use.

A third factor is contention ratio, which, according to Wikipedia, is the ratio of the potential maximum demand to the actual bandwidth. The higher the contention ratio, the greater the number of users that may be trying to use the actual bandwidth at any one time and, therefore, the lower the effective bandwidth offered, especially at peak times: “Unlike, say, service at a restaurant, it is much harder for a customer to differentiate between good and bad Internet connectivity or to even begin to see that an ISP is actively short-changing them,” Kleinhans says. He says that psychologically, the idea is to intimidate the consumer into not using their uncapped package the way it's supposed to be used in the first place.

“You're (the consumer) being threatened with a very severe punishment of super-slow Internet connectivity, which you know will be detrimental to your Internet experience,” Kleinhans says.

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