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Telkom lists suburbs for uncapped LTE services

Johannesburg - Telecoms company Telkom has kicked off its uncapped LTE promotion and listed the suburbs where the offering is expected to be made available.

Last week Thursday, Telkom announced an online sale from June 10 to July 10 in which it planned to sell 24 month contract uncapped LTE products at prices starting at R599 per month.

The company said the promotional packages will be “capped at 150 (customers) per base station to ensure a high quality customer experience with the service”.

This means that the offer will start at R599 for the first 50 customers, R699 for the second 50 and R799 for the final 50 available packages at each base station. The products also form part of Telkom’s SmartBroadband Uncapped Wireless range.

And kicking off the promotion on Wednesday, Telkom listed the suburbs where the promotion is available.

The offering is only available in Gauteng and more specifically in the following Johannesburg suburbs according to Telkom’s website: Mayfair, Paulshof, River Club, President Ridge, Northcliff, Highlands North, Northmead, Hyde Park, Bryanston, Northcliff, Morningside, Glenhazel, Protea Glen, Protea Glen West, Mulbarton, Florida Lake, Florida Uniflor, Noordheuwel, Crystal Park, Eastleigh, Sydenham, Selection Park, Linksfield Ridge, Randhart, Bedford Gardens, Benoni SP, Leachville, Sharon Park and Bonaero Park.

Telkom in turn is promising up to 90Mbps download speeds and up to 25Mbps upload speeds. Those who sign up for the offer, also get a wireless LTE router installed.

Attila Vitai, who is the managing director of Telkom Mobile and Consumer, told Fin24 last week that Telkom currently has about 1 300 LTE towers in South Africa and that the company plans to launch its uncapped LTE promotions in more areas in the country.

Fair usage policy

However, concerns have been raised about Telkom’s fair usage policy regarding the uncapped LTE deal.

In the policy, Telkom says it reserves the right to apply restrictions on an uncapped account if a customer’s behaviour is affecting the user experience of other customers on the network.

Telkom says it can also throttle these customer’s throughput speeds or shape their bandwidth and the company reserves the right to apply a cap of 50GB in instances where users use bandwidth intensive protocols or applications such as bittorrent traffic downloaded via peer to peer, application to application, application to server and news servers protocols.

Telkom also says that bandwidth intensive protocols and applications will be throttled across the network to 128 Kbps during peak network periods of between 6pm - 12am.

READ MORE: Uncapped LTE: Telkom defends fair usage policy

"In order to ensure that users experience that kind of speed, we want to ensure that there are no heavy users there that will ruin the experience for the others. So, what we're saying is that for all the applications and protocols, you'll be able to download your Apple TV, your Netflix, Box Office, video streaming, VPN (virtual proxy network) traffic, YouTube, music streaming, all email protocols, FTP (file transfer protocol), you name it, everything,” Vitai told Fin24.

"But bittorrent, we're saying now we know that there will be some people who want to use it for downloads that are borderline whether it's legal or illegal. But we're not going to take a moral stance, or a legal stance, in saying you shouldn't be downloading.

"It's not a moral thing for us that we don't want you to be downloading bittorrent.

"We don't want people to screw it up for other users. Therefore, saying we will cap it at 50GB, but actually it is a soft cap because we will allow people to use either bittorrent from midnight to 6pm up at full speed up until 50GB, but then we're saying after if you're a real heavy user and you get to 50GB, we'll allow you to use it but we'll throttle it back because that means you will have an impact. If you're that heavy a user, chances are you'll impact other users,” Vitai told Fin24.

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