Back in December, NTC along with local telcos proposed to cap the bandwidth on internet broadband to improve their service in terms of speed and uptime. It was met with a lot of objections from consumers and this prompted NTC to hold a public forum in January that resulted to the scrapping of the idea.
However, we just learned that Globe recently implemented a 1GB daily bandwidth cap on their broadband services as part of their fair-use policy. This fair-use policy is not new to mobile broadband subscribers especially prepaid ones who uses unlimited deals. In fact there’s already an 800MB daily bandwidth cap in their Unlisurf promo, but that’s fairly understandable since mobile internet is commonly used for light and personal consumption.This 1GB cap is for all their broadband services to eliminate abusive subscribers who uses their network bandwidth to download pirated content such as softwares and videos. The problem here is that those who use the internet to download legal stuff such as distros and legally paid softwares/games, view YouTube HD content or those from a large household will surely be affected.
Globe says that about 5% of their subscribers uses 80% of the network’s bandwidth and the 95% of the remaining users are left with only 20% of their capacity.
“Globe implemented a policy that promotes a more responsible way of using the Internet that will ensure fair and optimum usage of its broadband services across all subscribers,” the company said.
The usage cap, it said, would affect only users who download data in excess of 1 gigabyte a day, or the equivalent of about 250 MP3 songs.
1 GB daily is just not enough. For personal use maybe but once you hit two or three concurrent users, that 1 GB will easily be consumed. This would greatly affect gamers who legally download content online (e.g. Steam users) or those who wish to download huge iPad games from the App Store. Or how about those freelance designers that deals with high-res content and constantly upload them to the cloud for storage or submission.
There will be a lot of unhappy Globe subscribers. I’m thinking that Globe broadband internet will only be the home of casual internet users or for single-use only.
How do you think Globe could fix this? Increase the cap limit? Bucket pricing? Remove the cap altogether? Do share your ideas.
This article originally appeared at - pinoytechblog
