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I was browsing the MyBroadband forums this evening when I spotted this thread. Since the new Telkom tariffs came into effect at the beginning of November, it seems that ISPs reselling Telkom ADSL accounts have resorted to more frequent connection resets in order to ensure that subscribers don’t exceed their monthly traffic limits. Prior to 1 November, all ISPs reset connections every 24 hours (according to Telkom, in order to update RADIUS accounting, amongst other things).

From my understanding, this increase in reset frequence has been brought about by two things:

• Telkom now charges ISPs for actual ADSL traffic instead of for individual 3GiB accounts, as they did the past
• RADIUS traffic accounting is only updated at connection reset

In order to prevent situations where subscribers are able to download large amounts during the time between their penultimate and final connection resets before they reach their traffic limit, some ISPs are resorting to resetting connections every two hours. Yes, every two hours.

It seems as if the ADSL “broadband” market in South Africa is becoming more of a laughing stock by the month, primarily as a result of Telkom’s monopolistic practices.