Telkom’s uncapped LTE plan to cost R599: not without its drawbacks

Telkom will roll out the first phase of its SmartBroadband Uncapped high-speed wireless packages to select areas in Gauteng.

An online sale will take place on 10 June to offer uncapped 24-month contract packages to customers at prices starting at R599.

As part of the promotional offer, Telkom said customers will also receive an antenna and installation at no additional cost.

The promotional packages are capped to 150 users per base station to ensure a high-quality customer experience with the service.

The introductory 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 service includes uncapped data for all traffic types, and a “normal fair usage policy” applies.

Coverage map

The online sale will initially focus on selected base stations in Gauteng from 10 June to 10 July, and will be rolled out to additional locations in the following months.

The online sale portal will be on the Telkom website from 10 June, and includes a coverage map with the LTE areas that are eligible. On the coverage map, physical addresses can be entered to determine whether or not a customer is eligible.

Customers who participate in the online sale after the 150 spots have already been taken will be added to a waiting list. Existing Telkom customers in the select areas will have the opportunity to transition to the new packages depending on availability at each base station.

However, as part of the terms and conditions, a “normal fair usage policy” would apply to these accounts.

Telkom said the terms and conditions protect its clients and network infrastructure from the excessive usage of a few users.

It will impose the following restrictions on what it called “bandwidth-intensive protocols or applications”.

50GB threshold, with affected protocols throttled to 128kbps thereafter.
Throttling due to cap depletion will occur during peak network periods, from 6pm to 12am.
Subscribers may not provide network services from their account (for example, you may not use your account to operate as an FTP server).

These bandwidth-intensive protocols and applications were defined as BitTorrent, application to application traffic, application to server traffic, and news servers (NNTP).

It will also limit the number of uncapped users to 150 per base station to ensure the quality of service remains high.

The introductory 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.

This article originally appeared on MyBroadband as two separate pieces (here and here) and are republished with permission.