Uncapped Fibre Vs Capped Fibre: Best Deals

Jacques du Rand 2019-09-20


 

There is a big debate as to which type of fibre package is right for you and your household ?

Uncapped fibre or capped fibre, we dive into the differences and help you make up your mind and pick the best uncapped fibre deal for you and your pocket.

 

What Is The Difference.

Well it's exactly as you would think with uncapped fibre you can use as much as you like (almost), but there are important limitations most of the time and with some important restrictions. With capped packages you can get as low as 10GB deals and just like with cell phones top-up your fibre account as needed.

Quality Difference

Most of the savvy internet users will tell you, you usually get a better experience and quality product if you go for the capped package. That used to be more true in the past than it is today. International bandwidth has gotten a lot cheaper in the last few years and the ISPs have a lot more room for uncapped packages.

 

These fibre isps have to buy bandwidth in bulk from the big providers like Seacom and carefully balance it with their usage pattern and client base.

There are a few of them that doesn’t even have capped packages any more since the cost differences are so small.

 

Openserve ( Telkom )  Price Comparisons for uncapped fibre vs capped fibre 200G  20Mpbs - April 2019

https://www.fibretiger.co.za/network/openserve

ISP

20 Mbps Capped Fibre Price

20Mbps Uncapped Fibre Price

Fibre Tiger - Popularity Ranking

Afrihost

R847

R917

9

Axxess

R899

R959

5

Mweb

R829

R929

8

Webafrica

R819

R819

2

Cool Ideas

~

R999

1

Vox

~

R1099

4

 

*The Fibre Tiger Popularity ranking is derived from our user data over a two-month rolling period. We use the amount of interest shown per package and isp to rank the ISPs.

**Fibre Tiger is a “Fibre ISP Comparison Service”: We don’t directly sell any fibre packages we simply compare the best isps and their deals for you.

 

Throttle Vs Shaping

The fibre isps have two primary ways to control and restrict your bandwidth and the quality of the fibre service

With throttling, they will adjust the total amount of bandwidth flow for your account, usually if you are a big user, in the 100s of gigabytes, probably closer to terabytes these days. It's a catch all crude method of reducing and some say punishing  high bandwidth users.

Shaping a more precise tool and its based on the service or protocols used by you; torrenting, browsing, emailing. For example the ISP might see that you do a lot of torrenting and reduce the amount of bandwidth for that service, while your browsing and other services are unaffected. It's a slightly better way to control the usage.

 

Who Throttles and Shapes Me ?

This can be done by the fibre isp (Afrihost, Axxess, Vox etc) or by the fibre network (Vumatel, Openserve). The better ISPs like WebAfrica have a policy based per product and fibre network, for example they only have a Fair Usage Policy with their Openserve products - as do most ISPs with Openserve packages, For networks like Vumatel they don’t have any fair usage policy.

 

Just Get Uncapped.

For most users, it's makes sense just to get uncapped and don’t worry about it further, unless you are running a video piracy ring or watch netflix in 4k 24/7 you really have nothing to worry about.

The throttling and shaping has gotten a lot less over the years as more and more international bandwidth becomes available via more international internet cables like WACS and SEACOM.

How Much Data Does NetFlix Or Youtube Streaming Use

Your average movies being streamed in HD will usage about 2-3GB, that's still a very small amount of data per movie. That works out to about 66 movies a month for a 200gb cap, still a good amount below most ISPs shaping and throttling policies.



Bandwidth

Streaming Hours

10GB

10 hours

15GB

15 hours

50GB

50 hours

100GB

10 Hours



Fair Usage Policies

The ISPs will usually have a F.U.P (Fair Usage Policy) in place to describe their throttling and shaping practices.

We have a link to most of the ISPs and their fair usage policies on our  ISP Contact Page