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There’s one thing in common about all these fair usage policies. The fact that they want to ensure that everyone receives quality internet. They all approach it differently and since we don’t want you to have to do all the work of reading through them, we’ll go straight to the point. Here’s a definitive comparison between Safaricom, Zuku and JTL Faiba fair usage policy.
Fair Usage Policy Comparison
Safaricom Home Fibre
Simply put, upon reaching the Fair Usage limit for the package, the speeds will be slowed down significantly. That is, down to 1 Megabyte Per Second(Mbps) for Bronze plans and down to 3Mbps for Silver, Gold, and Diamond plans for the remainder of the validity period of the subscription.
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For example, if you cross the 500GB usage limit on your bronze package (8Mbps) on the 20th, for the remaining 10/11 days, you will be subjected to using only up to 1Mbps instead of the regular 8mbps.
Zuku Fibre
“The Fair Use Policy automatically identifies the extremely heavy users and manages their bandwidth in order to protect the services to all our customers.” Unlike Safaricom, Zuku has a lot more packages.
Customers can choose from the following internet bandwidth options – 2Mbps, 5Mbps, 10Mbps, 20 Mbps 30Mbps, 50 Mbps or 100Mbps, 100Mbps and 250 Mbps. Zuku works according to their ‘peak usage hours’. That is mainly from 11 am to 10 pm.
According to their policy, during peak usage hours the system reduces the speed for those customers who have already consumed large volumes (in Megabytes) during the respective day and month. Essentially, the more you use, the less speed priority you get.
JTL Faiba
Our Fair Usage Policy actually affects you if you’re one of the customers who make excessive or inappropriate use of the internet services provided by ISP. For example, video streaming or FTP or torrents to upload or download big files like movies.
Their policy is pretty similar to that of Zuku. Stating that, should you excessively download videos/big files, your speeds will be reduced. Similar to Zuku, it looks like neither of them has a cap, however, they do claim to automatically identify excessive users, which could be both a good thing and a bad thing since there’s no actual metric t measure against that the customers can refer to.
Telkom Home
This service provides either 13.3GB a day for the daily plan or 16.6GB a day for the Unlimited Plus plan. In terms of how they monitor the usage, they throttle down to 1Mbps, 512kbps and 256Kbps. As soon as you cross the 400GB mark, you are locked out.
Conclusion
While the issue of fair usage policy has just surfaced, a good number of internet service providers do implement such measures. We also found that “unlimited” data bundles also do have FUP terms, just to ensure that everyone has equal access to the same resources.
Whichever service provider you go for, keep in mind that the connection you have is shared amongst your neighbours and thus the service providers will do all they can to tame any rogue users.
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