Last week, Safaricom announced they were doubling Home Fibre Speeds . The company decided to offer increased speeds to its home fibre customers, some packages had speeds doubled, without an increase in cost, and everyone was happy.
The company also introduced in its updated terms and conditions a Fair Usage Policy (FUP).
According to the FUP, Safaricom Home Fibre packages will now offer specific monthly data caps on each package. When these data caps are surpassed, your speeds will be throttled depending on your fiber package.
Understanding Fair Usage Policy
It’s important to note that Safaricom is not the only provider with FUP. Zuku and Faiba have a FUP in place and they use it to ensure that everyone has equal access to internet resources. It’s probably something most of us have been overlooking when using our home or even mobile internet.
This clause is a policy utilized internationally by ISPs to ensure that every subscriber uses their internet in moderation.
When a user uses a large amount of data, it means other users in the same network will be adversely affected. To prevent those few-mass data consumers from eating into the bandwidth of other users, the ISP will cap let’s say the abuser’s data speeds.
Some of the online activities that could violate Fair Usage Policy include streaming high-quality content for a long period of time, sending or receiving extremely large data files, online gaming, among other things. Basically, it’s anything that will make users go beyond their fair use limit.
Some users also resell the data leading to excessively high volumes from a single link. These commercial users slow down the internet for all other customers by hogging all the bandwidth since the Home network is not designed for such excessive usage. If Safaricom were to design their Home Network to support both home and commercial usage, the costs per customer would be higher leading to less affordable internet. To therefore ensure high speeds at an affordable price, a Fair Usage Policy is necessary to protect the majority of the customers who use less than 5% of what the commercial users use.
This policy may seem unreasonable, but the reasons behind these measures are well…..practical. The aim is to ensure that users have the best experience using the internet. These providers, in this case Safaricom or any other provider will monitor your consumption and if you go beyond your fair-use limit, they can […]