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What is the fair use policy?

3 May 2008 By Avinash Meetoo 193 Comments

Since the rebranding, Orange in Mauritius has quietly imposed on us its fair use policy which is described as follows on the website of Mauritius Telecom:

[The Fair Use Policy] is designed to make sure your broadband service is as fast as possible and reliable whenever you are connected.

Some of our broadband customers use file sharing software and download large files like music and videos. This uses up lots of network capacity leaving less available for others. This means that the speed of your broadband service is then affected.

Am I likely to be affected by the Fair Use Policy?

If you don’t regularly use file sharing software or download large files from the internet it’s unlikely you’ll ever be affected by this policy.

What will happen if my use is very high?

If you only occasionally have very high usage, we’re unlikely to be concerned. If your usage continues to be very high, we’ll advise you if your usage is excessive. Ultimately, if your usage still remains excessive, we may have reduce the transmission speed of the service whilst we monitor your usage.

In general, this seems like a good thing. Those who continuously download too much will first be contacted by the MT personnel and if, consequently, they don’t reduce their bandwidth requirements then they’ll be penalized. This seems like the most sensible thing to do given the geographical situation of Mauritius and the limited number of Internet links we can have access to.

There are two aspects that somewhat disturb me though:

  • The Fair Use Policy has been retrofitted in our existing contracts. Is this legal? Or should have we been contacted by Mauritius Telecom to sign a new contract?
  • The Fair Use Policy system is not transparent. What happens if the son (or daughter) of one of the big-bosses of Mauritius Telecom (or a Minister) uses too much bandwidth? Will the MT technicians contact him or her? Will they have the courage to limit his/her bandwidth? I have some doubts. For the system to work (i.e. so that people do not complain), it must be 100% transparent (i.e. everyone should know what all other Internet subscribers have used as bandwidth) but this looks a lot like a privacy violation to me…

Opinion?

[Thanks to Ajay Ramjatan for initiating this whole thought process…]

Filed Under: Technology, Web

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. fluxy says

    3 May 2008 at 09:27

    “we may have reduce the transmission speed of the service” and “whilst we monitor your usage”

    are these even legal?? i pay for broadband of a particular speed and why on earth should i not get what i pay for? this is THEFT! and why should they “monitor my usage” and my privacy be baffled??

    somebody really needs to complain to the ICTA or sue orange or people need to change ISP in mass; but then, who will bell the cat?

  2. carrotmadman6 says

    3 May 2008 at 12:11

    Thanks for posting about the FUP. :)

    Yes, i seriously doubt whether it is legal to impose a new policy on users without their agreement. My last MT bill (with an Orange logo) didn’t contain any information at all about a new FUP. So it seems to be definitely illegal.

    & secondly there’s the total lack of transparency… :|
    No one knew about the FUP & there’s no info about what are the limits the FUP will implement.
    & there’s a big misconception that the FUP will affect only “big” downloaders. That’s wrong! Now imagine Orange putting a 1GB cap on your 128k or 512k connection?!?! Even minimum (forget ‘normal’) usage will exceed the FUP!!
    & don’t forget MT are known for having capped My.T at ridiculously low limits!

    & yes, there’s also this question of privacy. By monitoring our connection, MT is intruding in our private lives! Who says they are not storing all our visited sites??
    & there’s also a question of abuse – unless you monitor your connection, they can falsely trap you for exceeding limits! :(

    & btw there’s been uproar about the FUP both on my blog & Geekscribes. :)

  3. Eddy Young says

    3 May 2008 at 13:31

    “Fair usage policy” applies to services beyond Internet. For example, at an “all you can eat” buffet in the restaurant, if you are seen as abusing, you may be refused service in the future. But, at the restaurant, how much people can eat is dictated by the size of their stomach. The eye may be willing, but the stomach not so much :-) If you start slipping food in your purse, then the fair usage policy will hit you.

    Now, for the Internet, things are a bit different. The huge hard-disks available nowadays allow virtually unlimited storage, meaning that *everyone* can afford to download *endlessly* (not taking into account your electricity consumption.) For an ISP, a more practical solution is to limit bandwidth on the fly to bring in line those who are abusing the service.

    The bottom line is, fair usage policy is a necessary evil to provide all customers with an optimal* service. Remember, not only your fellow Internet users are affected by your bandwidth usage; you are, too, by their high usage. Without fair usage policy, your service would be much worse.

    Now, if you *need* guaranteed QoS, go buy a leased line.

    * Optimal may not seem so in the case of Orange Mauritius, but I believe the circumstances dictate what “optimal” means.

    @Avinash: (1) Every single contract that I have seen includes a “contract subject to change” clause. (2) Being the big boss (or the son or daughter of) has its perks. It’s life.

    I know I play the devil’s advocate, but I am just being realistic.

    Eddy.

  4. Ketwaroo D. Yaasir says

    3 May 2008 at 16:25

    [The Fair Use Policy] is designed to make sure your broadband service is as fast as possible and reliable whenever you are connected.

    I beg your scrawny little rotten stinking pardon? broadband?? service??? fast????? reliable?????????? connected??????????!?@??!@?$&*$#^!?

    those are terms not usually used in the context of a racket methinks.

    it’s already fucked up so this is their way of saying “it’s not our fault, it your fault” pas nou sa, zot sa.

    @Young

    basically what why are saying is that they reserve the right to *punish* you if you simply use your internet connection for an extended period.

    we’re talking about an *always on* connection here. not even something that’s reliable or even fast. its already very limited. and there is no quality to any service. And I’m not aiming at being sarcatic here.

    If it’s supposed to be limited to 32kbps then fine, 32kbps it is. but don’t just cut that down because of some obtuse view on equality.

    I mean this is stated as being broadband internet. ADSL for the Holy Spaghetti’s sake. It’s supposed to be fast all the time and allow you to download big files day and night if you want to.

    Those effin’ idiots just can’t cope with that concept and instead of investing in making more connections to the outside to increase the bandwidth available for everyone they are just interested in leeching a small market to death just to fill their coffers and wear silly ties when going to work in Port Louis (loaf about in air-conditioned offices really and what kind of idiots wear ties on a tropical island anyway?).

    can’t we just pretend this is a “developed and enlightened” country and mount a class action lawsuit against MT? for any number of already stated offences. including being a monopolistic bitch, which would be a capital offence if anyone had the common sense to make it one. there’s probably something under some trades description act of some sort we could attack them on.

    and what about that report thingy you were writing avinash? what happened to that?

  5. Avram says

    3 May 2008 at 16:57

    Orange is nothing more than a once-booming now debt-ridden business bent on squeezing the revenues from the guaranteed broadband demand of our local population and subsidizing its plans to expand their operations in Africa and the poorer parts of eastern Europe.

    This is not all. Naively imposing such downloading restrictions is definitely against the purpose of enlightening this locked-up country of ours at a time when Web 2.0 is in full swing! If broadband (by definition, internet plans should be of the order of Mbps and not Kbps)is still not available in our country in 2008, then how do we expect Orange to upgrade its communications infrastructure in the years to come? I really fear for all Orange subscribers.

  6. avinash says

    3 May 2008 at 18:18

    To Yaasir:

    The survey we did 6 months ago basically showed that we were getting only a fraction (< 50%) of what we were paying for AT THAT TIME. Since then, I've personally noticed that I am practically getting close to 100% of that I pay now (around 28 kilobytes/s for a 256 kbit/s line). So the survey seems to be irrelevant now (at least for me). I'll monitor the Fair Use situation though.

  7. vicks says

    3 May 2008 at 21:32

    FUP goes against customer rights. Before the rebranding there was a package by telecom plus for adsl 512k at around 1360 + vat and it was suppose to be unlimited..

    then how can they impose a limiT without even lowering the price of the service??

    personaly am using the Emtel HSDPA modem for the time being. my package limits me at 2Gb per month. i basically don’t use any p2p software or download any movies. YET 2GB is not enough.

    For me FUP means less time spent on facebook browsing though profiles, reduce quality of pics before uploading on flickr, less sharing on youtube, disable emoticon on msn, no multiplayer games..

    anyway i think Orange doesn’t want to disclose the limit after which the FUP will be applied

    coz its gonna be dynamic :) as the amount of users are increased and since its not in the near future that they are going to have more links ( besides SAFE) the limit of FUP will keep decreasing.. (10gb.. then 8gb to who knows maybe 1GB lol)

    anyway i’ve gone through many discussion related to the topic and the conclusion i make is that whatever orange decides to implement, we mauritians will abide. y? coz its the “only” company in Mauritius providing this service( believe it or not its still a ‘monopol’ in our cyberisland)

    i believe these things need to be cleared

    1. what is the limit after which we’ll be affected by FUP

    2.(i)what happens if we exceed the limit? we are warned?

    (ii)what happens if we disregard the warning ?

    (iii)if you are to decrease our bandwidth, by how much?

    3.when will the prices go down?

    anyway hoping to see some positive reactions from EMTEL and MTML

  8. Anon says

    3 May 2008 at 22:13

    FUP, in my opinion, is unfair to heavy users. I pay for a higher bandwidth because I tend to download more. I just want my downloads to be faster. The “casual” user often has a slower connection than me, ie. pays less. What then? This person (who pays less than me) gets to have “better service” due to “my service” being reduced. You call that fairness, that cut-and-adjust policy?

    What’s 10GB nowadays? Not everybody with high download rates pirate. Ok, we all pirate somewhere. I have to agree that I download tons of episodes online, particularly anime. Unlicensed anime mostly, which isn’t available elsewhere in Mauritius. At 200MB+ a file, I exceed my assumed limit of 1 GB in 5 episodes. No YouTube, no online radio, no browsing, no gaming. No nothing.

    I’ve been looking around. FUP is applied in other countries too. The limit? The minimum I saw was 20GB. The highest was 500GB for a 8Mbps connection. Per month plz!

    Give a read to Tiscali’s FUP, which I found fairest. It cuts your bandwidth only during peak hours, and restores it after, on a per-day basis. That’s all. No long-lasting effects at least.

    Anyways, let’s wait and see other developments. Maybe we could have 1Mbps at a cheaper price in the coming decade?

    Ps. Great article btw.

  9. n!135h says

    3 May 2008 at 23:06

    Well there is one thing which always says, read your contract when in doubt ;)

    17 variation
    “17.1 MT reserves the right to amend the T&C herein contained at any given time and/or from time to time and the subscriber shall be bound by….Notice of the amendment may be given by MT to the subscriber as at clause 9”

    clause 9 is that official news will be in myt website. Once nice thing i find about this is how to make the user think he has the upper hand.
    Notice of the amendment may be given by MT to the subscriber as at clause 9

    Honestly, when i was browsing quickly in there, i thought i saw the clause that protected us, consumers and i guess the intention might be so and now when posting this, im realizing that may is no obligation, and basically its as Eddy said.

    The one whom i think have been the most deceived are the 512kbps unlimited adsl users as at that time, it was no FUP or anything equivalent (if i recall correctly) and now this…It would have been fair for MT and/or Orange to at least give them the unlimited till the end of the contract (this is statement is of course based on the fact that i have no idea what are the dealings with the current 512 unlimited users and i can only assume that they have fallen in the FUP, by judging to our own MyT contract)

    In a case as such, the only power we have is the organizations as ICP…. Well since i havent seen anyone complain yet of the FUP, i think best is to actually know WHAT it is before we could think of what to do (hopefully, this would be just a watchdog that they can use when there are some real bandwidth problem)

  10. n!135h says

    3 May 2008 at 23:15

    p.s. i think i might have no expressed myself as i wanted in the intial post
    clause 9 is that official news will be in myt website. Once nice thing i find about this is how to make the user think he has the upper hand.
    Notice of the amendment may be given by MT to the subscriber as at clause 9

    Honestly, when i was browsing quickly in there, i thought i saw the clause that protected us, consumers and i guess the intention might be so and now when posting this, im realizing that may is no obligation, and basically its as Eddy said.

    what i meant was when you read it, you think that this protects you as they have to post their amendments on that website, but the “may” kindof protect them of that obligation and yet if you are not that attentive, reading this phrase in a hurry could lead you to believe it does protect you.

    p.s. now i remembered why i got to my contract,its because i had the feeling of déja vue and now i see what i failed to notice.

  11. Vishal says

    4 May 2008 at 00:06

    wats the use having an unlimited connection if u got a 1GB cap??

    Basically ur internet access fee comes down to paying for 1GB worth of data from the web per month.

    thats totally bullshit!

    there could be other ways to implement FUP, say like u can only get stream in off peak hours, like 0000hr to 0600hrs…thats wud b fair enuf since they’re aint many ppl surfing at this time..this was just one idea, lots of other fings cud b done as well…

    seems in mtius, the general motto is 1 step 4wd, and 2 steps bkwds….

    long live our cyberisland!

  12. Eddy Young says

    4 May 2008 at 02:17

    And, this is what I have to say about FUP.

    Eddy.

  13. avinash says

    4 May 2008 at 09:17

    I agree with Eddy that the Fair Use Policy is a good compromise because it allows the majority of us to use the Internet at a decent speed… We must not forget that our island is insufficiently connected to the Internet (SAFE or not…) because of the distance and cost involved.

    What I would like though is 100% transparency… like publishing statistics and even the identities of those who abuse so that people don’t complain too much. Up to now, the Fair Use Policy “enforcement unit” is opaque. No one knows how they operate, on whom they operate and what are their powers. This is a bad thing.

  14. Ajay R Ramjatan says

    4 May 2008 at 13:51

    Its bait and switch.

    Advertise UNLIMITED service and when people have subscribed to the service, restrict the service while billing the same price for the advertised UNLIMITED service.

    What does “excessive usage” means. Is it 30 GB/month, 50 GB/month? How are subscribers able to know?

    In other words, don’t advertise for UNLIMITED service when you can’t provide it. The Mauritius Telecom Group has not been born yesterday. I am sure that being one of the most profitable companies in Mauritius, its not bring run by idiots.

    People who are not total idiots do research before venturing in schemes like this. They knew what UNLIMITED means and decided to offer it. Now they realise they can’t provide it or don’t want to and decide to change the terms of service by an unclear FUP.

  15. Eddy Young says

    4 May 2008 at 14:53

    @Avinash: Of course, I’m right. I’m all for fairness ;-)

    Seriously though, FUP is a good thing. My cousin kept complaining about his downloads being slow most of the time. I knew that there was traffic shaping in place and that it could be “played”. I advised him to have intermissions of a couple of hours in between downloads. Since he’s done that, he’s always had full download speed, 1GB cap or not.

    Most of the people commenting here do not realise that the more they milk the bandwidth, the longer the throttling applies to their connection. I don’t know the exact set-up of the FUP policy, but I would imagine a *fair* worst case scenario as this: if you download intensively for three hours, you’ll be capped for that duration. But, in reality, it would be much more relaxed than this especially during off-peak periods.

    Many do not understand the limits of the technologies holding up the Internet together and that FUP is necessary. Maybe when we have the successor for TCP/IP (it’s already deployed at CERN) we’ll be able to do without traffic shaping.

    Eddy.

  16. Ketwaroo D. Yaasir says

    4 May 2008 at 15:05

    haha, I pissed off Mr. Young it seems. well, people can get offended at whatever they want to.

    funny that you of all people would be reusing the word “abuse”, avinash.

    even the identities of those who abuse so that people don’t complain too much.

    o’rly? Think about that. It’ll end up being you without you even knowing it. you’re getting all witchhunt like mentality. seriously. be careful.

    Take a family of about 7 people with 3 PC and a laptop(possibly two). something the government would applaud as high IT penetration, no doubt. they’re just using their internet at what to each of them seems a normal rate. (and please, eddy give the leased line thing a rest will you?)

    As mentionned above by Anon(wtf? is this 4chan?) there are much more dynamic ways of implementing a FUP. Taking bandwidth from those who are using it to give to those who aren’t going to be using it at that time is not a very bright idea.

    If the connection lags on peak hours, that’s fine. I may not have been fully awake in the networks class but I understand that perfectly. But if at 3 am, I’m getting 4 kbps and my rpm packages can’t find hosts to download from, I’ll be throwing sharp rocks in a certain direction.

    The problem with their “cyberisland” is that they are more interested in saving that bandwidth for businesses in their cybertowers. The civilian users are simply on the tiny end on the limb. instead of being in the business of making profit they should be in the business of telecommunications

    what is the bandwidth available to mauritius through SAFE anyway? did MT fork out pocket change when investing in SAFE that now they’re getting only crumbs? I read the whole thing can go up to 130Gbps. Say as fairly small 10Gbps for about a current maximum of about 500,000 subscribers (taking some wastage into account) that’s still something fairly solid per subscriber since not all of them will be using their connection at the same time.

    my point really is that this FUP is a sort of acknowledgement that they can’t cope with the demand. But not want to do anything to increase the available resource. And even they are doing something to increase external connectivity, they should be advertising that instead of throwing tons of sipek off mountains.

    some just told me as I was typing “Even if it’s not particularly effective it’s still better than being particularly ineffective, non?”. I’d like that, except that he has 20MBPS unlimited line and doesn’t know the meaning of “connection was reset”. so non.

  17. Ketwaroo D. Yaasir says

    4 May 2008 at 18:55

    Ah shit, I should probably explain this part a bit more:

    funny that you of all people would be reusing the word “abuse”, avinash.

    even the identities of those who abuse so that people don’t complain too much.

    o’rly? Think about that. It’ll end up being you without you even knowing it. you’re getting all witchhunt like mentality. seriously. be careful.

    I meant to develop that a bit more so you don’t get (too) mad but I got carried away by other trains of thought.

    I meant that you, avinash, know that there isn’t anything as such to “abuse”. As fas as I can tell from your past outrages against the crappy internet connection. If it were something that people could abuse I’d be the first to agree to some sort of equal opportunity policy. But the current anaemic dribble isn’t worth fighting over except when they are threatening to reduce it even further.

    And I really don’t think it will benefit a majority. If peak hours implies during the day, then they are about as effective as the CWA, which cuts water during the day and lets it go to such a pressure during the night that one of my taps broke.

    I’ve just noticed that my connection during the whole of today was fairly stable, around 15kbps, and at sundown things are starting to really slow down. And I can say from experience that it is usually bad through most of the night.

    Are the the majority of internet users in mauritius nocturnals or is this proof that they are still being asinine and very hypocritical.

  18. vicks says

    4 May 2008 at 20:59

    FUP blessing or not only future can tell :)
    btw did anyone try to go beyond the limit? any feedback from orange yet?

    i just tried a new service by orange “E-transfer”, well it works but they did apply a fee on the transaction Rs 8, something that i guess they forgot to mention on their site

    also the range permitted for the service as mentioned on their site is between Rs20 to Rs1000, but seems like it doesn’t work with Rs20 but works with Rs30( i presume the lower limit is Rs 28)

  19. avinash says

    4 May 2008 at 22:57

    To Yaasir:

    I thought a lot before writing “abuse” but I stand by my word. I know (and I’m sure you know too) people who download films everyday. I don’t care about it being legal or not. That’s another thing.

    What bothers me though is that those compulsive downloaders do not generally watch all the films they download.

    The honest ones burn the film on a DVD and stack it on their 500-600 DVDs they have already burnt (and mostly never watched).

    The others make hundred of copies that they sell for Rs. 50 on every streets of this country.

    In both cases, they are abusing.

    “Someone” told me that 5% of ADSL subscribers in Mauritius use more that 90% of the available bandwidth. This is very bad for most of us who are not among those 5%.

    So I am for the FUP. Except that I want it to be 100% transparent instead of being 100% opaque as it is now.

    But I also agree with Ajay that there is something fishy somewhere. The FUP has been retrofitted into our existing contracts. Despite Eddy’s claims, I am not too sure about the legality of this. I may be wrong though as I know practically nothing about law.

  20. Eddy Young says

    5 May 2008 at 02:27

    Avinash,

    Customer information is private property and protected by the Data Protection Act. I don’t think it is either legal or practical to expose the data pertaining to thousands of customers. The best the ISP can do is to publicise the implementation of the FUP and to be accountable to the ICTA.

    Eddy.

  21. Ketwaroo D. Yaasir says

    5 May 2008 at 06:04

    If the 5% using 90% is true then there really is a bigger issue; how could that even be allowed to happen in the first place? How did they collect those statistics? What, and this is the big one, does the 100% amount to in concrete numbers?

    those can’t possibly be individual users. Unless the 100% is ridiculously small, they would have to have insanely fast connections. … which is not impossible, when you start thinking that given the high price of the 512kbps and the 1024kbps lines very few people can actually afford them. 5% or less. and they would very likely be using their high speed like it’s a 24/7 orgy of downloads.

    except that you can’t accuse them of abusing. from their end of the stick, they paid for the service and they are simply using it within the limits of what it was advertised as. They most likely don’t know about SAFE and it’s limited bandwidth. They are just consuming what MT is offering them.

    But still, there are some sectors that gobble up more bytes per second than most individuals put together, that I know. And from some of the post made in the “let’s loathe MT” facebook group you created, we can deduce that some regions are getting greater connectivity than others. That may be related to proximity to certain of those bandwidth guzzling businesses.

    I won’t be naming names, but quite a few people working in the cyber tower bring external harddrives to their offices on which they download dozens of movies/games/anything in a single day. That is abuse. They learnt doing that kind of thing in the labs of UoM and are simply repeating it in a work environment. Their Education.

    The above 2 items should be subject to a FUP much more that end users I think.

    Myself, I admit that I download 1-2 big files a week, which include films too. (and for note, they are mostly old films I never got to see in whole when were aired on the MBC)

    It’s not a matter of restraint, it’s just that it can’t go any faster.

    I usually ponder a lot while at my PC and in the meanwhile a lot of idle time is lost. So I always have something downloading, albeit slowly, just so that idle time is not lost (and so that little connection icon in the lower right stays happily lit instead of blinking pathetically at irregular intervals).

    And sometimes when I have to turn off my PC, I notice that the download speed isn’t that bad and it could put in a solid contribution while I sleep. so I just leave the PC on to download quietly(I have a very quiet fan setup).

    result: my PC stay on sometimes 2-3 days at a stretch just from downloading things.

    Even then, given the amount of new data I have on my hard drive at the end of the month, I’m not going over 4-5 Gb per month. And as I said above, it’s not a matter of restraint.

    as Ajay R Ramjatan wrote, how do you know what constitutes excessive usage?

    Is the length of time I stay connected and downloading counted as excessive? It definitely can’t be the speed. I can’t see any argument for the quantity. But from the FUP it definitely seems like I will be negatively affected.

    And I will insist, you don’t pay for “broadband” internet just to check your emails every 5 minutes. The downloading of files is a definite application. There’s even mention of downloading songs all over the myt FAQ

    It’s interesting to note that the news of the FUP was sneakily introduced on the myt FAQ but no news for “unlimited” users.

    if they intend to take from myt to give to “unlimited” users, they definitely are asking for a punch in the face.

    On the legality of it all. It’s legal to the word. The contract says there can be changes. these are changes.

    but legal is not synonymous to fair or just or even plain common sense.

    monopoly is no excuse for mediocrity either.

    and I think those Rs.50 DVDs are mostly recopied off imported pirated copies. not necessarily procuded locally from downloads.

    everybody will be quick to point the finger at everybody else when things go wrong. I don’t think the end users are in the wrong because they don’t have all the facts. I’m just point my finger at MT for overselling to begin with. And possibly for not doing enough to increase the QoS.

  22. avinash says

    5 May 2008 at 11:12

    Interesting comment Yaasir.

    There is one thing which is absolutely central to our discussion:

    When one pays for a 256kbit/s ADSL connection, is that person entitled to 24×7 downloads at 256kbit/s?

    Ideally yes.

    But in practice all ISPs all over the world base themselves on general statistical laws to buy less bandwidth than would strictly be required to provide their services at decent prices.

    In fact, as Eddy pointed out, for an indecent price, you can get yourself a leased-line and happily download everything you like all day long.

    The baseline should be the price of the leased-line. People pay (at least) Rs. 10,000 per month for such a line. Common sense would say that we should be using our ADSL lines (which are around Rs. 1000 say) about 10 times less for the system (trick?) to work.

    If all of us use our ADSL lines all the time, then there is no way MT can give us all 256kbit/s as they simply have not bought this kind of capacity in the first place.

  23. avinash says

    5 May 2008 at 11:14

    And this is true for every single ADSL provider on the whole planet :-)

  24. Anon says

    5 May 2008 at 14:34

    I’m a noob here, when I see all the ethical/technical debates going on. But I’ve got a simple question.

    My connection is unlimited, right? It’s also 24/7 on, right?

    So, if I leave my PC on, downloading stuff, it means I’m using the service I’m being provided with, and paying for.

    That is, I’m downloading at my advertised speed, and since my connection is 24/7, I can use it 24/7 as I want, right?

    So, how can they tell me I’m abusing? What do they consider abusing? They gave me an always-on connection, and a fast one at that. So, I should refrain from using it fully??

    Anyways, the above was just a scenario. If I did that, my electricity bill would break my roof as soon as I take it out of the envelope. But still, some people do it. Those “compulsive downloaders” as Avinash calls them. But can we really blame them? They are just using what they paid for, and what they are being offered. It’s the problem of MT if they can’t guarantee equal service for all.

  25. avinash says

    5 May 2008 at 15:07

    In fact, I believe that there is a lack of information from MT to us on this issue. You wrote:

    “I’m using the service I’m being provided with, and paying for.”

    but I don’t think that this service is 24×7 downloads at maximum speed. Don’t forget that bandwidth is never guaranteed on the Internet (TCP/IP is a “best-effort” protocol) and therefore MT has never sold 256kbit/s (or whatever) to us. Instead, they have told us that they’ll make their best-effort to give us 256kbit/s.

    Technically speaking, I guess they can give us all 256kbit/s at all time but we’ll have to pay in excess of Rs. 10,000 per month for that. This is simply the cost of bandwidth. Until then, we’ll have to comply with FUPs like all other ADSL users throughout the planet. What I would like though is 100% transparency on bandwidth usage in Mauritius.

    (PS: Read my post. I understand the technical and economic reason behind the FUP. FUPs are used all other the world (including the US and UK). My only problem is its legality and impartiality in Mauritius)

  26. avinash says

    5 May 2008 at 15:11

    Now that I think of it, there is a more interesting question that we can ask ourselves:

    Has MT bought enough bandwidth for us all to have an acceptable experience of the Internet at the same time?

    Acceptable is terribly subjective. Maybe network experts (using some kind of very advanced Poisson theorem or, ahem, black magic) can tell us how we can verify this?

  27. Ketwaroo D. Yaasir says

    5 May 2008 at 18:15

    hence ISPs are in the business of being loathed, not providing internet service.

    I stumbled upon this while poking around (ignore the excessive ads). Seems we all reach roughly the same conclusions going on what we separately know or can guess. So we could all be right. And I wrote a few(un)edifying things on Eddy Young’s blog too.

    the thing is, when you look at the map representing the submarine fibreobtic layout of the world, the Indian Ocean has only ……………. one(1) cable…

    the indian ocean is not much wider that the atlantic, is it? I am restating the very very obvious when I say that this is the root of the problem.

    Now before anyone jumps in to defend MT/ICTA/government, you all have to realise (again) that is is their job to predict that kind of demand. I mean they commission multimillion fact finding comities to learn in months what the Man On The Street could have told them in 5 minutes, so they really should know. If only to justify the expense.

    telecommunication is an issue on the same scale as food, water, energy and transport.

    I don’t think MT bought enough bandwidth for all of us. And isn’t doing all that it can, and I insist, it can do more to get more.

    I think 85% of maximum speed is a nice figure for “acceptable”, ne? Just have to spin some voodoo and paint your telephone pole in freshly decapitated chicken blood to make it happen.

    now this is going to sound odd… but I’m getting around 27 kbs at the time of this post.

    If I were to just a little bit paranoid, I’d be thinking “they” are trying to trap me into “abusing” the bandwidth.

  28. selven says

    5 May 2008 at 21:33

    If you don’t regularly use file sharing software or download large files from the internet it’s unlikely you’ll ever be affected by this policy.

    What will happen if my use is very high?

    If you only occasionally have very high usage,

    There are huge ambiguities in that, what does high means here, this is not a figure, hence tomorrow their definition of high can be changed?

    As far as whether they have the right to change the rule of the game anytime? Yes i think they do, because right in small lines in the contract it is written “Mauritius telecom reserves the right to change this term of use at any time..” (or something like that).

    This “high usage” will be a weapon that will be used to “defend” themselves whenever they wish to decrease your bandwidth to redirect that to something more lucrative.

    If only i had enough money :p i could have bought Telecom and made a video club out of myt!

    fouff.. those guys are bastards who just doesn’t have any respect for their customers, that’s cheap.

    +$3|v3n

  29. selven says

    5 May 2008 at 21:34

    Btw, this new theme sux compared to the old one!

  30. Anon says

    5 May 2008 at 22:13

    Lol @ Selven. Video club out of myT. :P

    Anybody heard anything about the EASSy cable, and about a rumor as to UCL coming and implementing FTTH at an affordable price in Mauritius?

  31. carrotmadman6 says

    5 May 2008 at 22:47

    @Anon

    EASSy seems to be stuck in limbo… last i heard was that they have started the marine survey in March… so most probably, Eassy would be here by late 09 or 2010. :)

    As for UCL, they’ve just disappeared!
    & instead MT is installing FTTH in Quatre-Bornes… (can anyone plz confirm this?) I think MT are doing it on a test scale… :P

  32. anon says

    6 May 2008 at 11:10

    zot ine blok rapidshare :(

  33. avinash says

    6 May 2008 at 12:23

    Rapidshare has multiple IP addresses:

    195.122.131.16
    195.122.131.17
    195.122.131.18
    195.122.131.19
    195.122.131.20
    195.122.131.21
    195.122.131.22
    195.122.131.2
    195.122.131.3
    195.122.131.4
    195.122.131.5
    195.122.131.6
    195.122.131.7
    195.122.131.8
    195.122.131.9
    195.122.131.10
    195.122.131.11
    195.122.131.12
    195.122.131.13
    195.122.131.14
    195.122.131.15

    Are all of them not working? I don’t think that MT is deliberately blocking Rapidshare. Looks more like a failure there… I may be wrong though.

  34. Eddy Young says

    6 May 2008 at 12:45

    ‘traceroute’ or ‘tracert’ will tell you if the IPs are blocked.

    Eddy.

  35. lolocse says

    6 May 2008 at 13:35

    Le ping passe sur les IP RS mais http access non.I think that this is a few hours maintenance on their authentication servers rather that MT “blacklisting” RS for subscribers kuz their are certainly issues like premium account users who are at stake so MT will think twice before doing such things.

  36. carrotmadman6 says

    6 May 2008 at 14:06

    Yes, MT is deliberately blocking Rapidshare. No doubt about that.

    Rapidshare.com is not working.

    But the download servers haven’t been blocked… (I hope MT doesn’t notice this & blocks all the above IPs… ) :@

    I’m making a petition about that, hope some action will be taken. Enough is enough!

  37. Ketwaroo D. Yaasir says

    6 May 2008 at 14:38

    speaking of blocking, I’ve been trying to block the youtube IP ranges, 208.65.153.0 to 208.65.153.255, on the Orange livebox firewall. How would you go about doing that?

  38. Avram says

    6 May 2008 at 19:33

    This is just about great! Not every content on Rapidshare is warez and for Orange to accept this is simply ridiculous.

    No wonder they cap on dial-up like “broadband” offers like 128K and 256K when my friends & relatives in the West are enjoying 5Mbps+ lines with very decent caps or no caps at all. That’s a very telling fact about what they can afford us in terms of QoS and innovations. There are so many countries with so stringent copyright laws which still haven’t blocked Rapidshare.

    Thank you Orange so very very much! You just eased our very miserable online experience…

  39. avinash says

    6 May 2008 at 22:35

    I’m getting terrible bandwidth and latency at this moment to some selected websites including mu.archive.ubuntu.com (91.189.88.46). Look at those times:

    $ traceroute 91.189.88.46
    traceroute to 91.189.88.46 (91.189.88.46), 64 hops max, 40 byte packets
    1 * * *
    2 196.20.216.1 (196.20.216.1) 8.873 ms 8.980 ms 16.747 ms
    3 ADSL-TPLUS-70-97.telecomplus.net (196.27.70.97) 10.412 ms 9.039 ms 16.769 ms
    4 * * *
    5 F-0-0.telecomplus.net (202.123.2.99) 1039.466 ms 1014.802 ms 985.407 ms
    6 192.168.3.1 (192.168.3.1) 1032.978 ms 1108.202 ms 1032.819 ms
    7 po3-1.lisbb1.Lisbonne.opentransit.net (193.251.248.133) 1313.453 ms 1286.612 ms 1313.737 ms
    8 so-2-1-2-0.madcr2.Madrid.opentransit.net (193.251.241.205) 1407.028 ms 1369.164 ms 1500.843 ms
    9 level3-3.GW.opentransit.net (193.251.254.14) 1406.992 ms 1422.662 ms 1547.234 ms
    10 ae-4-4.ebr1.Paris1.Level3.net (4.69.135.182) 1501.339 ms 1525.888 ms 1500.569 ms
    11 ae-2.ebr1.London2.Level3.net (4.69.133.94) 1641.988 ms 1577.312 ms 1641.190 ms
    12 ae-16-53.car2.London2.Level3.net (4.68.117.80) 1642.082 ms ae-16-55.car2.London2.Level3.net (4.68.117.144) 1698.347 ms ae-16-51.car2.London2.Level3.net (4.68.117.16) 1699.193 ms
    13 195.50.121.2 (195.50.121.2) 1747.702 ms 934.969 ms 904.425 ms
    14 lithium.canonical.com (91.189.88.46) 1000.537 ms 1018.533 ms 986.183 ms

    Are you getting the same thing?

  40. Ajay Ramjatan says

    6 May 2008 at 22:36

    Based on several tests I have done. A few servers responding for the A record http://www.rapidshare.com are behaving erratically.

    No indication of any rapidshare censorship of any kind so far.

  41. Ajay Ramjatan says

    6 May 2008 at 22:41

    Seems to be on your side Avinash. My latency is acceptable

    Tests done with Orange ADSL Home 512/128 with FUP (Formerly known as Wanadoo ADSL Home 512/128 UNLIMITED)

    silverx2 ~ # traceroute 91.189.88.46
    traceroute to 91.189.88.46 (91.189.88.46), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
    1 192.168.0.50 (192.168.0.50) 11.475 ms 11.443 ms 11.428 ms
    2 XXXXX (XXXXX) 25.039 ms 29.872 ms 45.600 ms
    3 XXXXX (XXXXX) 52.880 ms 59.518 ms 66.172 ms
    4 202.123.2.129 (202.123.2.129) 74.517 ms * 86.802 ms
    5 F-0-0.telecomplus.net (202.123.2.99) 95.224 ms 101.596 ms 108.471 ms
    6 192.168.3.22 (192.168.3.22) 114.859 ms 19.103 ms 25.145 ms
    7 196.192.4.34 (196.192.4.34) 38.528 ms 22.347 ms 29.710 ms
    8 58.26.87.9 (58.26.87.9) 298.713 ms 305.534 ms 311.922 ms
    9 219.93.182.226 (219.93.182.226) 318.570 ms 325.179 ms 330.850 ms
    10 210.187.143.5 (210.187.143.5) 338.472 ms 344.092 ms 351.471 ms
    11 219.94.12.138 (219.94.12.138) 358.368 ms 273.831 ms 280.395 ms
    12 58.27.113.30 (58.27.113.30) 294.416 ms 58.27.113.62 (58.27.113.62) 300.082 ms 58.27.113.30 (58.27.113.30) 281.466 ms
    13 58.27.124.58 (58.27.124.58) 287.109 ms 58.27.124.54 (58.27.124.54) 300.364 ms 58.27.124.50 (58.27.124.50) 306.759 ms
    14 219.93.174.84 (219.93.174.84) 313.650 ms 321.620 ms 327.429 ms
    15 202.188.139.166 (202.188.139.166) 333.308 ms 339.178 ms 346.553 ms
    16 ge2-24-0-cr0.nik.nl.as6908.net (195.69.145.145) 348.996 ms 355.655 ms 270.902 ms
    17 te1-4-3508-cr0.thn.uk.as6908.net (78.41.154.13) 278.019 ms 291.395 ms 297.932 ms
    18 canonical-gw.datahop.net (195.72.130.230) 277.907 ms 284.856 ms 296.797 ms
    19 lithium.canonical.com (91.189.88.46) 309.346 ms 317.700 ms 323.368 ms

  42. selven says

    6 May 2008 at 22:46

    hell no

    Macintosh:uploader selven$ traceroute 91.189.88.46
    traceroute to 91.189.88.46 (91.189.88.46), 64 hops max, 40 byte packets
    1 * * *
    2 ADSL-132-1.myt.mu (41.212.132.1) 9.395 ms 11.278 ms 10.094 ms
    3 ADSL-TPLUS-70-97.telecomplus.net (196.27.70.97) 16.792 ms 10.264 ms 10.108 ms
    4 * 202.123.2.129 (202.123.2.129) 21.054 ms 10.218 ms
    5 F-0-0.telecomplus.net (202.123.2.99) 298.730 ms 551.609 ms 429.679 ms
    6 192.168.3.1 (192.168.3.1) 550.824 ms 601.306 ms 475.927 ms
    7 po3-1.lisbb1.Lisbonne.opentransit.net (193.251.248.133) 766.693 ms 456.564 ms 568.683 ms
    8 so-2-1-2-0.madcr2.Madrid.opentransit.net (193.251.241.205) 734.340 ms 268.568 ms 275.903 ms
    9 level3-3.GW.opentransit.net (193.251.254.14) 267.882 ms 270.149 ms 310.502 ms
    10 ae-4-4.ebr1.Paris1.Level3.net (4.69.135.182) 265.666 ms 284.350 ms 276.884 ms
    11 ae-2.ebr1.London2.Level3.net (4.69.133.94) 293.636 ms 282.652 ms 272.862 ms
    12 ae-16-51.car2.London2.Level3.net (4.68.117.16) 511.947 ms ae-16-53.car2.London2.Level3.net (4.68.117.80) 272.454 ms ae-16-55.car2.London2.Level3.net (4.68.117.144) 273.129 ms
    13 195.50.121.2 (195.50.121.2) 272.878 ms 271.592 ms 280.347 ms
    14 lithium.canonical.com (91.189.88.46) 267.513 ms 269.580 ms 267.925 ms

  43. carrotmadman6 says

    6 May 2008 at 23:04

    13 hops & 3 time-outs for me… yeah, it’s terribly slow! :|

    & btw i’ve just posted about Orange blocking Rapidshare…

    & i’m taking a leaf out of Ed’s book to make a petition on the FUP & Orange blocking RS. :P

  44. avinash says

    6 May 2008 at 23:21

    It seems that there is a technical problem somewhere and, for once, I think it’s not MT’s fault :-)

  45. armand says

    6 May 2008 at 23:33

    Does anyone know whats the limit for FUP

  46. Anon says

    6 May 2008 at 23:43

    I’ve seen Rapidshare.com going down for almost 12hrs once. I think it might be a problem like that.

    As for Orange blocking RS, that would be the bit that overflows my buffers! Capping my connection, yes. Controlling what I can see? Are we going for a Great China Firewall in Mauritius too now?!

    Let’s see if this persists.

  47. ramesh says

    7 May 2008 at 08:51

    ya Orange really block rapidshare. got a chat yesterday on forum, seem rapidshare is working well in other countries.
    orange will make our life miserable

  48. Ajay Ramjatan says

    7 May 2008 at 10:00

    Observations on present rapidshare.com situation

    1. HTTP requests without proxy
    wget -Y off http://www.rapidshare.com
    Results: Requests almost always times out.

    wget -Y off http://www.google.com
    Results: Requests always works

    2. HTTP requests via proxy
    export http_proxy=”http://x.x.x.x:y”
    wget -Y on http://www.rapidshare.com
    Results: Requests still times out most of the time.

    wget -Y on http://www.google.com
    Results: Requests always works

    3. HTTP requests via encrypted proxy tunnelled via SSH
    ssh -L 8080:127.0.0.1:8080 user@remotehost
    export http_proxy=”http://127.0.0.1:8080″
    wget -Y on http://www.rapidshare.com

    Results: Works all the time

    Seems the gremlins of the Internet are manifesting again. Why would a request using a plain proxy not work and work when using the same proxy with encryption? And please if you want to suggest sophisticated censorship filters that sniff out keywords in traffic “e.g. host: http://www.rapidshare.com in HTTP requests”, remember that its not very easy to implement.

    Can anyone do other tests so that we can pinpoint the cause?

  49. Ashesh says

    7 May 2008 at 10:04

    Here is what the Rapidshare support teams tells me:

    Hello,

    Please check all your network elements and configurations. It happens often
    that the problems you experience are only results of filters, proxy server,
    router or firewall rules on your or on your internet service provider side.

    Probably the reason of your problem is the connection between your computer
    and the Internet Service Provider.
    We are not able to troubleshoot other networks. We can fix problems only in
    our network. The servers are up and
    running and the internet connections have enough capacity to handle the
    requests.
    Please contact your provider to let him check if the path to RapidShare.com is
    working.
    Keep in mind that if you can reach us via ICMP (ping), then you should be also
    able to reach us on port 80 (http://). If it is not so, there must be
    somewhere a filter. We do not have applied any filter on HTTP (Port 80).

    It is also possible that we block your IP-address because denial of service
    attacks from your IP-address.
    If you have contacted your provider and they could not solve the problem,
    please let us know your IP-address so that we can check if it is blocked.

    Thank you for your understanding.

    Best regards,

    RapidShare AG – Support Team

    RapidShare AG
    Gewerbestrasse 6
    CH – 6330 Cham

    web: http://www.rapidshare.com
    email:
    tel: +41 41 748 78 80

    Ashesh schrieb:

    > Hi
    > I have signed for a premium account. I can no longer open any rapidshare
    > linked file. Even the website I cannot open.

  50. Ajay Ramjatan says

    7 May 2008 at 10:13

    Addition to tests:

    https://ssl.rapidshare.com seems to work almost always

  51. ramesh says

    7 May 2008 at 10:21

    guy rapidshare for me now today 07 may 2008 at 10:15. wait till the end of day

  52. Tushal says

    7 May 2008 at 10:25

    We can access rapidshare using proxy or a VPN{Avinesh you know what this is}
    The only way which you can “acess RS normally” is by VPN but if orange has this hint..forget about RS again! ! !
    Nomad, mtml users have no problems in accessing RS website.only Orange users cant access! ! !

  53. avinash says

    7 May 2008 at 10:31

    Hi Ajay,

    I can access http://www.rapidshare.com from work. As far as I know, we are using normal business ADSL lines from MT here…

  54. carrotmadman6 says

    7 May 2008 at 10:37

    10:30
    I can access RS.com…. (hopefully) they’ve stopped blocking it! :D

  55. ramesh says

    7 May 2008 at 10:41

    rapidshare is working. i forgot to type ‘is working’ above.

  56. avinash says

    7 May 2008 at 12:01

    Soooooo it seems that this was just a technical glitch somewhere… This is bound to happen from time to time.

  57. Ketwaroo D. Yaasir says

    7 May 2008 at 13:56

    see? people are quick to point the finger when things go wrong.

    the timeouts you describe happen to me too. I have a website hosted in the US and it timeout/server not found/connection was reset on me from time to time. sometimes for periods of up to an hour. When I ask a few acquiantances in france, they seem to have no problems at all. people in australia sometimes have the same trouble as me but at different times. Internet gremlims indeed.

    but there’s still only one route for much of the way to us and thats getting congested as we are being made aware of. etc etc.

    so anyway, back to business.

    In the name of fair use in my own house, at least until they dump more cables in the sea, I’d like block(or if possible only limit the number of connections) youtube addresses on the livebox firewall.

    I”ve looked all over oranges website (the france based one not the local one where the myt page is 404) but they only ever give you unhelpful instructions like how to just find the firewall configuration page and nothing on how to actually use it.

  58. Eddy Young says

    7 May 2008 at 15:03

    Too much paranoia :-)

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2e_43fmVml8

    Is Orange present in Reunion Isl.? If yes, why are they not peering? The latency from Reunion Isl. is so so much better than in Mauritius at about 250ms for a roundtrip to a server in Europe. Compare that to the near 1,000ms for the same roundtrip from Mauritius.

    Eddy.

  59. Anon says

    7 May 2008 at 20:09

    The Rapidshare issue is now solved. I don’t think Orange had anything to do with blocking or anything like that. Probably a messed up device or setting somewhere along the path from Mauritian PC to RS’ servers. :)

    “In the name of fair use in my own house, at least until they dump more cables in the sea, I’d like block(or if possible only limit the number of connections) youtube addresses on the livebox firewall.”

    Can’t you implement some kind of parental filter software on the machines you own to only allow access to youtube on a time-basis?

    Also, I’ve seen some freebies around that allow you to control the bandwidth available to softwares. You could restrict the bandwidth that your browser uses for example. Unfortunately, it was in an RSS feed which I failed to read, so I didn’t get the name of the software. Sorry…

  60. Ketwaroo D. Yaasir says

    7 May 2008 at 20:56

    Too much paranoia :-)

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2e_43fmVml8

    the youtube vid loads about 2 seconds then kindly offers that I rewatch those 2 seconds. and I haven’t been downloading any questionable files since … yesterday at least!

    heh, even google no longer supports crappy connections. or it could be the Internet Gremlins. or even an ISP throttling a bandwidth intensive website (if we were to be just a tad more paranoid than usual).

    kind of reminds me. I was at a Barack Obama rally in North Carolina a few days ago…. by proxy. basically, I was getting updates on the situation every few minutes via sms to IM. and about 5 minutes before the guy is supposed to arrive, I got a “This message was not sent because Mobile Messaging is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later.” and suffered a fir of acute paranoia.

    Goddam Internet Gremlins… but it was really exciting and you could feel what all the fuss of a presidential candidate race is about.

    ahem, I may be going off topic though.

  61. Ajay Ramjatan says

    7 May 2008 at 21:49

    @Ketwaroo D. Yaasir

    I do not use the Livebox but as far as I know, all decent routers have an option to make custom routes.

    I recommend you do a null route on the youtube subnet. Note that this has the detrimental effect of blocking youtube for your whole household.

    Of course, the best solution is you figuring out how to use the firewall

  62. Ketwaroo D. Yaasir says

    8 May 2008 at 00:04

    Can’t you implement some kind of parental filter software on the machines you own to only allow access to youtube on a time-basis?

    well actually, we have 3 PCs at home (and possibly a few more devices I haven’t seen yet). it seems a lot but it was the only way to avoid conflicts. trying to install sneaky software on each other’s computer would be like a Mission Impossible (with all the inconveniences of hanging from the ceiling).

    THe main reason I want youtube gone is that my kid brother has recently developed the nasty fad for watching pro wrestling on youtube (if you remember those days, they were very popular on Saturdays in between the horse races on MBC1). and he tends to watch a lot of it.

    Basically I have the same problem as Orange with SAFE. except here of course I don’t have an optical cable and can’t allocate the bandwidth into slots. So you could say I understand the issues that an FUP will have on our bandwidth availability acutely.

    I recommend you do a null route on the youtube subnet. Note that this has the detrimental effect of blocking youtube for your whole household.

    I think I got what you mean.

    The firewall itself has been pretty uncooperative. It’s not even saving the changes I’ve been making between restarts and the changes I had made doesn’t seem to have any effect on anything else.. Not to mention each time I go into the configuration panel, it has reset the language to french….. which doesn’t help.

    I’ve come across suggestions which require “patching” the router software but I think that would invalidate whatever warranty there might be on the thing.

    I don’t mind not being able to view youtube myself. It’s mostly the long pauses in between every few seconds of video that have put me off.

    long live web 2.0 as they say.

  63. avinash says

    8 May 2008 at 22:08

    Anyone care to comment?

  64. selven says

    8 May 2008 at 22:35

    my my my 4lyf, you must be really frustrated :p

    As far as rants :p, well well well, you could use some brains to realize your most greatest fantasies instead of just ranting.

    The above as far as i can see wasn’t rants, but a discussion about wtf might be going on :p. Besides am sure Orange knows better than to piss off some nasty lil penguins and devils…. this could be both bad for business and security..

    Anywayz, Yasir, as far as adding your own routes for the router, you can telnet to 192.168.1.1 and login as root and do your work there.

    Good luck.

    +$3|v3n

  65. Eddy Young says

    8 May 2008 at 22:45

    Ignoring the last bit, I’d say that 4lyf is right mostly.

    I’ve been saying similar things in the past: ranting on a blog will not bring much change because the blog doesn’t reach that far beyond a small circle of Internet users. Only concrete actions will do (and I suggest some in my original ADSL petition).

    He highlights an interesting point in passing. Many are engaging in a pseudo-technical discussion without sufficient background knowledge, and that is only adding noise which makes things even worse with the confusion that ensues. Even 4lyf is getting his kb/s and KB/s mixed up!

    That said, 4lyf should probably not mind the rants and pseudo-technical discussions if he’s so much against it. The obvious question is: what has he done to improve the situation?

    Eddy.

  66. avinash says

    8 May 2008 at 22:52

    By the way, has anyone read an article on the FUP in News on Sunday today (yes, it appears on Thursdays…)?

    A journalist called me yesterday and asked me some questions about the FUP. I think he stumbled upon this blog entry by sheer luck. I told him about my own feeling about the FUP (good thing but…) and that one possible solution to the bandwidth and cost issue would be for MT to mirror (a lot of) what we download locally.

    I forgot to buy a copy…

  67. Eddy Young says

    9 May 2008 at 03:45

    Shame you didn’t mention peering agreements with other ISPs in the region.

    Eddy.

  68. Ketwaroo D. Yaasir says

    9 May 2008 at 04:35

    speeds might be low, but this morning i was enjoying a joyful flat 108kb/sec, 1 local peer, was great, downloaded about 1gb in 1.45hrs.

    so you’re that little asswipe who’s been eating up our bandwidth, eh? and it’s “rite of passage” dimwit…

    The ranting is for the purpose of ranting. Absolute pure rant. We love it. it gets ideas circulating. there’s really no point of petitioning it you have no clear idea what you are petitioning for. You could admit that it’s an exchange of ideas between people who know that one needs to be extremely intelligent to say profoundly stupid things.

    what are you going to do anyway? Drag an extra copper wire from your house to an ISP in europe by tugging it with your pirogue?

    read the top of the page it says “on Teaching, Programming, Technology and Web 2.0”. keywords being programming, technology. you can bet your little ass that there will be technical terms all over the place.

    and my dear Eddy, lack of background knowledge is not necessarily a sign of lack of intelligence. Except in the case of 4lyf. that’s an arbitrary bias but he/she/it is asking for it.

    Also except that I think that technical terms are a rather pompous way for the “professionals” to tell the Man On The Street that “U can’t touch this” (and then start break dancing as support to their arguments. literally.). It seems that they fear if everybody understood what they were going on about, they would lose their… “black magic”.

    Anyway, if there’s something the Men On The Street don’t understand, there’s the whole of the internet just a tab away so they can look it up. Might take some time but everybody is as clueless as anybody else at one point or another.

    Anywayz, Yasir, as far as adding your own routes for the router, you can telnet to 192.168.1.1 and login as root and do your work there.

    password 1234, right? yeah I tried that too. but it keeps giving me “you cannot log in until 15(x num. of retries) secondes” yes. secondes. The thing is hopelessly french.

    Still, I got the bit that Ajay suggested sorted out from the web interface. It’ll hold until my younger brother figures it out on his own.

    I know it was a bit of a weird thing to ask in the current post, but we should all probably find ways to control our usage before we get unexpectedly FUP’ed.

    A journalist called me yesterday and asked me some questions about the FUP.

    journalist eh? oh hum… some of the comments on this blog post may get quoted out of context I think. no?

  69. carrotmadman6 says

    9 May 2008 at 06:52

    @4lyf
    Yeah, you’ve right, we’d better stop ranting & go on & face off against Orange. But with distractors (like Eddy) running around debating whether the FUP is good or not… the e-discussion will never end.
    It’s high time we adopt a common stance & fight against injustice.

    But since no one is willing to…IT’S ME WHO’S GONNA DO IT! :@
    (… waiting for the exams to end)

  70. avinash says

    9 May 2008 at 07:11

    Just to clarify something. Eddy is right. Without something like the FUP, there is no way that a Mauritian ISP can offer a 256kbit/s connection at Rs 750 per month because of the expenses involved (SAFE, satellite, etc.)

    By the way, does anyone feel to have been unjustly penalized because of the FUP up to now?

  71. selven says

    9 May 2008 at 13:27

    Not me, since i rarely download, and most of my downloads are pr0n and updates or sources.
    :p If i felt unjustly penalized (i would advise everyone to do like me), DoS em with massive amounts of fone calls to their tech services when you are drunk, loop() phpmail() endloop() then till they get pissed off at you and wish to cut you off, then you can say, bof its your fault, i am the customer i am supposed to be the king. Then grab your livebox close to you when they try to take it from you and cry out that you were kicked and brutalized by MT people, get police protection order after that :p am sure they won’t like such kind of publicity!

    coming back to the question: Nope, not yet.
    +$3|v3n

  72. Eddy Young says

    9 May 2008 at 15:23

    @carrotmadman6: So, let’s see one of your contributions to the thread:

    13 hops & 3 time-outs for me… yeah, it’s terribly slow!

    & btw i’ve just posted about Orange blocking Rapidshare…

    & i’m taking a leaf out of Ed’s book to make a petition on the FUP & Orange blocking RS.

    Unverified claim about RS being blocked, but nonetheless you give me credits.

    I seem to be the only one sticking to the topic, while the rest have gone off a tangent. Explain how this makes me a distractor?

    Or, are you still fussed up about me having your blog removed from MBT because of the deliberate plagiarism?

    Eddy.

    Think before you start writing or plagiarising!

  73. Ketwaroo D. Yaasir says

    9 May 2008 at 15:30

    Eddy is right.

    Except Eddy doesn’t mention where his new peering idea comes from.

    He may be right from about the FUP, but from a conservative point of view.

    I think carrot and me are right form what’s that other point of view. something big probably.

    There are not enough cables in the I.O. money is not an issue if anyone is actually serious about those cyber island claims. It’s an investment. Supply and Demand. Increase the Supply instead of pissing off the Demand. But writing down policies at a desk in an office is of course much cheaper.

    tsunamis are not an issue either. cables on the sea floor are not going to be affected by surface waves, I know that. they only have to worry about Giant Sharks, sea monsters and other Krakens.

    that other one keeps going on “My farther did this. My father did that”, well your father is not around anymore. He had roads constructed for the textile factories, you should be having cables laid down AND NOT JUST FOR THOSE GODDAM BPO FARMS! they are just infrastructure. they don’t vote for you. we do.

    the FUP could just be a sinecure though. I ALREADY feel I’m being unjustly penalized by the unreliable service alone. I haven’t received any threat letters or any gestapo like phonecalls but the my connection is suddenly crap at the time of this post. What’s worse it’s at a time I actually need to download a file. Even connecting to your blog is taking far far too long.

    Then grab your livebox close to you when they try to take it from you and cry out that you were kicked and brutalized by MT people

    Elian gonzalez!!

    haha, most younger people won’t know know what I’m talking about.. I am probably a couple of decades than I appear.. come to think of it the older ones may not know either…. oh well..

    Still at the virtual age of 43 and so close to my early pre-retirement, I shouldn’t have to suffer the incompetence of a few pencil pushers.

    and hurray! subscriptions are working again!

  74. carrotmadman6 says

    9 May 2008 at 16:29

    By distractor, i meant trying to discourage us from protesting against the FUP…. by saying things like the FUP is applied everywhere in the world, so why not Mauritius.

    & concerning my blog, i don’t know whether you’ve noticed it or not, but i’ve stopped plagiarising ever since. :P
    So can I request my blog to be re-added to the MBT?
    (Oops, we are going off-topic here!) :)

    What i’m trying to say is that there would be no need for any FUP if the rulers were far-sighted. I dunno when this whole idea of cyberisland started, but since Day 0, they should have predicted that one day or the other, traffic usage will explode & SAFE won’t be enough. If they had thought of investing into a fibre optic link, we would certainly not be facing a day where a FUP is being implemented & RS.com is being blocked. (& btw it was indeed blocked – verified by a source from Orange).
    We must not forget that having only SAFE as the only link is a major economic handicap. Suppose, SAFE gets cut off (like with the Med cables), the whole BPO sector is dead & no one gets to use the Internet. (Satellite link is only 1Gbps!!!)

    & another thing about the FUP is the lack of transparency! No one knows what are the limits, how are our connections are being monitored & how will we be “punished.”

    & this is exactly what I’ll ask in my forthcoming petition:
    1. Invest into fibre cables.
    2. More transparency on the FUP.
    I hope my standpoint is clear enough. :P

  75. Eddy Young says

    9 May 2008 at 16:38

    In 2008, you don’t have to have a “peering idea”. It is common practice amongst ISPs. Have you tried pinging a server in neighbouring Reunion Isl.? The connection goes through Europe, thus wasting valuable bandwidth on the SAFE.

    Eddy.

  76. Ajay Ramjatan says

    9 May 2008 at 20:34

    >By the way, does anyone feel to have been unjustly penalized because of the >FUP up to now?

    Yes.

    I am FOR FUP if the TERMS is CLEAR. I want to know about the LIMITS. When am I considered a heavy downloader? An existing contract has been modified and unclear terms have been added.

  77. avinash says

    9 May 2008 at 20:45

    I am 100% agreeable with that Ajay. The system must be 100% transparent or else we won’t ever stop complaining (in the good sense of the world.)

  78. selven says

    9 May 2008 at 21:00

    agreed as i mentionned above :)

  79. Ketwaroo D. Yaasir says

    9 May 2008 at 21:21

    Apparently you do need to have a peering idea Eddy. because since MT/Orange aren’t doing it yet they probably haven’t thought about it that much. Or maybe they are thinking about it and it’ll soon pop up as a jolly good coincidence.

    I only described doing something similar on your blog, except of course I didn’t know there was already a term for it. Of course you could argue that that’s not the same thing. And of couse it’s not the same thing. I was just formulating a very obvious possibility of a solution to a very obvious problem and not quoting a textbook answer.

    If they(Orange/MT) are doing useful stuff they really should be telling us about it instead of letting us think they are a bunch of useless morons who should have their heads on stakes when the revolution comes.

    Instead of break dancing in your corner(see my previous comment on the subject), you could help carrotmadman a bit. though I’m not sure how. you say you have some experience with that sort of thing, right?

    hehe, the subscriptions are really working good now. 2 more comments came in while I was still typing this.

    about the transparency thing.

    100% transparent yes. but private.

    I’m sure you don’t want your usage statistics known to everyone.

    keep it between the ISP and the end user. maybe append the usage per day of the month with the telephone bill. help prevent future abuse instead of simply “punishing” it.

    maybe give more detailed reports to companies to allow them to identify employees who abuse their business lines downloading movies all day long instead of simply loafing about like they are paid to.

    it’s not a good idea to publish names of individuals and their internet usage. even if it’s used as punitive action for multi-recidivists. take my example of a family of 7, shouldn’t they be getting a preferential rate because of the large number of users in the same household?

  80. Avram says

    9 May 2008 at 21:47

    What is deplorable is the extreme selfishness of those self-congratulating leechers who rant about how much they can suck out of MT’s paltry and barely improved ‘broadband’ bandwidth. Perhaps that’s got very much to do with our inborn third-world mentality of thinking for ourselves and not thinking as a nation…

    As for the MT’s terms, I too am for a complete and well-detailed set of terms and conditions GUARANTEEING what I should expect from Orange i.e. quantifying how much is ‘a lot of downloading’ for each broadband plan.

  81. avinash says

    9 May 2008 at 22:03

    I have thought about the meaning of 100% transparency and I have realized that publishing names (or whatever) was not a good idea after all… in the name of privacy.

    I am for having a detailed and logically presented explanation by MT of that “abuse” means.

  82. Eddy Young says

    9 May 2008 at 23:27

    Enough with the ranting, who’s taking it charge of setting up an association of Internet users? I can’t put up my hands as I’m in England, but I’m sure one of you brave souls will step forward :-)

    Writing to the ISP as an association has more chance of yielding a response. In fact, you don’t even need an association, just a bunch of signatures at the bottom of a letter requesting for more details regarding the application of the FUP. The same letter sent to the papers will tell journalists that there is news to be made and will prompt them to follow up.

    Eddy.

  83. avinash says

    9 May 2008 at 23:44

    I can be a brave soul from time to time :-) Who wants to join?

    I also believe we, as a group of MT customers (a “collectif”), can send a letter to the CEO of MT asking for clarification (no need to set up an association.)

  84. carrotmadman6 says

    9 May 2008 at 23:55

    I’m in as always. & i was considering the same thing… gather enough signatures on a petition & send it everywhere (papers, ICTA, MT/Orange, Gov, etc.)

  85. Ketwaroo D. Yaasir says

    10 May 2008 at 01:03

    I would mostly qualify as a shady character. I think. Do you have need for shady characters?

  86. selven says

    10 May 2008 at 12:15

    I have thought about the meaning of 100% transparency and I have realized that publishing names (or whatever) was not a good idea after all…

    Uhmm i was thinking more about ambiguous terms such as “high usage” be explained clearly, e.g **high means above 5GB of monthly downloads etc..

    As i believe as long as there are such vauge terms, they’ll be able to exploit us (and vice versa?? )

    Also that MT selfcare page can be used to verify self usage (and added tothat if you have a logger on your own router to monitor your usage), you can compare both and kick the hell outta em in case they try to fry you up with that FUP.

    +$3|v3m

  87. Ketwaroo D. Yaasir says

    13 May 2008 at 01:17

    sooo…. . . . .

    what are we up to?

  88. avinash says

    13 May 2008 at 11:44

    We need to write the letter to be sent to the CEO of Mauritius Telecom asking for clarification about the Fair Usage Policy.

    I am not sure we need to involve the press right away but we can, of course, communicate on the letter on our respective blogs.

    I’m pretty sure we’ll get a reply relatively quickly.

    Yaasir, can you draft something and circulate it to us by email?

  89. Eddy Young says

    15 May 2008 at 19:02

    So…

    Is everyone happy with their 55 KB/s now that FUP permits that? :-)

    Eddy.

  90. avinash says

    15 May 2008 at 19:41

    What do you mean by 55Kb/s Eddy? Are you talking about 1Mbit/s subscribers?

  91. Eddy Young says

    15 May 2008 at 20:05

    Nice one, Avinash :-)

    I’m hearing from 512 KB/s that they are getting full speed with their downloads. I wanted to gauge how the rest of you were doing.

    Eddy.

  92. Ketwaroo D. Yaasir says

    15 May 2008 at 20:44

    ah, sorry I was mostly asleep the past few days. Apparently I missed an electric storm and a blackout.

    I did start writing a letter to complain about the poor quality of service a while before though.

    It started along the lines of…
    ”
    To: Whom it may concern
    From: am angry customer

    As you may know, printer manufacturers are in the business of selling ink cartridges, television stations are in the business of bringing viewers to their advertisers and airlines are in the business of catering for a captive audience.

    Basically most businesses are in the business of doing something else than what they advertise so tell me, what the heck do you think you are doing? Because you definitely not being very good at it.
    …
    ”

    and it continues on the same line. It’s still only a draft but bits of it try to explain why they should try pig farming as alternative careers.

    of course the one liner approach would be

    “To: MT/Orange

    why do you hate us so much?

    ”

    In fact, since at this point its mostly about gaining clarifications on the FUP, anyboby could write it.

    But since nobody will do it until somebody does, I’ll try and get something more or less “polite” in a day or two (or maybe even later tonight). You may have to re-edit it a bit though.

    Is everyone happy with their 55 KB/s now that FUP permits that?

    Eddy, have you been bungee jumping without the elastic?

  93. avinash says

    15 May 2008 at 21:37

    To Eddy:

    Personally, I am happy. I get 26-27 Kb/s (on my 256 kbit/s) most of the time.

    To Yaasir:

    Keep the faith :-)

  94. selven says

    15 May 2008 at 21:44

    Basically most businesses are in the business of doing something else than what they advertise so tell me, what the heck do you think you are doing? Because you definitely not being very good at it.

    Dude, you’ve been in the IT world for soooo long and you don’t know what is the business of an ISP?????

    Its soo damned simple, and MT just does it perrrfectly….

    ISP itself stands for… “I Screw People”, and till now, they’ve been doing it to the perfection here….

    Lately connection was ok, so, i won’t comment on it, (out of fear that it changes right after i say how much i get :p)

    +$3|v3n

  95. armand says

    16 May 2008 at 20:22

    As you seen on the news MT is making big profits, why they can’t upgrade their safe capacity and satellite. I know if they reduce their tariff this will cause other isp to complain.

  96. Chouaibe says

    16 May 2008 at 21:38

    Hey guys.
    guess I’ve been missing lots overhere..
    it’s been long since I post a comment.
    as far asif they can insert the FUP clause in your current contract, need to check that out in the statutes or codes…
    think Eddy is quite conversant with law..so, what do you think eddy?
    as far as speed is concerned, i always got 28-29KB/s and only for 1 month, my speed dropped as low as 5-9KB/s but it went back to normal.
    I should agree, like Avinash said, I’m like those who downloads movies/shows during the whole day and watch only 1 out of 3 download :s
    It’s an addiction! Any advice?
    How about the letter Yassir?
    I repeat my question…till the EASSy won’t be a reality…don’t you think that all this noise is for nothing??
    Can we increase the bandwidth on the SAFE cable?

  97. jens says

    17 May 2008 at 15:58

    Well you guys are fortunate to get speed such ads 29 KB/s and > 55 KB/s with your respective adsl connections.

    The only speed that i get on international network is <=14-16 KB/s with an adsl 512 kbps.

  98. Ketwaroo D. Yaasir says

    17 May 2008 at 18:01

    It’s an addiction! Any advice?

    yeah, get a girlfriend. and let her deicide what movies you download.

    How about the letter Yassir?

    I am not your saviour. I said I’ll try and see what I could do. But anybody else could still write it. or just email them separately. Even right now, why don’t you? still I have a little bit of work to finish first.

  99. Ketwaroo D. Yaasir says

    18 May 2008 at 07:36

    oh all right… I’ll post it as comment. since I do not have the email addresses of everyone else. delete the comment without moderating it after you’ve forwarded it. (if you think it’s worth forwarding)

    [[text in double square brackets are notes, you’ll have to advise as necessary and edit them out.]]

    [[insert the usual formalities up here]]

    Unless stated otherwise, “We” refers to the signatories of this letter/email and “you” refers to the ISP known as Orange (a.k.a the lamented Mauritius Telecom).

    Shortly after Mauritius Telecom turncoat to Orange was rebranded as Orange, we chanced upon, and we do mean chanced upon, the following addition to the Myt user Frequently Asked Questions(FAQ) available at http://www.mauritiustelecom.com/myt/myt_abonner_faq.php#fair_use_policy

    Quote:
    [The Fair Use Policy] is designed to make sure your broadband service is as fast as possible and reliable whenever you are connected.

    Some of our broadband customers use file sharing software and download large files like music and videos. This uses up lots of network capacity leaving less available for others. This means that the speed of your broadband service is then affected.

    Am I likely to be affected by the Fair Use Policy?

    If you don’t regularly use file sharing software or download large files from the internet it’s unlikely you’ll ever be affected by this policy.

    What will happen if my use is very high?

    If you only occasionally have very high usage, we’re unlikely to be concerned. If your usage continues to be very high, we’ll advise you if your usage is excessive. Ultimately, if your usage still remains excessive, we may have reduce the transmission speed of the service whilst we monitor your usage.

    :End Quote

    [[either]]

    The very quiet manner in which this new policy has been retrofitted into our existing contracts [[reusing avinash’s words here]] seems to fit, very accurately, the definition of the word “skulduggery”. However,since we do not want to be accused of hasty judgement [[though by MT’s past policies, there’s nothing hasty about this judgement]], we would like to offer you a chance to explain those vague wishy washy new clauses in our contracts.

    [[or]]

    It should be stressed that we discovered the news about the Fair Use Policy(FUP) by accident and for many of us, have not agreed to such a policy when originally signing our contract for internet service. While we do understand that as stated in our contracts “MT reserves the right to amend the T&C herein contained at any given time and/or from time to time” [[n.b. line dire MT pas Orange]], the imformation given in the FAQ seems to us to be rather vague. Infact, far too vague and as such, we would appreciate some clarification on the following points.

    [[needs revising]]

    [[note on the FUP there’s only the issue of the “excessive usage” and the “whilst we monitor your usage”. If you think of anything else, please don’t hesitate]]

    who the heck do you think you are kidding? using “broadband” and “fast” in the same sentence when talking about your services?? syphilitic idiots…[[optional… maybe…]]

    We are very curious to know how exactly you will go about determining that we are using “file sharing software” and using our connection to do such things as “download large files like music and videos”? [[not particularly necessary but hey, this is a draft]]. We are very concerned that our privacy is being threatened when you say in the FAQ “whilst we monitor your usage”. We would like to know *exactly* what you are monitoring in our usage, *precisely* how, and just who has access to that information.[[add more stuff in the same vein here.]]

    We are also extremely puzzled by what constitutes “excessive usage”.

    A figure in gigabytes would be helpful.[[if they give us something in megabytes, we should get VERY suspicious]] However, we would like to know what other factors you might be considering when calculating the “excessive usage”. for example,
    does connection duration factor in? If a user is downloading at very slow speeds for extended periods of time, does this count as “excessive”?
    if a fairly large household shares an internet connection between several PCs. Will they get accused of “excessive” usage? Shouldn’t they instead be getting a special discount for participating in all that cyberisland tralala?[[I’m quoting my own examples here, others should add any they mught think of]]

    How occasional is “occasionally high”?

    [[dunno what to add, but seems important too]]

    How excatly are you going to “advise” us of our supposedly “high” and “excessive” “usage”?

    Will it be via letter, email[[note, it’s obvious that anyone who might be “guilty” of their “excessive usage” does not use the crappy mail box provided by MT/Orange. This may well be an area they will try to screw us over, claiming to have sent us a warning email to our orange inbox and we did not heed]] or maybe a phone call?

    By how much do you intend to “reduce the transmission speed of the service”? And for how long?

    [[assholes…]]

    Finally, do we customers have a recourse if we think that we are being unjustly penalised by the FUP[[you bet your ass we are!]]?

    [[someone get some ideas on how to elaborate this bit]]

    Please do not be afraid to use technical terms in your reply, which we hope will be quick and hopefully enlightening [[and maybe even “educational”]], as some of us probably know better what they mean that you do. Thank you

    [[the usual formalities down here]]

    [[and we sign/names/open ID?]]

    ps. we would like to assure you that we do realise it is a difficult job maintaining the position of automatic monopole in the ISP secor in Mauritius. But do keep in mind that monopoly is no excuse for mediocrity.

    and if you think this email/letter oozes a cold loathing and murderous hatred for your guts at every single word and punctuation… well, you are right and you have only yourselves to blame. [[I vote we keep the ps.]]

  100. avinash says

    18 May 2008 at 08:50

    :-)

  101. Ketwaroo D. Yaasir says

    18 May 2008 at 09:14

    ho hum…
    I was expecting you forward it first. then delete it. but I guess it’s not worth forwarding.

    say, maybe we should move the campaign to a new post. Loading this page takes about 3 minutes on my current connection. And I only had to refresh twice because it had stopped halfway through.

  102. armand says

    18 May 2008 at 18:15

    http://www.orange.mu/internet/faqs.php/#faq111

    1.11 why have we introduced the “fair usage policy”?

    We have introduced the Fair Usage Policy in April 2008 to ensure that all our Orange ADSL customers get the best possible and most reliable surfing experience.

    Picture a motorway where you should be going fast, say at 90 km/hour. Now picture a few heavy container trucks rolling along the same motorway all day every day. It’s obvious you will not be able to drive at optimum speed as you would have to share the road with those trucks.
    This is similar to what is happening on our networks: those container trucks are the heavy users on our internet networks. They download very large files 24 hours a day and 7 days a week, leaving less bandwidth for the rest of you. And we think it’s unfair that you should not be getting good speeds when you surf the internet because of a small number of our users.

    i. how do I know if I am a heavy user?

    Are you a big fan of peer-to-peer and continously download large files? Then there is a great chance that you are a heavy user. For example, if you are an ADSL Home 512K customer and you download over 5,000 music tracks per month or more than 30 movies per month and keep on doing this type of download every month, then you would qualify as a heavy user. This type of download is a large amount by any normal standard of usage.

    ii.how will the “fair usage policy” be put into practice?

    Your FUP threshold, i.e the amount of data that you can download will depend on the offer to which you are subscribed to. Monitoring of your downloads will be done on a monthly basis and if you exceed your FUP threshold over a period of 2 consecutive months, you will be subjected to FUP on the third month.
    So, for example:

    you exceed the FUP threshold for your package during month 1 and 2
    during month 3, you again exceed your threshold, say on the 21st of month 3
    after the 21st until the end of month 3, you will be subject to speed restrictions
    at the start of month 4, your speed will be back to normal as long as you do not again exceed the FUP threshold
    if you are being speed-restricted quite often, then we will contact you and may advise you to move to another package that is more suited to your download needs

    iii. what happens after I have been speed-restricted?

    You will be moved back to normal usage the following month but you will be speed-restricted again if you exceed the set threshold. If we find that you are being speed-restricted continuously, we will contact you to propose a package more suited to your needs. Speed restrictions will depend on the package you are subscribed to

    iv. what if I need to download large files without being speed restricted?

    Then you should move to another package with a higher bandwidth. The fair usage threshold for a My.T 512K is higher than that of My.T 256K, which means you are allowed heavier downloads with My.T 512K than My.T 256K. This is applicable across the board for all My.T and ADSL offers as well.

    v. what if I am not a heavy user?

    Then you have nothing to worry about. Even if you downloading heavily for one month but not the next, you will not qualify as a heavy user. More than 95% of our subscribers are NOT heavy users.

    vi. can I track my internet usage?

    Go to My Internet Account on http://www.orange.mu/my-account to check your internet usage online. You will need to enter your ADSL login and password.

  103. carrotmadman6 says

    18 May 2008 at 20:15

    @Ketwaroo

    There’s one important you missed. Why are My.T & ADSL prices the same?!?!? This point should definitely be raised since there’s no 1GB limit on My.T anymore (since a long time) & both services are restricted by the FUP.
    My.T 256k (2Mbps local) + Livebox + VOD + TNT = Rs. 750
    ADSL 128k = Rs. 750

    Should we mention any “reasonable limits” like 50GB for 512k? The point of the web being more interactive & bandwidth-hungry should also be raised – imposing a 1GB limit would prevent everyone from watching online videos, trying out rich internet applications.
    There’s one thing we shouldn’t forget as well that this FUP applies to both download & UPLOAD. :|

    How about their failed attempt at blocking Rapidshare.com “by implementing Internet Censorship” & hence “the assault on the basic human right of freedom to access information.” Should that be included?
    (On a second thought, NO – coz they can always shrug it off as a technical glitch) :|

    Summarize it as well:
    Our Demands:
    1. State cap limits for each connection.
    2. How our connection (privacy) is being monitored (breached)?
    2. What happens after we go beyond the limits?
    3. Any alternatives?
    4. Why do ADSL 128k & My.T 256k have the same price?

    As for the petition, there’s http://www.petitiononline.com/ & http://www.ipetitions.com/ :P

    PS: Here’s the letter I sent to the papers, but they didn’t publish it! :(
    In short, the ADSL connections that were previously unlimited (without any kind of restrictions) are now being capped.

    I would like to bring to the public’s attention that in light to the rebranding of Telecom Plus & Cellplus into Orange, there has been a major shift in ADSL traffic usage terms, that so far hasn’t been publicly announced by Mauritius Telecom.

    [quoting FUP here]

    While I understand that this is common practice in Europe & other countries, I resent the lack of transparency & the failure of Mauritius Telecom to communicate this change in policy to users. Furthermore, the cap limits for the offers haven’t been stated & any efforts to obtain that information from Customer Support have been unsuccessful.

    I believe that users have the right to know to what extent their traffic usage is being limited & I sincerely hope Mauritius Telecom will respond to my plea.

    An Internet User

    PS2:
    In Canada ISPs have to justify why they are throttling traffic. But Mauritius… is Mauritius – that will never happen here. (link to article) :(

    PS3:
    FUP on News on Sunday. Stab in the back indeed! :P
    Check on geekscribes.net

  104. avinash says

    18 May 2008 at 21:45

    Hi,

    I nearly forgot about the News on Sunday article. A journalist called me during the week and asked me some questions on the FUP. I basically explained to him what I wrote in my post and also some of the issues we talked about.

    I also spent some time talking about caching and proxying but he didn’t talk about that in the article.

    Thanks carrotmadman6 for reminding us.

  105. armand says

    18 May 2008 at 21:49

    so both 128k and myt are the same so move to myt and get a setup box to watch tnt.

  106. Ketwaroo D. Yaasir says

    19 May 2008 at 03:08

    @armand thanks for updating us with the new FAQ.

    last time I checked, that whole section of the orange site was throwing up 404 errors. seems they tried to catch up a bit after the News on Sunday article got published.

    It may be more worded but it is still very very vague. probably more nebulous that before.

    over 5,000 music tracks per month or more than 30 movies per month

    what kind of mucic? encoded in mp3 ogg or FLAC? raw PCM even? what kind of movies? 700MB? 1/4 DVD? 1/3 DVD? full DVD iso? blu ray iso?

    how the heck can you compare a low speed heavy lorry goods with an unspecified vehicle in which you recklessly driving on the motorway?

    I mean carrot is right, people with lower connection simply can’t be accused of abusing since they can’t abuse anything. and should probably be getting a much lower price.

    so both 128k and myt are the same so move to myt and get a setup box to watch tnt.

    that is not very useful or even helpful information. It’s not even very informative and furthermore… hey wait… it doesn’t make any sense… what are you talking about? myt is allegedly 256Kbits, isn’t it?

    off topic, http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=6020959511&topic=4184

    and I know it’s a bit rude hijacking your blog comment section to ask about this. But it’s more helpful than their help lines. (well, that’s not completely true. the sweet level 1 voice is very kind and helpful when it concerns simple things like lost passwords, but for anything technical she’ll refer you a very rude “technician” whose favourite phrase is “kieter?? ki to per kozer la?”).

    anyway, does anybody else want to have a go at writing/updating that letter to the account for the new FAQ?

  107. Ketwaroo D. Yaasir says

    19 May 2008 at 03:20

    ah yes, I forgot:

    on the 30 movies a month bit. What about the guy who is suscribed to an overseas video on demand service and downloads one movie everyday.

    Ok, I don’t do that myself. but you get the idea.

    for example, blocking rapidshare. There are many mauritians who have bought premium accounts on rapidshare.com. that’s money not spent ditectly on Orange but which relies on Orange not fucking up at every occasion it gets.

    also note the , we will contact you to propose a package more suited to your needs

    since even the highest package available to residential users is FUP limited, this would mean they have undisclosed offers. Probably to leech even more money from us just so that we can temporarily bypass the FUP.

    I would still be very curious to know what is the whole amount of bandwidth MT/Orange has at its disposal and how it goes about splitting it between the businesses and home users…

  108. Eddy Young says

    19 May 2008 at 13:30

    A FEW words of caution: DO NOT SUGGEST ANYTHING RESEMBLING A MONTHLY CAP ON DOWNLOAD.

    The FUP is better for the user. Under the FUP, how much you download is not important; what matters is how much bandwidth you use.

    Under FUP, your bandwidth is capped for a certain duration if your recent usage has been very high and the overall network is saturated. Once the congestion clears up, your maximum bandwidth is restored. Compare this to a monthly cap which would cripple your connection past the limit on download until the next billing period starts.

    Eddy.

  109. Eddy Young says

    19 May 2008 at 13:50

    BY FUP, I mean it in the way that I assume it has been implemented, that is, short and temporary caps on bandwidth for users who download continuously.

    However, the FUP could have been implemented as a monthly download limit past which your bandwidth is reduced until the start of the next billing period.

    Maybe, how FUP is actually implemented is a better question to ask of Orange management. Then, further clarifications could be requested following the first answers.

    The important thing is to start a conversation between users and Orange.

    Eddy.

  110. armand says

    19 May 2008 at 16:52

    mt called me after I sent a email to chairman of Mauritius telecom

    the caps limit on 128k is 10gb
    Myt 256K is 3gb

    if you are a heavy user they prefer you take 256k business package

  111. n!135h says

    19 May 2008 at 19:29

    tou sa reply la -_-….hmm pou alle lire sa >_< (dernier fois ti lor comment 50 me think)

    Okay i havent read the other replies,so if it has been brought forward, my apologies…i was browsing a cool site and saw something interesting

    according to http://www.ip2location.com/ip2location-internet-ip-address-2008-report.aspx , mauritius is 22th in “The Percentage of IP Address Ownership by Country in 2007” with 0.5185% …. (We are one rank above india)

    I dnt know bt how much this report is exact but i trust this site and if it really reflects the truth of things,means we use a lot of IPs (if my understanding is correct on the report) and out of those IPs, we are sure to have some “heavy” downloaders….with the limited bandwidth we have to the net and the ratio of light and heavy users the FUP was bound to hit us anyway

    I was talking to a friend the other day and one possibility is that if each and every net users decides to upgrade to a higher bandwidth (lets say a minimum of 256 Kbps), the ISP will be forced to either limit subscribers (which is less likely to happen) or buy more bandwidth to the outside world and in one way, the limit of the FUP might go up (though i dnt think it will ever be taken out completely)

    p.s. i just saw this
    “So, for example:

    you exceed the FUP threshold for your package during month 1 and 2
    during month 3, you again exceed your threshold, say on the 21st of month 3
    after the 21st until the end of month 3, you will be subject to speed restrictions
    at the start of month 4, your speed will be back to normal as long as you do not again exceed the FUP threshold”

    correct me if i am wrong but the fact that you ARE on restriction technically means you wnt be able to fit in the category of heavy user as long as you are in that so how exactly can they tell that you are still a heavy user while being restricted -_-

    p.s.2 good comment @ 111 and 112 (though others might be as well, but i didnt read them,sorry)

  112. avinash says

    19 May 2008 at 20:52

    What do you mean, Armand?

    The FUP states that:

    “Your FUP threshold, i.e the amount of data that you can download will depend on the offer to which you are subscribed to. Monitoring of your downloads will be done on a monthly basis and if you exceed your FUP threshold over a period of 2 consecutive months, you will be subjected to FUP on the third month. ”

    It seems that you are implying that all MyT 256kbit/s users can download 3Gb per month without exceeding their FUP threshold. This is around 100Mb per day.

  113. Ketwaroo D. Yaasir says

    19 May 2008 at 21:01

    correct me if i am wrong but the fact that you ARE on restriction technically means you wnt be able to fit in the category of heavy user as long as you are in that so how exactly can they tell that you are still a heavy user while being restricted -_-

    he means we are being taken for idiots by Orange…

  114. armand says

    19 May 2008 at 21:03

    yes and 128k home can download 10gb

    If you are a heavy user well go for a 256k business package

  115. carrotmadman6 says

    19 May 2008 at 21:35

    @Eddy

    I’m confused at what you mean by what matters is how much bandwidth you use. When i’m downloading i’m using full bandwidth, no? (full 128kbit/s for me) It’s only when you are surfing that you don’t use all the bandwidth.

    I guess it’s clear enough: –
    “Your FUP threshold, i.e. the amount of data that you can download will depend on the offer to which you are subscribed to. Monitoring of your downloads will be done on a monthly basis and if you exceed your FUP threshold over a period of 2 consecutive months, you will be subjected to FUP on the third month.”
    In other words, there’s indeed a monthly DOWNLOAD cap.

    Read the terms well:
    “- you exceed the FUP threshold for your package during month 1 and 2”
    Let’s put it at xGB. You go beyond xGB for 2 months in a row. They monitor you (& raise their digital eyebrows).

    “- during month 3, you again exceed your threshold, say on the 21st of month 3”
    “- after the 21st until the end of month 3, you will be subject to speed restrictions”

    U go beyond the cap xGB for 3rd month – they reduce ur bandwidth! :(

    “- at the start of month 4, your speed will be back to normal as long as you do not again exceed the FUP threshold”
    & it’s not temporary. Go beyond xGB for the 4th month, again bandwidth reduced….
    Do it repeatedly, they contact you, telling you to “upgrade” your connection.

    [But I guess it’s flexible. If u do 50GB for 1 month & then 10GB for the next month… then they won’t bother u (hopefully).]

    & here it is – Orange themselves have suggested it:
    5000 tracks at 5MB per mp3 track = 25GB
    30 movies at 700MB per movie = 21GB
    So that’s around 20GB for 512k.

  116. carrotmadman6 says

    19 May 2008 at 21:42

    Oops… didn’t see the last comments.

    @Armand
    The caps limit on 128k is 10gb
    Myt 256K is 3gb

    Can you confirm that? That’s supercrap! :(
    I wonder what’s the limit for Adsl 512k & My.T 512k??? :|

  117. Ketwaroo D. Yaasir says

    19 May 2008 at 22:38

    actually…. n!135h mentionned the business packages

    http://www.orange-business.mu/adsl-tariffs/

    seems the 2Mb line is the one costing Rs10,000. (something that would make most of the people I know overseas gag and throw up. 2mb/s is what you’d get free with your breakfast cereals…)

    the 256K Business line is a rather hard bargain @ Rs2200 (incl vat) but it somewhat seems, and I really really loathe using the word in this context, … “reasonable”…

    Well for me anyway, since some in my household and myself *need* a reliable internet connection. I mean how the hell are you going to be able to work at home with a shitty 3gb limit on your head? Only trouble though is that I will really miss having the 256K upload rate of myt….

    would be funny if everybody, who could afford to, decided to do the same thing and them Orange would suddenly decide to FUP their business users too.

    note also that the usage limits are clearly stated for ADSL Pro users. so Orange really is taking home users for idiots.

    and reading the News on sunday article scanned on geekscribe.net

    there are only 28,500 broadband subscribers in mauritius?

    and here I thought they were having the difficult task of handling a huge demand.

    if all of us were downloading at 256 kbits simultaneously (which we obviously can’t) that would still be about 8 gigabits/second. Which on the scale of the SAFE line+sattelites+whatever can’t be that bad. I may not be an expert but it seems to me they could even accommodate a larger number of subscribers without breaking too much stuff.

    another idea to fight the FUP, have some people stand in front of the orange teleshops and hand out flyers to anyone going in to alert they to the scams they are victim of.

    I really hope MT senior employees are reading this comment section and realise how much I loathe their company.

  118. Daniel says

    19 May 2008 at 23:14

    Unless an ISP can provide you with your usage information, they cannot really expect you to remain within any kind of limits. The average user of broadband does not have the technical knowledge to know what their volume downloaded is or what bandwidth they’re using. And something like streaming radio can consume a lot of bandwidth pretty much constantly and quite legally.

    Therefore, the ISP needs to provide a means for the average user to be able to know when and if they reach any threshold before they can fairly restrict you in anyway. Of course ISPs are not always fair.

    However, on the My.T web site and quoted above from the FUP is:
    “If your usage continues to be very high, we’ll advise you if your usage is excessive.”

    I understand this to mean that they are required by their own policy to warn you before they limit you in any way. I would say that if anyone has any limit imposed on their broadband without getting a warning first, they have a very good case to complain and make a stink in the press at least.

  119. vicks says

    20 May 2008 at 00:14

    @ Armand

    could you please clear

    “the caps limit on 128k is 10gb
    Myt 256K is 3gb”

    if you are a heavy user they prefer you take 256k business package

    so basically its a raise in price for previous adsl 512k users lol

    avant || apres
    512k unlimited @1360+vat || same service for 3,190+vat

    i still don’t understand y they haven’t reduce their prices, we are in way forced to use and download less due to FUP..)

    also does business package means only for business? company? do we actually have to prove that we own a business to be eligible?

  120. Eddy Young says

    20 May 2008 at 13:10

    I AM very disappointed by the way FUP has been implemented by Orange, as it is far from being the best and does not alleviate the problem of “missing bandwidth” so much loathed by users.

    BTW are Orange management reading this thread? Otherwise, how could the contract be changed so suddenly to include clarifications about the FUP?

    Now, if only they would take some hints from me, everyone would be happy :-)

    With the current implementation, some users are free to “abuse” their connection for two consecutive months and then some in a third month before being capped. During all that time, the rest are penalised with slow downloads. At the same time, the abusers have valid reasons to complain about poor service when under restricted bandwidth for the rest of the month.

    But, I still hope that the figures cited are only for guidance and not strictly implemented, and that the casual user will not be affected too badly.

    Maybe moderation is the key to salvation after all. If you take frequent breaks when downloading, the software should see you as a moderate user and not flag your account for limitation.

    Eddy.

  121. avinash says

    20 May 2008 at 13:57

    Interesting point Eddy.

    It’s true that the proposed scheme is not foolproof at all. Maybe putting names online is the way to go after all… In this way, abusers will be despised like spammers :-)

  122. n!135h says

    20 May 2008 at 17:27

    @Ketwaroo, year i was think abt that too ^^ (referring to 117)

    after read this though
    http://www.adam.com.au/products_home_homeadsl.php
    “Excess Shaped
    All AdamDirect & Adam Home accounts have a monthly quota. Should you exceed that quota you will not incur any additional charges. Instead, your account will automatically be ‘shaped’ (reduced in speed) to 64k/64k (roughly twice as fast as dial-up) until the start of your next billing cycle. This will occur if you exceed your monthly quota on any data allocation (Download, Upload, Local (DDB), or Off Peak traffic). Each traffic allocation is counted individually and shaping will only occur if you exceed one or more allocation (not the total). Data usage can be checked from our members area at any time. Shaping is subject to a fair use policy.”

    I somehow prefer the FUP rather a scheme as above.
    Furthermore i agree with Ketwaroo on comment 121, the price is way too high and if i had the choice (and im sure its not restricted to me alone), i would have shifted for the unlimited connection one… We all are at some point in time heavy downloaders, may it be in term of leaching, sharing or streaming contents (remember, today ppl want better quality for their streams, even if its free :P…as a matter of fact, standard quality is already good and you pay for better, both imply higher bandwidth) and if they really want us to be a cyber island with most of the ppl connected to the net, they better take the price down….i mean,its not like you download 24/7, remember, we pay for electricity as well and it aint cheap….what the use of having a mighty connection of unlimited bandwidth if you have to shutdown your pc at times…They should have realised that by now that even the heavy downloaders will stop at times….

    for comment 124, Eddy, i think that if they feel we are heavy downloaders (if you keep on burning the chance they give you, say if you are caught i dunno 3 times), then cancel this type of subscription to the user…as a matter of fact, i think the key issue behind the heavy users moving for better connection is price as stated before and my guess is that they didnt take into consideration the way of live of Mauritian as a whole

    p.s. i dnt know if you are aware bt i was looking at DCL’s offer the day and it was more expensive than MT and a further investigation in the price showed that we payed more there because they had to use MT’s phone line and we even had to pay DCL Rs1000 which would be forwarded to MT as conversion fee….with hurdles like this, its no doubt that other ISP have to offer a much higher price to a price which i think is rather high (prices of adsl home and pro here as i see myt’s offer as affordable for the connection you get)

  123. n!135h says

    20 May 2008 at 17:49

    p.s. my wandering mind >_<

    “for comment 124, Eddy, i think that if they feel we are heavy downloaders (if you keep on burning the chance they give you, say if you are caught i dunno 3 times), then cancel this type of subscription to the user…as a matter of fact, i think the key issue behind the heavy users moving for better connection is price as stated before and my guess is that they didnt take into consideration the way of live of Mauritian as a whole”…. they would notice that each have specific needs, ranging from the casual email checks to music streaming and LAN games and that in respect with some of the salary of a person v/s price of net+price of electricity, since we cannt throttle the price of electricity,we would rather on net though the desire to use it as it should is still there…..

    Someone correct me on this, but i recall reading somewhere that the price we pay for net is composed of 2 parts, the actual price+a price which goes to a fund because of the investment in SAFE (i know i read something similar for phone connection on http://www.icta.mu/mediaoffice/2008/iuc_04_08.htm
    “…..The regulator’s decision comes in the wake of a Cabinet of Ministers’ decision on 25 April 2008 pertaining to Interconnection Usage Charges (IUC) and a new provision on Access Deficit Compensation (ADC).

    The Directive, which defines the cost-based IUC and the mode of payment between the operators is in line with the Government’s policy for the telecommunications sector. ” )

    Granted that MT did invest a lot in this sector, but hasnt most of the investment been paid off by now (considering the rather high prices they charge for the business sector) and why not target quantity…the more subscriber you have, the more possibility there is for income (considering that Rs1000 for a conversion fee is a bit high, http://www.tschmidt.com/writings/Broadband%20First-Mile_files/image007.jpg, its just jumping from the single line to a DSLAM though there is the cost of the latter which i guess would be recovered and after that, its profit..)

  124. Anon says

    20 May 2008 at 18:10

    Oh? The 10GB limit has been confirmed? It’s not that bad, 10GB per month on a 128Kbps line. Wonder what about 512Kbps and 1 Mbps.. Are they around 20-30GB?

    I find this cap to be quite resonable. You are able to freely download, without really going overboard. For me, a 20GB cap would be ok. That’d be minimum I would say. It’s way better than 1 GB / month at the very least! :D

    Of course, a ridiculously priced 2Mbps at Rs.10000+ doesn’t improve things. Oh, how the French people must be laughing after seeing this, as compared to their Rs.1200 8Mbps from… Orange! :P

    Btw.. I don’t find putting names online a good thing. My usage might be normal for you, but seem abusive to you. It’s really not fair to do something like this. I’m paying for my connection, so I can use it as much as I want, since it is unlimited.

    What they could have done is implement restrictions during peak hours on heavy downloaders that download 24/7. Therefore, during peaks, their speed gets lowered, but off-peak, they get normal speed. There is no “consecutive months” or anything.

  125. armand says

    20 May 2008 at 18:45

    I am asking the same question if I can put a business adsl on a home line.

    But I told them I was downloading 15gb per month

  126. Bilbo says

    20 May 2008 at 21:56

    “the caps limit on 128k is 10gb
    Myt 256K is 3gb”

    From my part, I would not have wished reading those very figures. The reason is that if MT wish to leverage access to middle-income households bent on maxing out on their 256K lines, this is a harsh step backwards. Friends of mine hardly limit their monthly downloads to lower than 5GB!

    Should I be happy with that given that I’m logging onto my good old 128K every evening after work and still wishing I could enrich my learning experience over the Web and buffer my Youtube videos in a breeze? Speed is the key, as always it will be. Perhaps my self-inflicted decision at resisting the endless calls from MT to upgrade to MyT were a blessing…time will tell…

  127. Ketwaroo D. Yaasir says

    20 May 2008 at 22:54

    I understand this to mean that they are required by their own policy to warn you before they limit you in any way. I would say that if anyone has any limit imposed on their broadband without getting a warning first, they have a very good case to complain and make a stink in the press at least.

    I have I think a question…

    How do I go about proving my connection speed is what is appears to be?

    because from my current connection speeds, which hover around 3-7 KBps, I think I am being penalised (possibly for my outspokenness). And I haven’t received any kind of warning.

    I mean if I were to take their reports on divide the total usage by time connected, I get an average of 22KBps. which is pushing the limits of credulity a bit too far.

    I’ve tried http://www.speedtest.net/ but it refuses to load…

    In this way, abusers will be despised like spammers

    wrong side of the wall buddy…

  128. Ketwaroo D. Yaasir says

    21 May 2008 at 11:17

    oh well. last comment from me then. I’ve spammed this post enough I think…

    an addendum: I wrote actually…. n!135h mentionned the business packages when actually it should have been actually…. armand mentionned the business packages sorry for any confusion.

    I sent them the following email on Tuesday, May 20, 2008 at 10:39 AM

    salutations,

    I am actually a residential subscriber to Orange’s ADSL service. the My.T 256 home package.

    Since the introduction of a fair use policy, it has become apparent that all home user packages offered by Orange are crippled by insultingly low monthly download limits.

    Following this appalling decrease in quality of service, I am considering taking a business package. Not by choice mind you. If Orange did not hold the automatic monopole over landline ADSL service, I would have washed my hands with the lot of you a long time ago.

    Anyway, I wanted to ask about the ADSL Business 256K package. Does business package imply that I have to prove that I run a business to be eligible? Or can I subscribe to the business package even as a residential user?

    please note that I am querying these details for other Orange ADSL subscribers as well. I am very probably going to publish your answer in one form or another.

    – Ketwaroo Yaasir

    That was about 24 hours ago and they haven’t replied yet. …and re-reading it, I don’t think they will. I tend to write in a straight line and abuse the adjectives when I am unduly irritated….

    @n!135h

    your comments are actually very informative.

    The cost of life in mauritius is something which one should also keep in mind when reading the http://www.adam.com.au/products_home_homeadsl.php
    we have to realise that a 1$ bill is to them what a Rs5 coin is to us(probably less in fact), and not go multiplying everything by 28 and gasp at how lucky we must be and what a bastard that ketwaroo is for complaining so much.

    Given the massive profits MT/Orange are making, they must have recovered their investment by now. And seeing as technology is one of those things that get cheaper by the numbers, they’d probably get better quality/quantity submarine optical cables than SAFE if they were to reinvest in that direction again.

    It might even have been a bad idea to privatise(or liberalise, whatever the appropriate term is) the telco sector. If Mauritius telecom was government owned, and by some extraordinary luck we had people with a vision to accomplish instead of shareholders to satisfy. people who could proudly say “profits? ha! who gives a shit? we’re just here to provide a decently priced and reliable backbone for telecommunication services. And since we like our jobs, we’ll keep making more connections within out borders and to the rest of the world until the Krakens of the deep start drawing up petitions against us for excessive cabling on their lawns.”

    bonhomme Jugnauth (it was his political war cry first I think) would have decreed “get it done!” and it would have been done (I wasn’t too hot on politics when he was in power. but I’m told he wasn’t quite as much of an asshat as the rest of them). All that on tax money of course, but since it would have been for the public good and the opportunities for the whole country it would create would have been worth it.

    That’s just a thought though…

  129. V!N$H! says

    25 May 2008 at 11:20

    I think some may find this article interesting…

    http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/146137/mauritius_telecoms_profit_at_record_high.html

  130. Drake says

    1 July 2008 at 10:37

    Someone just said over there that he gets only 22kb per sec with a myT 256. Thats all!!! I get an average of 20kb per sec with my 128kbps modem (After having teaked my PC of course)
    Imagine now with a myT; i would get 45kb per sec!!
    For the FUP I think the only solution is to hide your IP.
    I have 3G phone that can be used as modem(460kbps) on a PC and i heard somewhere that there are special configs that made you acess internet for free WITHOUT EATING MONEY from your prepaid sim card(Emtel) (I think you should insert a special IP and proxy in the phone’s configs & the software of the phone (I got an LG KU250)
    Does anyone know these stuffs about free internet with a 3G phone?

  131. Eddy Young says

    1 July 2008 at 14:32

    @Drake: Stealing free Internet connectivity is the first step to a life of crime. What next? Will you ask us where to source dope?

    Eddy.

  132. carrotmadman6 says

    1 July 2008 at 16:16

    @Drake
    Would you mind sharing you 20KB/s “tweaks” with my 128k connection?? :P

    As a matter of fact, i’ve been surfing for over 2 months last year on FREE GPRS on my ex-Cellplus. :P
    But then it became paid… :(
    But you can still surf for free on Orange 3G…. just use a empty sim! LOL :D

  133. Drake says

    2 July 2008 at 10:51

    @Eddy: Stealing FREE?? How can you steal something that’s free.
    What you said was just like to steal a free brochure in a supermarket, or park your car in a free parking area.
    You wanna get some tweaking for your pc, thats what you asked carrotmadman6?
    Are you joking when you’re telling me that we can surf free using orange??
    And what you mean by using an empty sim? leaving the sim card “slot” empty?(p.s: me dont like jokes)

  134. carrotmadman6 says

    2 July 2008 at 13:37

    @Drake
    Yep, contact info on my blog. :)

    Nah, just use a SIM without any credit to browse on 3G. & when you recharge Orange wont charge you anything! :P

  135. Eddy Young says

    2 July 2008 at 20:18

    @Avinash: Re-reading your posts (and my comments to see if and where they are out of line), I cannot but think what a shame it is that you have to restrict yourself to a 256 kb/s connection when there is so much information to be found out there. How do you cope? Seriously?

    Eddy.

  136. Eddy Young says

    2 July 2008 at 20:19

    @carrotmadman6: This must be the hack of the year. But, I guess it’s just a matter of time before this hole is plugged now that it has been revealed.

    Eddy.

  137. selven says

    2 July 2008 at 23:30

    Someone just said over there that he gets only 22kb per sec with a myT 256. Thats all!!! I get an average of 20kb per sec with my 128kbps modem (After having teaked my PC of course)
    Imagine now with a myT; i would get 45kb per sec!!

    dude, i know that am not that good in maths :p but hell, you are pushing it a bit too far :p 128kbps ~= 16.6KB/s
    and 256kbps ~= 30 something KB/s

    so get a life, i bet you hell don’t understand a sh!t about tweaking.

    Are you joking when you’re telling me that we can surf free using orange??
    And what you mean by using an empty sim? leaving the sim card “slot” empty

    dude, ones surfs with a surf board.

    what do you mean by “what do you mean by using an empty sim??” hell an empty sim doesn’t mean and empty sim card slot, that’s just plain english, you are drunk or high???

    and as far as the thread, hell, am severely being affected by that fup, its taking me 8 hours to download 200MB of osx updates!

    ps. at avinash, you got any troubles with SoftwareUpdate process continuously downloading stuffs in the background?? i was supprised yesterday when after i found that my connection was slow that in that sluggish state, and doing a tcpdump showed softwareupdate was running in the background without asking me and downloading something…. weird thing is that i verified the app, its the legit one. though no reason as to why it was doing so

    +selven

  138. Drake says

    3 July 2008 at 12:24

    By the way, don’t expect 20kb per sec with rapishare free.

  139. avinash says

    3 July 2008 at 14:40

    To Eddy:

    How do I cope with 256kbit/s? Very well I guess except for videos. As a matter of fact, at the University of Mauritius, academics have crappy Internet connections and consistently achieving 256kbit/s is just a dream.

    But then I’m only talking about a new college. The UoM is nothing more than a glorified college now. IMHO.

  140. selven says

    3 July 2008 at 15:15

    hell did i forget to close some blockquote tags above?

    By the way, don’t expect 20kb per sec with rapishare free.

    btw drake, actually, me and my friends have compared downloading from rapidshare and mosth ave agreed that many times it averages to 38KB/s …. which is kind of weird, could there be a local mirror somewhere???

  141. Drake says

    3 July 2008 at 15:15

    Selven is just a lamer!! i dnt get 16 kb per sec with my 128kps modem! i usually get 20 kb to 25 kb per sec!! Go and learn how to tweak, cause me i use real hacker tools! Not lamer tools!
    And ive just used a myT 256
    The result: 46kb to 52 kb per sec!!
    LAMER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  142. avinash says

    3 July 2008 at 15:36

    Calling Selven a lamer is very very dangerous ;-)

  143. Eddy Young says

    3 July 2008 at 16:40

    I suppose if you’re mostly reading on the web, 256 kb/s is quite adequate.

    Has the situation at the university become so worse for you to qualify it as a glorified college? What is wrong with it in your opinion? I thought the financial troubles were over.

    Eddy.

  144. Eddy Young says

    3 July 2008 at 16:42

    @Selven: On Tiger at least, Software Update does not download in the background. Are you on Leopard? If yes, surely there must be a Preferences pane that allows you to disable automatic software update.

    Eddy.

  145. Anascrash04 says

    3 July 2008 at 17:33

    Hard to believe, but if u insist that much why not share it with us :D

  146. selven says

    3 July 2008 at 19:16

    Before we proceed on, i wanted to show you the soon to be release trailer of the movie called “The 1337 Drake”
    ———————————————————————–

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJBbT7EUFpA

    ———————————————————————-

    okay so now we can proceed on

    Selven is just a lamer!! i dnt get 16 kb per sec with my 128kps modem! i usually get 20 kb to 25 kb per sec!! Go and learn how to tweak, cause me i use real hacker tools! Not lamer tools!

    okay, i am extremely sorry mister Drake, please forgive my lameness… i couldn’t comprehend your grandeur… I came to realize your leetness until too late… anywayz, please let me explain humbly how i came to that conclusion…

    I know that i am not that good at maths, but please hold on a minute, i’ll try to use a calculator..

    what is does 128kbps means?

    it literally means, 128 [one hundred and twenty eight] kilo bits per seconds. not to be confused with 128KBps, i.e one hundred and twenty eight kilo bytes per second.

    …now if i have properly studied well (anyways a leet person knows that this information can be obtained anywhere[http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Why_a_byte_is_equal_to_eight_bits&alreadyAsked=1&rtitle=How_many_bits_in_1_byte]), that

    1 byte == 8 bits

    8 bits = 1 byte

    1 kilo byte = 1024 bytes

    1 bit = 1/8 byte

    128 bit = (1/8) x 128 = 16bytes

    since we know that 1 kilo bit = 1000 bits
    [assuming we are using the old standards]
    [with the new standard it will be 1 kilo bit = 1024 bits]
    128kilo bits= (1/8) x 128 x 1000 = 16,000 bytes [old standard]

    128kilo bits= (1/8) x 128 x 1024 = 16,384 bytes [new standard]

    since we know 1 kilo byte = 1024 bytes…

    (Remembering standard 4’s arithmetic, how many 50 cents are there in 10 rupees, usually then we used to divide 10 by 0.5 since the cents is the one we makes up the big rupee thing…. anywayz sorry for blanking out and thinking about standard 4)

    so,
    16,000 bytes = 16,000 / 1024 = 15.525 Kilo Bytes [old standard]
    16,384 bytes = 16,384 / 1024 = 16 Kilo Bytes [new standard]
    ….
    [that is how many kilo bytes are there in that 16,000bytes]

    So i came to the conclusion that, 128kbps is around 15KB/s, ofcourse, 16KB/s if you prefer new std and it would be closer to your super tweaks.

    But ofcourse there was one thing that i didn’t count in my calculations then…. it was your leetness… since none of the mathematical rules applies to you, neither do laws of physics (since of course you are leet..please again forgive me for having underestimated you), then you results are definitely true, as due to you magical tweaks, all laws of physics and maths fails.

    I MYSELF DO NOT BELIEVE IN MATHS NOR PHYSICS, BECAUSE THOSE THINGS ARE EXTREMELY JUST HYPOTHESIS, BUT I AM USING IT TO SHOW MY LOGIC HERE SINCE YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT A SYSTEM THAT MAKES USE OF THOSE SYSTEMS TO WORK

    reference you might like:

    http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_bytes_in_1_kilo_byte

    http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Why_a_byte_is_equal_to_eight_bits&alreadyAsked=1&rtitle=How_many_bits_in_1_byte

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbit/s#kilobit_per_second

    http://www.google.com/search?hl=de&q=what+is+128kilobit+in+kilobyte&btnG=Suche&meta=

    new standards
    http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJBbT7EUFpA

    -Yours truly and humbly…
    S3lv3n a.k.a $3|v3n or PC_THE_GREAT
    have a nice day Drake the almighty l337

  147. selven says

    3 July 2008 at 19:42

    if you want the high definition of it, it is available here http://thegodof.net/movies/drake.m4v

  148. csyke says

    3 July 2008 at 19:57

    i agree with avinash…
    don’t mess with selven…

  149. n!135h says

    3 July 2008 at 20:01

    okay this is getting to no good. Drake plz, you are simply pwning yourself here mate.
    given that i am too far from the exchange (more than 4km :(), i dnt get tnt because the SNR would be too great and mess the net i get..so im on these:
    “Débit montant 124 Kb/s (Intlv[LP0])
    Débit descendant 2036 Kb/s (Intlv[LP0])”

    Still i get an average of 25~40kb/s on rapidshare…strange isnt it.

    “i dnt get 16 kb per sec with my 128kps modem! i usually get 20 kb to 25 kb per sec!! ”

    I would beg you to differ. You maybe get peaks of 20~25KB/s…continuous means something is wrong (i am no expert in that field, so i wnt comment much..but maybe they had accidentally given you something). I can get peaks of 60KB/s…bt usually the average is between 20~38kb/s..btw my peaks last only 1 sec ^^)

    yeps selven, you are rright, 256 should give 32KB/s…

    “Go and learn how to tweak, cause me i use real hacker tools! Not lamer tools!”

    For this one, i am sure when i say i would beg you to differ :). Just hope you didnt unleashed anything bad out there ;) (p.s. this is a joke :D)

    p.s.s. i found something nice :)..want to share ^^
    http://www.paulgraham.com/gba.html
    “To the popular press, “hacker” means someone who breaks into computers. Among programmers it means a good programmer.”

  150. n!135h says

    3 July 2008 at 20:03

    p.s.2

    and i second Mr Avinash..calling selven a lamer ….dangerous….

    :)

  151. csyke says

    3 July 2008 at 20:13

    and btw drake, since 128kbps=16 KBps…. it seems weird that you are achieving anything above 16K…
    i dont want to go techie about how adsl works… you will just have to take my word for it… if you are using MT adsl 128, you can’t go above 16 KBps… your port speed on the local exchange is limited…
    most logical explanation you are using some downloader which is wrongly reporting the current download speed…

    and as a side note, there is no such thing as “hacker tools”, you better go and learn about what a hacker is before talking big…

    en attendant cya….

    oh and yeah… its rude calling someone a lamer, can you tell us which primary school you attend? we might want to talk to your head master about good manners issues with his current students…

  152. avinash says

    3 July 2008 at 21:48

    In fact I’ve given my 4 months notice at the UoM and leaving at the end of August :-)

  153. Eddy Young says

    3 July 2008 at 21:56

    @Avinash: Finally swimming into the open sea? Beware of the sharks :-)

    Eddy. (My last comment before I start Leopard installation)

  154. king_trojan says

    3 July 2008 at 22:32

    Dear expert ( Drake) ,
    I’m impressed that you TWEAK ur poor pc/modem to get 20-25 kbps ..i use a myT 256 kbps and i get 1.13 MBPS ..do u have any explanation for this?toi qui c’est tou ..toi qui est si puissant ..^^..

    Screenshot :
    http://i30.tinypic.com/vovsm0.jpg

  155. An@$cr4sHâ–‘4 says

    3 July 2008 at 22:55

    Hi Drake
    what about mine? :p
    any explanation for this ?

    Screenshot
    http://i25.tinypic.com/333a8ba.jpg

    i made this with my uTorrent on, so,, would u say i used better hackers tools than yours? or my dad works at Orange ^^?

  156. selven says

    3 July 2008 at 23:03

    ayooo king trojan stop with your manipulated screenshot again la…

  157. Anon says

    3 July 2008 at 23:30

    Ahhh a good ole’ flame. Nice nice… Long time I’ve not seen that! :D

    Anyways, 128KBps = max 16KBps by 1KB = 1024B. Peaks of 20KBps are possible, but anyways, it’s just peaks.

    And calling Selven a lamer is not a wise thing to do. Not wise at all…

    I still wonder how “hacker tools” come in this discussion. By definition, wouldn’t somebody that uses “hacker tools” be called a script kiddie? I’m just a n00b, so I don’t really know. Just wondering.

    Btw..

    “To the popular press, “hacker” means someone who breaks into computers. Among programmers it means a good programmer.”

    Among geeks, a hacker is somebody to be revered and who’s feats are to be appreciated. (A quote I once saw on a blog) ;)

  158. Anon says

    3 July 2008 at 23:36

    Whoops… Typo: 128KBps should have been Kbps.

    Anyways, 128Kbps = max 16KBps by 1KB = 1024B. Peaks of 20KBps are possible, but anyways, it’s just peaks.

  159. Sundeep says

    3 July 2008 at 23:39

    If i were Drake, i wouldn’t use the internet ever again..

  160. csyke says

    3 July 2008 at 23:44

    avinash, so ur finally leaving uom? might i ask where you are going?

    btw i agree with eddy, sharks are no good for your health… and it seems there are plenty around these days…

  161. avinash says

    4 July 2008 at 00:46

    I’m exploring some options. I’ve not decided yet. As for sharks, they have always existed…

  162. Eddy Young says

    4 July 2008 at 02:00

    I reckon that your background in academia would make you perfect for a trainer’s job. Maybe get trained and work as a methodology mentor?

    Re: Software Update, the background download can be disabled from the Preferences pane of the Software Update software.

    Eddy.

  163. selven says

    4 July 2008 at 02:09

    poor me, i really wanted to check out the PL classes…
    :p imagine you having a badge tied on your neck :p lmao that would be damned funny!
    am really curious what the options are :p everyone’s been curious about that lately… :D i wonder if there’s a secret google card among those options.

    but btw, now that i think about it, the normal trend is young people work normal job, and when the grow old they move to the academics part [talking about people who are into research and all], but are you not doing the opposite? i.e being in the academic sector when you were young and moving to the other side when you turned old? :p

  164. avinash says

    4 July 2008 at 09:48

    To Selven:

    I am not that old :-)

    It’s true that I have been in the tertiary education sector for many years. I started in 1999 at the Mauritius Chamber of Commerce and Industry in fact. Now it’s time for me to do something else.

    Mind you. I *love* teaching. And that’s why I think Eddy is spot on. I’ll never be able to prevent myself teaching…

    As I’ve written above, I’m currently exploring some options. But nothing is confirmed yet.

  165. selven says

    4 July 2008 at 09:58

    well if you love teaching, get a job that pays well but requires less times, then you can use of the free time for teaching :D

  166. selven says

    4 July 2008 at 10:05

    heya anascrash, referring to your screenshot, what’s that folder “the last vampir..” some sort of movie or tv show? [which probably i haven’t seen but interested… can ya gimme the full name please]

  167. selven says

    4 July 2008 at 10:07

    anascrash: nevermind its blood the last vampire most certainly, already watched

  168. An@$cr4sHâ–‘4 says

    4 July 2008 at 19:39

    @ selven , its an E-book, christopher’s pike : The Last Vampire, 6books total, the best book i read so far

  169. Drake says

    4 July 2008 at 19:58

    Who’s selven, the queen of united of kingdom! I don’t think so. So there’s nothing to be afraid of a small lamer like him.
    By the way i dnt use myT 128 as others may think.
    but i get 20kb per sec, i can assure you cause i know how to open my ports using a hacker tool!! its not limited as someone said over there!! I would have share it but i don’t think so. Hey carrotmadman6 i’ve already told you how to do it by means of contactify. And for a MyT 256 i get over 45 kb per sec – don’t trust me you don’t want. When i get time i’ll try posting a screenshot for you to see it. And you avinash a bloody geek like you should be able to know what tools to use to get over 45kb per sec with a myT 256kb.

  170. Drake says

    4 July 2008 at 20:27

    I knew that many of you were lamers. Looking at anascrash screenshot i know he’s done some retouching with that idm window or other things as i mention below for king_trojan. Lamer go and fool userlf before fooling a geek! By the way anas, ur utorrent is outdated. the 1.8 RC 1 is out!! or for u king trojan either you photoshoped your screen shot or u’ve got a a 22MBPS modem at home!! Don’t take me for a fool! Or youve downloaded something that is already on your LAN(or hard disk) not on the internet!! FOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! And your idm is outdated 5.12 build 12 is out!!
    And i describe my tools as hacker ones because spyware doctor detects it as a hacker tool.

  171. Drake says

    4 July 2008 at 20:43

    Hey selven for your small film i just think that uve missed the right Drake. The Drake that posted these newbie questions is not just me. If u were real geek u’ll know that our e-mail are different. Poor foool. Once more u’ve done something for nothing which is gonna be a real flop!!!

  172. avinash says

    5 July 2008 at 07:44

    Ok. Time for me to step in. I’ll give Selven the right to answer once to Drake. I’ll then delete all further comments (if any) mentioning Drake, Selven and being lame.

  173. Anascrash04 says

    5 July 2008 at 09:32

    @Drake stupid fool
    its from local host, no retouching, just wanted to test the ability of your mind by hiding HFS from my taskbar,

    tskk tskk

    and having an previous version program doesnt mean that it doesnt work, i just like to have stable versions before jumping on any new version and clicking NEXT NEXT NEXT when installing the proggie

    lol and now u say it wasnt you

    well Mr.1337 Drake
    if i were you, i’d change nickname and visit this blog from time to time and think twice before posting comments

    Astalavista ;)

  174. LaSh says

    5 July 2008 at 12:28

    Notice to Avinash Meetoo:

    Just a LITTLE note to Drake, no flaming or whatsoever.

    –>
    Email addresses can be only viewed by the Blog Admin, which would be Avinash Meetoo.

    So, Selven couldn’t have noticed the change in emails, if ever there was :).

    Have a nice weekend everyone :).

  175. n!135h says

    5 July 2008 at 19:59

    If it needs deleting Mr Avinash, do it :)

    Dnt want to sound cocky because i am no geek or computer wiz or talented in the IT/computer field bt things said by Drake sure are …how to say, “difficile a avaler”

    “Or youve downloaded something that is already on your LAN(or hard disk) not on the internet!!”

    LAN….sure, why not, hard disk O_o…would rather not use some download accelerator for that…..

    “And i describe my tools as hacker ones because spyware doctor detects it as a hacker tool.”
    A tool is a tool mate, having a software detecting it as a hacker tool doesnt automatically means its a hacking tool, could be a tweaking tool or anything, in brief, a tool..

    “If u were real geek u’ll know that our e-mail are different. Poor foool. ”

    1) How would we get information on that on the first place?
    Mail (will not be published)..hmmm…

    2) In such cases, mail doesnt prove anyone’s identity FYI.

    I would give you the benefit of the doubt for your claim 20 KB/s…cool for you, enjoy it to the max (as well as the 45 KB/s…would be more to a 360kbps connection…maybe you are talking files locally?…if not, same thing, enjoy it) but for us common ppl….we cant get such “high” rates and taking aside Mr Avinash (who dnt use pirated softwares :P…though i am sure he would agree they are not THAT cheap bt relative to the amount of time and knowledge invested,it certainly reflects the price…too bad our rates doesnt favor us :( ), we download a lot and as the main issue was on the FUP….

    One thing which is quite sad is that well, as i have posted previously, MT made some really big profits and last i heard, FT was not doing good profit
    http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6319961.stm
    “Full-year profits dropped at France Telecom last year, despite a strong performance from its mobile phone business and foreign operations.”

    My guess is that we MT would be more like a spare wheel or something which takes out some of the “stress” on FT and if my maths are good, if our profit goes elsewhere, there is little room for MT to buy more bandwidth and its kinda sad to think that Mauritius who wants to be “something” in the IT world as the IT hub, lacks one of the essential tools….Proper network and proper speed to support the business which revolves around it. I wnt deny that call centers and others dnt benefit from high bandwidth, bt at what cost? We might have the cheap labour, bt they have the cheap bandwidth…and this means they have an edge over us (with technologies and information available nowadays, i think any dedicated person could become knowledgeable in almost any field, though he might lack the practice bt then again, if you look properly on the net, video tutorials, virtual simulation of Real life things…).

    But then again, we dnt have much bargaining power, our currency doesnt have proper weight and if i recall correctly, while it can get appreciated….it could also mean loss contracts because other countries offer cheaper..for same thing….

    Maybe i am seeing too far ahead, bt i guess we are entangled in it and it would require a major change or will from the government to get us better bandwidth

    (makes me wonder why hasnt anyone invested in a game server yet in here….that could mean some money if we have the full 2M locally..side note…i read somewhere that even 100M wasnt enough for those massive lan gaming…if i recall well…bbc videos ;))

  176. avinash says

    6 July 2008 at 08:32

    Finished?

  177. Ketwaroo D. Yaasir says

    6 July 2008 at 09:11

    something that the drake guy and other more or less recent myt subscribers have brought to attention. They usually brag about how fast their connection is.

    It is possible that in the first “free” month(s) you subscribe to myt is “doped”. I mean turbocharged to bait the client in believing they’ve made a sweet deal.

    Just out of curiosity, do any of you remember how fast their connection was when you first signed up? I sort of remembered I was thoroughly excited when torrents were peaking a 1.5mbps.

    there must be something wrong with the alignment of stars and planets… tongues of fire….

  178. n!135h says

    6 July 2008 at 10:23

    from my end, its finished :D…whatever might come back ^^

    Would be nice if we could come back to the issue at hand though…..

    I remember i read something as host file locally…cool…bt what?

    Most things we download are either pirated or/and in case of animes, it has not been aired here so its legal to get them though when they license it here (if they ever -_-), we have to buy them.

    Who would host that server, in case the downloads are legit and what will he/they (referring to a company) gain from doing that? Also,as for updating the software…okay host them locally…but i see it restricted to that….Bt thing is, the net has become crowded and i think i read somewhere/watched or was told that there is a plan to assign an ip to almost everything…which means they would be connected and accessible from almost everywhere in the world or locally.

    Would this poor bandwidth or FUP not “mettre batton dan la roue” of this movement to come? Try imagine you have an i-mug/i-kettle at your office (dnt laugh lol,i actually read something in an electronic magazine which helped you to power on/off your kettle over a network :P), power it on…and let say for the sake of argument, FUP is that bad that you have difficulties communicating with it back…then use your imagination -_-…..

    Maybe if the main service provider for “heavy” content like youtube would make a mirror near us,like for Africa, then (if its feasible) we could use the same concept like here….i.e. locally we get better bandwidth (Africa having say 2M and international the same old 256k).

    Anyway i have one question :P.
    Why would MT/Orange want to give us better bandwidth to the outside and at reasonable prices when it can get “most” of happy customers with MyT 256/128 and all the other down one and some 512?

  179. selven says

    6 July 2008 at 11:51

    Avinash, thanks for giving me a chance to have a last reply on this issue :D

    sorry, was away for two days, had a picnic and i had some work early in the morning.

    @ anascrash04:

    its an E-book, christopher’s pike : The Last Vampire, 6books total, the best book i read so far

    And i’ve got an almost complete collection of most of christopher pike’s books. :D:D:D including the entire last vampires, and his special collections on top of that :D:D:DD

    and now for drake…

    sorry dude, didn’t realize that THAT drake wasn’t you (heh, between you and me, that’s kind of a coincidence two people using the name nick… probably you were using an old email before?).

    Anywayz, if you really want a movie on you, nevermind, i was kind enough to remake it, here yu go:

    ————————————————-
    your new video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3t25PJ7Pe9M
    ————————————————-

    am really sorry that you got pissed off, i didn’t realized who you were, am extremely sorry, please don’t hack me with your powerful hacker tools mister Drake, please please please :'(

    Anywayz Drake, i want to be fr!end you, you care adding me up on msn or mailing me back?
    msn : pc [at] hackers dot com
    mail: pcthegreat [at] gmail dot kom

    please forgive me for any misunderstanding… and please please please don’t hack me, i really want to catch you up online one of these days? you have a blog somewhere? I think we had a misunderstanding, i want to correct it and maybe understand you better and make pe4ce??

    ps. the queen of england isn’t of pure noble blood, and she’s not sexy, so there’s nothing special with her :p

    Thanks again for reconsidering.
    +$3lv3n

  180. Ajay Ramjatan says

    9 July 2008 at 12:46

    Holy cow!

    I go away for a few days and all hell breaks loose in here.

    /me hands avinash a whip (not to mention a hammer)

  181. selven says

    18 March 2009 at 00:56

    btw, do you still get 200K when viewing trailers from movies theatre from your mac anymore???

    seems i can’t get any akamai stuffs

  182. avinash says

    18 March 2009 at 07:34

    I’ll check and I’ll let you know.

  183. metalduster says

    16 April 2010 at 18:02

    I was a 1mb user i had noticed recently my adsl was always changing bandwidth sometimes i get 512 sometimes its 700 sometimes its 998 etc…It was making me angry i contacted orange a lot of times…technicians came to see the problem at home they said all was ok!I contacted orange i asked them if fair user policy was the root they said if they were monitoring they would have called me and informed me….Im sure they don’t call u they play with your bandwidth..I just switched to MyT 512 to see if the line’s better..Indeed i can see a faster connection while surfing compared to 1 mb standard adsl…sometimes i noticed download up to 2 mbps with my my 512! Strange but you can try to download itunes from apple.com you will see its very fast….This fair user policy is very very bad i mean orange doesnt have the means to provide all…Instead of making their server bigger they are restricting themselves sadly resulting in a very poor service

  184. avinash says

    17 April 2010 at 05:16

    Are you sure you are victim of the fair use policy?

    Incidentally, it’s normal to have 2Mbit/s on MyT when connecting to servers (including Google and Akamai caches) found in the island. MyT is really nice. If only we had more local servers e.g. mirrors, cheap yet capable hosting facilities, etc.

  185. Akash says

    26 June 2012 at 10:35

    You normally buy three loaves every morning. But one day, in thinking about the barbecue evening you’ll be hosting, you go out for 15 loaves, but the shop keeper refuses to sell you more than your normal three: does he have the right to do that?

    You normally consume 100cu.m of metered water from CWA mains per month. But when the school holidays come, you have to wash everywhere in your residence, and once you use up the normal 100cu.m, does the CWA barge in and locks up your meter? Same for CEB? WMA? Or the petrol station?

    No, simply because if you can afford to pay, you can have access to the service. They do NOT have the right to prevent you from consuming more than the normal, because you can pay for that, even if it means a progressively stiffer rate for every incremental unit you consume.

    So, what’s SO special with MT/Orange, you tell me. I see absolutely NO logic in the (supposedly) Fair Usage Policy. It’s simply an abuse of the proverbial Mauritian laissez-faire.

    And this leaves us with the haunting question: is sodomy really illegal in Mauritius, while that FUP is doing more than that to your pockets…?

  186. Avinash Meetoo says

    26 June 2012 at 22:42

    To be fair, foreign ISPs also have fair usage policies. I suppose that’s because the global bandwidth is limited and it’s not only a question of who can pay more…

  187. Akash says

    28 June 2012 at 16:27

    Now this: http://www.defimedia.info/live-news/item/14605-l%E2%80%99iba-demande-%C3%A0-mt-d%E2%80%99arr%C3%AAter-la-diffusion-des-30-cha%C3%AEnes-t%C3%A9l%C3%A9-de-myt.html

    “foreign ISPs also have fair usage policies.”
    So what? Some people eat luftefisk, would you? Others cockroaches, would you? So why tolerate the unacceptable. No, if something is allowed under other skies does not necessarily (nor fairly, as you tried to put it) imply that it shold be allowed here. What is distressing in Dodoland is that some businesses / people are allowed to copy absolutely all that failed elsewhere and try to make it work here, as if the southern hemisphere had some kind of magic to reverse the curse.

    “because the global bandwidth is limited ”
    Ah not sorry again: when there is a new morecellement or factory or industrial zone (like the JinFei aborted thing), it is up to the service provider to upgrade its network, be it water, electricity or whatever, and not the consumer to be punished for its consumption: imagine CMT having to be content with the maximum of 3,000cu.m of water and 1,500kWh of power per day just because the current network does not have enough capacity for more. No way! It’s up to the utility companies to in-build in their rates the costs of upgrading their network and maintaining it and supplying it. Just like petrol stations: when demand rises, they “démerde” themselves to ensure that there is always enough stock in reserve…

    “it’s not only a question of who can pay more”
    Oh, not sorry again: how did MT manage to consistently publish such obscene profits? How do you think petrol stations remain profitable even when prices are regulated? Because the law of supply and demand ensure that whoever can pay more will have its demand satisfied, provided it can afford the asking price. But what MT does with its FUP, it dictates to you how much you can consume. Bloody hell, if you had a kid that’s oversized and a matching appetite, how would you have appreciated a pharmacy/supermarket enforcing a FUP on infant milk…? And if you had been blessed with oversized twins…?

    Ah, now I hope you’ll understand how I’m ardently wishing that BeeTel undercuts and forces MT to swallow its own poison when it starts offereing its fibre-to-home concept. but if you see that one too polluted by a FUP, then you’ll know how far big business is being allowed by our authorities to keep on raping our pockets…

Trackbacks

  1. e.young » My take on Fair Usage Policy says:
    4 May 2008 at 02:06

    […] has started a discussion about the new Fair Usage Policy clause in Orange contracts and what it means for users. Here is my opinion. […]

  2. GeekScribes » Blog Archive » Orange FUP in News on Sunday! says:
    20 May 2008 at 17:50

    […] is Mr. Avinash Meetoo’s heavily commented and discussed post about FUP. I’m really sorry since I forgot mentioning this great […]

  3. Avinash Meetoo: Blog » What is a heavy user? says:
    21 May 2008 at 08:28

    […] What is the fair use policy? […]

  4. Avinash Meetoo: Blog » Will I be a happy voodoo doll on Sunday? says:
    27 February 2009 at 19:08

    […] infamous fair usage policy! Mauritius Telecom has still not explained what the limits exactly are. With increased bandwidth, […]

  5. Avinash Meetoo: Blog » Noulakaz.net is five years old today (Part 2) says:
    18 March 2009 at 11:05

    […] 3 March 2008: What is the fair use policy? […]

  6. How is Emtel Airbox’s Fair Usage Policy (FUP) different? - Yashvin, pages of my life says:
    19 June 2015 at 20:14

    […] Policy (FUP) isn’t something new to Mauritius. Several Mauritian bloggers (carrotmadman6, Avinash and Geekscribes ) have even written on this topic in the […]

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