Take that orange fans! :/

The company is here, and as soon as it lands here, it starts changing things. Sometimes for the best, most of the time, for the worse! Read on!

We just lost our only Mauritian portal. Servihoo redirects to orange.mu. Poor chap. You have been a faithful portal for around 10 years, and you vanished in less than 10 minutes. RIP. I kind of miss that blue guy now.. 🙁

Same goes for one of the most reliable mobile networks around. Cellplus has turned into Orange, to the greatest delight of Emtel, who boasts a 100% Mauritian network nowadays.

Fair Use?

But you know what the worst is about? Check out this screenshot below:

 

Notice that Fair Usage thing being mentioned?? It wasn’t there before! Home 128K and 512K were uncapped! Unlimited usage! 24h/7d + unlimited bandwidth? Now? Your ADSL connection is capped!

 

ii. 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.

There you go folks! Reduction in speed and monitoring of usage. This means?

i) Your connection gets way slower if you go over the limit! What’s the limit? Not mentioned. Might be 1 GB, might be 500MB, might be 10GB, might be 100GB. It’s at their discretion! Your connection speed might drop to as much as 1/2 its speed!

ii) Your usage is monitored. Abuse the limit often, and you are on a permanent block list. Or maybe you’ll get a letter which politely tells you to move to another ISP or plainly, “f*ck off!”? Big brother will be watching!

There ya go folks. MyT is capped. Now ex-Wanadoo ADSL is also capped!

The funniest thing is? You pay the same price for a capped 128Kbps connection and a capped 256Kbps MyT connection! Weirdos! 😛

So much for the big advertising campaign about the arrival of Orange. It should be about “We welcome new capping scheme” instead of a “We welcome a distinguished guest” advert! 😛

As CarrotMadMan has very justly said, we have been back-stabbed! (Oi man! If only you knew the amount of traffic I’ve been driving to you! Seriously, you owe me one! Loads of my friends are advertising your blog on their messengers! :D)

I’ve been expecting a 8Mbps connection (uncapped), just as Orange offers in France, as I have mentioned in my previous post However, I think it’ll only be a dream. I’ve heard of 2Mbps being offered for businesses at Rs.10500 ($385) something, but considering the price, it’s useless for home users. Too bad.

Btw, check out Tiscali’s Fair Use Policy, which I find very agreeable. What do you think?

Tiscali’s Fair Usage Policy is designed to make sure your broadband service is quick and reliable whenever you use it.
A very small number of customers use Peer to Peer or file sharing software, which constantly sends and receives video and other very large files, throughout the day. This type of activity uses a lot of bandwidth and can significantly reduce the speed at which other customers can access the internet during peak hours. Approximately 1% of customers use more than 30% of the available bandwidth during peak hours. We don’t believe this is fair to the vast majority of our customers.
This fair usage policy automatically identifies the very small number of extremely heavy users and manages their bandwidth only during peak hours (6pm to 11pm Monday to Sunday), to protect the service for all our other customers. Outside peak hours, the use of the internet by these heavy users is unaffected.

What happens if you are affected by the Fair Usage Policy?

During peak hours, customers affected by the fair usage policy will share bandwidth with each other and will be separated from other customers (contention?). The amount of bandwidth available for affected customers to share, will be at least as much as for those customers unaffected by the policy. The speed affected customers experience when downloading at peak hours will therefore depend on what these customers are doing. If they are all web-browsing and reading emails, they will experience normal broadband speed. If on the other hand they are using Peer to Peer or file sharing software they will experience slow broadband speed. Outside of peak hours, no restrictions will apply.

 

Capping?

Capping is used throughout the world. Capping at 10GB. Capping at 20 GB. Capping at 50GB. Capping at 100GB. I’ve even seen capping at 300GB somewhere in UK. But here, a ridiculous 1GB is imposed!

This is fun. I think people in charge here do not know about the existence of such things as YouTube, iTunes, online radios, streaming TV shows, people that download nightly builds of Linux and other software and the likes. For them, downloading 10GB per month necessarily means you are a pirate, and that your access to bandwidth needs to be restricted. Lemme see you folks use YouTube and similar streaming sites, and not go over your 1GB. Listen to some online radio, like 2 hours or so. You will easily go over 300MB of downloaded data with high quality streams. Do that 3 times and you are nearly over quota. That’s it. 3 days of online radio per month.

Download 2 Linux or other open-source distros, and you are over-quota. Just plain lol!

This capping is mainly targetted towards p2p and torrent users. We never know if it’ll affect direct-downloaders. But I think we are all in the same basket here. 🙁 Seems torrenting is now over with Orange in charge…

I’ve noticed something weird btw… This morning, my 512K “uncapped” connection was going to a crawl. Now it seems to be better. I may not be over-quota yet, but during peak hours, browsing was impossible? Doomsday signs?

Cyber Island. Yes! It’s like our “information superhighway” has had speed breakers installed. Considering that our superhighway was 2 lanes big, with loads of pot-holes, it has just become slower!

RIP, Mauritius Telecom. Glory to the ISP who provided uncapped connections. And hurray to Orange who provides capped connections. Yaaay… we’ll be back to stone age very fast, with capped 56K connections! Hip hip hip, hurray for Mauritius. MT really knows how to choose its strategic partners!

What can I do to remain in quota?

1. Drop heavy downloads. No more DVD downloading off torrents.
2. No more P2P. This means, no Limewire, no Bearshare, no EMule, and paradoxically, no more buying stuff off iTunes!
3. Do not schedule multi-downloads. If one of them breaks, and you lose the others, you have to restart again, losing bandwidth.
4. No more abusing YouTube and similar video streaming sites.
5. No more streaming audio online.
6. Compromise on quality. Get VBR instead of high quality MP3’s. Get RMVBs instead of AVIs.
7. Do not download unless you are sure your file works.
8. Avoid useless browsing.
9. Cut down your time spent on Internet.
10. Change ISPs?

Well, if you see this page, you will know why people are generally dissatisfied with Orange, specially in UK. Compare with this one? Then drool!! And drool more! This is what we are all looking for!

Comments awaited, and excuses for my sarcasm. This thing about capping annoys the hell out of me. I don’t like restrictions being imposed on me, when I’m paying Rs.1540 for a 512K connection, when I could get 16x faster for the same price abroad! :/

EDIT: Btw.. check out this screenshot! 😛 It’s not good publicity for them to have such comments in the same Google search as your name. I googled “orange.mu” and came up with that:

 

EDIT 2: My friend Yasir also wrote about Orange, here. Seems the anti-Orange articles are growing in number day-by-day!