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Egypt: TE-Data Fair Usage Policy

Categories: Middle East & North Africa, Egypt, Economics & Business, Technology

The Egyptian Internet service provider TE-Data [1], started applying what it calls a “Fair Usage Policy,” without prior warning. TE-Data and many other ISP's here already have Deep Packet Inspection (DPI [2]) and Volume Tracking systems implemented in order to offer limited and unlimited packages for their ADSL users, for different prices. But now TE-Data has decided to put boundaries on the Internet usage of the unlimited users, and even if you decide to pay more money to get an unlimited connection your Internet connection will be slowed down after you exceed a certain limit as stated in their FUP document [3]:

Traffic volume for each ADSL speed is counted on monthly basis. When this traffic/ data reach a certain limit the speed automatically drops to 128 Kbps till end of the subscription month. The speed is upgraded once more at the beginning of the new month.

And for sure the Egyptian bloggers and Twitter users were not happy with such a decision.

@Jpierre [4] wrote here [5]:

Dear TEDATA. F**K YOU AND YOUR NEW FUP.

Also @Moodeey [6] wrote here [7]:

TeData have a new FUP for unlimited ADSL ! For God Sake it's called unlimited …

And @AmrSpace [8] wrote here [9]:

في صمت تام بدئت تي داتا في تطبيق سياسة الاستخدام العادل على الانترنت غير المحدود، بحيث تقوم بخفض السرعة بعد تحميل حجم معين من الجيجابايت
TE-Data started applying a Fair Usage Policy on their unlimited internet package with no prior warning. This will throttle the download speed of those who exceed a certain quota of Gigabytes.

In fact, it may not be TE-Data only, but other ISP's are believed to start doing the same thing. @Tafatefo [10] who is subscribed to LINKdotNET [11] wrote the following tweet [12]:

كل الشركات .. مش تي اي داتا بس … وأنا أصلاً لينك .. عموماً الـ80 جيجا بتوع الـ5 ميجا دول يخلصوا عندي في أسبوع بالكتير
It's all the ISPs, not TE-Data only … I am a LINKdotNET subscriber … Anyway , I should exceed the 80 GB limit for the 5 Mbps subscribers in about one week.