MTN’s “Uncapped” Broadband: The 24 Hour Rush

Last month I started seeing these adverts on TV, advertising MTN’s new data option: pay R50 and get a whole day’s worth of broadband access.

In addition to this, there’s also a R25 option which gives you three hours of unlimited “uncapped” broadband. And there are also new pricing options when it comes to broadband, with 75 MB and 300 MB data bundle options now available. They’ve also done away with out of bundle rates, which meant if you didn't either buy a once off or subscription bundle, you paid a lot more out of your airtime.

But I think more than anything, it was this R50 uncapped access that got everybody talking, and it made me think about what I could get in 24 hours.

Now, my Nokia E90 isn’t top of the range – it puts out a connection at about 115 kbps, which at least trumps dial-up, for sure, and I’ve seen it go up to about 70 kbps while downloading. On a good day it can download 4 MB in one minute, compared to dial-up which would take about 20 or 30 minutes to do the same. Now take 4 MB and times that by 60 and you get 240 MB in an hour. Then times that by 24 [hours] and you get 5760 MB in a day.

I don’t know if this is at all correct. Like I said, it’s just in theory. I’ve read others’ calculations and they think you might be able to get 1 – 1.5 GB in 24 hours, and they have better broadband connections than mine, likely, with one guy saying he can get 150 MB in 6 minutes! That’s about 25 MB per minute, but this is at 4 mbps or something.

The only thing is that there’s a bit of a lie when it says “uncapped”, which you’ll notice I’ve put in inverted commas almost everywhere in this post. This is because you can download up to 150 MB with unlimited speed – as much as you can go. But after 150 MB, it is limited to 128 kbps. But this isn’t a problem for me, because like I said – my E90 doesn’t put out that much anyway.

But consider that MTN’s normal 1 GB data bundle is nearly R300, and the 2 GB one is nearly R400 - a 1-Day R50 option doesn’t sound too bad. In fact, it’s less than what you’d pay for a 100 MB data bundle: R80. And those data bundles also have to last 60 days now, or two months. Before it was just 30 days, but people complained.

I think what I have to do is try and prove the theory by downloading 1 MB and seeing how fast it downloads, do my calculations,  and after that, try out the R50 option and see how much I can get in 24 hours. I reckon I could download The Dark Mod in 24 hours, seeing as NAG won’t put it on the Cover DVD.

MTN’s “Uncapped” Broadband: The 24 Hour Rush