SA is the same. Got some more backbones now, but still with laughable speed and prices. Our fastest speed is still only 4Mb. tests are being done on 8Mb. I don't think any country can beat us in terms of slow speed. Haha
Data caps are a way of artificially increasing advertised speed for a connection. No ISP actually promises to provide you with the advertised speed for your plan, it all depends on your contention ratio at your local exchange. The way they delegate data caps is probably a function of total available bandwidth providable from an exchange per month at peak times divided by users. That way they can fit more users onto a single piece of equipment at the exchange based on your datacap since you're expected to average a certain amount of speed overall through the month. Basically they can advertise ridiculous speeds for packages that realistically aren't going to be obtainable during peak traffic times, and you'd probably be lucky to achieve it off-peak too. There's no actual limit to the amount of data a telco can send and receive, it's all done speed wise and datacaps are a way of artificially limiting users to slower speeds. This however has major downsides as you usually get high-traffic times during the day, like lunch time or when everyone gets home which really brings everything to a crawl speed wise with everyone sharing the bandwidth at the exchange and saturating the network (you don't get a dedicated link to your ISP). I think this is how it works but I'm not 100% on that, someone please correct me as I'd like to know myself.
