My take on Fair Use Policy
by Eddy
Avinash has started a discussion about the new Fair Use Policy clause in Orange contracts and what it means for users. Here is my opinion.
Sidenote:
I have suffered Remote Desktop sessions with one-second latency while working in Mauritius for over a month, so I am not particularly happy about the state of Internet connectivity on the island. But, I feel a dose of reality needs to be prescribed to those who are calling for what can only be called the lynching of Orange.
Working with a latency of one second means that it takes that long for every click or keystroke to register on the remote desktop. Count how many seconds there are in an eight-hour day, and you will get a rough idea of how little work can be done in that time. Of course, I had to compensate with twelve-hour days.
The fair use policy is meant to bring fairness to all customers. Fairness means that all users should benefit equally from the service, but most of the time it suffers because it’s everyone’s their own amongst users. It is unavoidable that one user downloading continuously will penalise other users due to contention and the physical limit of the network. In such cases, the ISP has no other choice but to apply its fair use policy.
Fair use policy is not a policy for the users, but rather one for the ISP. In other words, fair use policy is self-policing on the part of the ISP, and its mention in the contract is just a notice of how the ISP will enforce it.
Yes, Orange are still a quasi-monopoly. Yes, their fair use policy is not doing much for quality of service. But, this is how they operate and what you’ve agreed to by signing the contract. If you are not satisfied, you can break the agreement, claim compensation for bad service, and what else. You can claim that Orange should not take any more customers if they do not have the capacity, but Orange need the economy of scale to keep their costs low. Are you prepared to pay much more for a better service? If yes, then go ahead, there is already a product called “leased line” that will suit you just fine.
As someone pointed out, unless you are prepared to mount a class action lawsuit against them, it does not do much to keep ranting. And, for a class action lawsuit to even germinate, you’d have to get over your self-interest. But then, would it not be easier to be considerate towards Joe Bloggs, down the road, who cannot download these important PDF files for his university application because others on the same exchange are leeching manga?
Eddy.
I am immune to flame.
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