Acceptable Usage Policy

From Wiki.vlocity.co.za

Our policy has always been to provide an Uncapped service to our clients. Its unfortunate that the abuse of a very small percentage of users, has an impact on the greater number of users. In order to provide businesses with an uncapped service, i.e. always on browsing and email, we have to limit certain activities. Internet access is very expensive in South Africa. Bandwidth is a premium. So in order to try to deliver a reliable allways on service, we have to have certain limitations in order to survive. As the costs come down and more bandwidth becomes available, we will pass that on to our clients.

Unacceptable Activities.

We deem certain activities as unacceptable on our network. These activities are either illegal or frowned upon by most internet service providers.

• SPAM or Mailing Lists distributions.

Sending email as a cheap form of Advertising to a large group of unsolicited users, is considered SPAM. Servers world wide are on the lookout for these activities. As soon as it is detected, the sending server is added to a universal blocking list and blocked from sending email. We do provide the correct tools for Bulkmail distribution and advertising. These tools are freely available and comply with Bulk Mail activities and acceptable usage. Think about it. You do not want your email address used for unsolicited email. Nor does anyone else. It has become unthinkable to simply send email to huge distribution lists which may not disguise your email address properly, sending your email address on an email distributed to thousands of other users has become completely unacceptable.

• Peer to Peer Downloads and Torrents

Torrents are a fantastic way to share files. Used in a business environment, these tools are great to distribute data, large files etc. However, like all good things on the internet, there are those that would abuse it. Limewire is a great tool for distributing legal music, movies etc, but its actually used to illegally transfer movies and music. As a responsable ISP, because we are providing a connection which we CAN monitor and control, we cannot be see legally to be distributing illegal content. Effectivly our clients are sharing our network. Thats how we provide the service. So effectivly we are responsable for the activities of our users, more so that upper level ISP's. Torrents consume a tremendous amount of bandwidth in both directions. In and Out. So we are not receiving revenue for the users that upload content from your computers, but in effect we pay for it. For this reason we cannot accept torrents and other peer to peer services deemed illegal.

• Viruses.

Viruses effect our daily lives on computers. We expect all our clients to provide the correct anti virus software on their systems. Its simply a fact of life that using the internet will end up with the interaction with viral web sites and content. All customers are expected to defend their systems against these attacks. When we detect viral activity on the network, we will immediatly shut the link down and notify the client to sort this out. The virus attack impacts the clients performance as well as the performance of our network. Excessive usage due to a virus attack, will be charged to the client.

On our broadband services we only provide what we deem as standard internet activity in an uncapped basis. If you have any service that falls outside of this range of services, then we need to be notified.

We do provide Static ip's and Open Bandwidth on a pay per Gig Service. This is not monitored and not shaped in any way. Users get their own public IP Address and can setup whatever services they choose. However, this is a prepaid service and unlike broadband, these are very fast anmanaged connections. Using these services, the client is expected to know what he is doing. In these cases the client pays for a specific amount of traffic up front. Once the limit has been reached the service is terminated until a topup payment is received. These services will work on any of the activities listed since the public IP Address of these connections is allocated to the end user.