Vodacom does a 180 on Blackberry Internet Service capping

Vodacom have changed their minds about capping the Blackberry Internet Service for now, while they work with RIM to come up with a solution to deal with the high data usage problems.

Vodacom CEO Pieter Uys said on twitter: “I hear your concern on BB. Not throttling anything now – working w/BB to find solution to manage the massive bulk file downloads”.

The press release on Monday caused Vodacom to get a thorough lashing from their customers, like I said in my previous post, most people buy the Blackberry for the internet service, take that and limit it, then what do they have? A smartphone that you could just barely call a smartphone.

The introduction of the 100MB data throttling from 3G to 2G was supposed to be a temporary measure put in place while Vodacom and RIM developed a better way to deal with the data usage abuse that came with unlimited internet usage.

One option I think would be decent is to lift the proposed cap of 100MB to something like 500MB. That would be a perfect usage limit, granted you’ll still get some people that will still try and download their movies and series using a 2G connection after they’ve been throttled. Personally I use about 100MB of data over the 3G network per month and the rest I just connect to Wi-Fi using my Android smartphone.

One thing is good to see, enough customers make a noise and Vodacom does actually listen.