I have said this elswehere before...

The use of unlimited is for marketing purposes. There is no such thing as unlimited. Even with a 1Mb or 4Mb package, there is a limit to how much you can download every day or month.

When they say "always-on", it means you can have your Streamyx connected all day and still pay the package rate. When they say "unlimited access" or "unlimited internet" or "unlimited broadband", it means you can access the internet anytime you want for as long as you want each day and still pay the package rate. It does not mean you can have unlimited download as that is limited as said above due to technical and time limitations based on your package speed.

Has anyone seen any reference by Streamyx saying "unlimited data transfer"? Data transfer and bandwidth are different.

Overselling by itself is not the problem. It is practised in other industries as well and if done correctly, it can actually benefit users especially when it comes to lowering the costs of service. It is massive overselling or irresponsible overselling that causes problems. I think that is what TM has probably done. They do not have enough capacity to cater for all the new users they have taken on in recent months / years. Their expansion of their infrastructure and bandwidth capacity has not been in line with the expansion of their user base. This plus the fact that internet usage patterns and applications of users have changed in recent years as compared to the initial usage for mainly email and web surfing in the earlier years.

I think another thing that has happened recently is that there may be many users on 1Mb packages who have upgraded to 2 / 4Mb packages due to the slow downs in the past few months, thinking that they would be assigned "premium IPs" and have better speeds. In general, these may be users who download a lot, so they want faster and better connections. If so, this in turn means that more users are downloading more at higher pseeds and this would have contributed to access being slow again, probably due to lack of capacity from TM to support all these users. So things started slowing down in general even with "premium IPs". So you end up paying almost double what you used to and getting equal or less than what you used to. As I said before, you have just rewarded TM for giving you poor services instead of punishing them.

Again, you should not be taken in by the word "unlimited". Unlimted broadband, unlimited access, unlimted usage etc can be defined or interpreted differently. I ask again, has anyone seen any reference by TM saying that our packages gives "unlimited data transfer"? That defines the amount of download / upload.

It is most likely that in the beginning, there was no need to state any limits in the packages as the usage in the early days were different from nowadays. The other ISPs especialy wireless came along much later and they state limits in order to manage the capacity that they have. Also using unlimited is a good marketing way to get users as users like to think that they are getting a lot (unlimted) without having to pay a lot of money. Again, there is no such thing as unlimited.

AFAIK, TM has not stated unlimited data transfer. Thus they can implement data transfer limits if they want. It is users who have come to expect that they can have as much data transfer as they want for their packages. Since we have not been restricted in the early days, we continue to expect to be unrestricted. But I do not think it was stated anywhere that we would forever be unrestricted when it comes to data transfer.

Always-on just means that you can access the internet any time of the day, and all day if you want but yet pay the fixed package rate. Unlike the dialup days, where if you were always-on, your phone bill will shoot up very high as dialup was based on a usage basis. I do not think that always-on was advertised as meaning that you can always download 24/7. We have come to expect that though. Always-on is related to a fixed price in this case.


There is a difference between bandwidth and data transfer. Data transfer is the amount of data you can send and receive (upload / download). It is the quantity of data eg in MB or GB. Bandwidth is the speed in which you can transfer that amount of data. It is how fast you can send or receive that data. It is quanity per time frame.

Your package of eg 1Mbps or 4Mbps is already a limit of your bandwidth, so saying unlimited bandwidth is wrong. With a 1Mbps bandwidth connection, if you download 24/7 the whole month, you can download approx 300+ GB of data (data transfer). That is the limit of your data transfer per month under ideal conditions. So saying you have unlimited data transfer is wrong.

Given a specific timeframe, the 4Mb user can download more than the 1Mb user. Given a specific amount of data, the 4Mb user can download it faster than the 1Mb user. But there is a limit either by timeframe, amount of data or speed of connection. No such thing as unlimited.