The BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS) provides users with unlimited e-mail, internet browsing and instant chat services for a fixed monthly rate of about R59.
Downloading of large content, such as video streaming, is not covered by the fixed rate but some websites have allowed users to circumvent this by providing mechanisms to download video clips.
The BIS contributed to the popularity of BlackBerry smartphones in SA.
Vodacom said yesterday that BIS users who reached the 100MB threshold per month would have their connection speed reduced from the faster 3G to the slower 2G network. The new rules will not affect BlackBerry Enterprise users, mainly corporate users.
Andries Delport, Vodacom's chief technology officer, said it had studied usage patterns to better understand the causes of congestion at peak times and "one surprising finding was that more than 95% of BlackBerry data usage was attributable to less than 5% of users".
Vodacom said one user, for example, exceeded 300GB a month. The news caused an uproar.
"So because 5% is abusing the system, 95% must suffer? 100MB is crazy. Why not 300MB? That is more realistic. Vodacom (is) going to lose customers over this," a concerned reader commented on TechCentral's website.
"There is no point getting (BIS) if you can only use 100MB then get throttled. I don't think Vodacom can complain about people abusing their network, because they have been upgrading their network constantly. Surely the upgrades ... should be able to handle all the load, " commented a reader on MyBroadband's technology news website.
Customers can monitor their data usage by downloading an application called Data Monitor from Vodacom Appstore.
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