Vodacom recently announced that it will be throttling Blackberry BIS users who use more than 100MB per month, effectively stepping them down to 2G speeds. Needless to say – there was tremendous backlash to this decision. Twitter was abuzz, and Bandwidth Blog had massive traffic from users who wanted to comment on this. People were NOT happy, and they did not see this helping all Blackberry users in the bigger scheme of things. All in all, everyone thought they will be affected.

Pieter Uys posted the following statement with regards to Blackberry BIS throttling (on the official Vodacom page on Facebook):

“I’m very concerned that the steps we were planning to put in place were interpreted as punishing normal users.  This is not at all our intention and no changes have been implemented to slow down any customer’s BlackBerry service.  We are instead working with the makers of BlackBerry, Research In Motion, to find a solution to manage the bulk movie and file downloads, since these are responsible for degrading the service for all other users. By managing this issue we’ll improve the service for all of our BlackBerry customers.”

This is a great example of the web giving customers a voice, and well done to Vodacom for listening to us. And well done to the customers as well…