Telkom Internet Cap Management

After several months living with capped internet, and almost as many months having the internet run out on me, I began trying to manually ration the bandwidth. I opened the Telkom Tracker Website regularly and calculated how much internet I should have used by that point in the month, but that - though effective - grew exceedingly tedious.

UPDATE: NEW (rewritten) VERSION COMING VERY SOON - SEE DETAILS BELOW.

So I decided to write a program to do it for me; a program I've been using since December.

I have no idea if it will work for anyone else, but if you use this website:

to check your cap, and you know your username and password, then I see no reason it shouldn't.
Please be aware that it will only work for TelkomSA internet accounts and is not a universal internet usage monitor.

After downloading, installing and starting the program for the first time, you should see this login screen.

Carefully enter your username and password in their respective fields, then enter your base monthly limit in gigabytes. Checking the 'Accutime' is recommended as I will explain shortly. Click 'Save and continue' to sign in to your tracker page.'

If you're successful, the next screen you'll see should look something like these two:

Once you have saved your login details once, this will be the screen you'll see when the program opens, after a brief loading time.

Most of the subheadings are self-explanatory, and if you do need further explanation, simply hover over each in turn. The most important one is the 'Proportional Limit'. This is calculated by taking the current day as a fraction of the month and applying it to your monthly limit, thereby indicating how much of your bandwidth you should have used by a given day in the month. The Accutime option takes into account the hour of the day also.

In the first case (left), the total is just under the proportional limit. The green part of the bar represents combined uploads and downloads, and the light blue portion represents the difference between your total and your proportional limit. In the second case, total downloads and uploads are well over your proportional limit. The green bar represents the portion of traffic within the proportional limit, and everything red after that represents how far over the proportional limit traffic has run.

The program also calculates your average daily use, and - based on your standing with the proportional limit - how much you should reduce your daily use to in order to make it to the end of the month.

Clicking the red arrow on the left-side of the window will open the settings, where you can change your monthly limit (do not include top ups, these will be detected automatically), change your account settings and clear your details from the computer's memory.

Problems installing,

Make sure you install 'as administrator' so that there aren't any problems with permissions.

There seem to be some issues with installing the fonts - just click ignore for each issue, let it finish installing, and then copy all the fonts in the "Fonts" folder in the zip file to "C:\Windows\Fonts". It's not a major issue, but it will ensure that everything is displayed correctly.
If the install fails, then extract the '.cab' file and fine the "Telkom Internet Cap Management.exe' file, which is the program. It should run from there.
If you're using Windows XP, you may need to run an update before you'll be allowed to install.

If anything breaks, or there's something you'd like to see in the next release, please email me or leave a comment and I'll get to work on it asap...

Download Telkom Internet Cap Management Tool.zip here.

UPDATE:

I realise that both the link and program have not been working for a while (SORRY!!!) due to google groups shutting down their file hosting, and due to Telkom tweaking something small about their website that flummoxed my programming. I have switched to a better storage site for my files, and am in the process of rewriting the program so it will be more reliable. It also has a new, cleaner look as a side-effect of yet another shift in interface fashion. I've got it working, just gotta work out the kinks and the update should be up within the week, so watch this space!

-11 July 2011

The new program interface (under construction)