Acceptable Use Policy

SAINET Internet Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) (Effective 1 September 2009).

This is the SAINET Internet Acceptable Use Policy, which forms part of SAINET Internet User Agreement Broadband ADSL Terms and Conditions and SAINET Web Hosting Terms and Conditions
(The definitions in respect of the terms used in this Policy are contained in the Broadband ADSL Terms and Conditions). This Policy can change without notice.

1. You must not access, nor permit any other party to access, the Services for any purpose or activity of an illegal, fraudulent or defamatory nature.
2. You must not use the Services to make available online any material that is illegal, including but not limited to material that is classified or would be classified as RC or X under the National Classification Code set out in Schedule 5 of the Classification (Publications, Films and Computer Games) Act 1995 (Cth), nor will you use the Services to provide unrestricted access to material online that is unsuitable for minors.
3. You acknowledge that any material that you make available online using the Services is your own responsibility and that we accept no liability for any such material.
4. You must not act through the Services to block or disrupt access to the Internet by other users, service providers, their computers, software or hardware. Such actions include, but are not limited to, attempting to gain unauthorised access to another computer system, unauthorised copying, modification or destruction of information held on another computer system, unauthorised copying or dissemination of material protected by copyright or propagating computer viruses, worms and other types of malicious programs.
5. You must not transmit threatening, obscene or offensive materials, or engage in any form of harassment when using the Services.
6. You agree to refrain from sending unsolicited bulk commercial email, including the use of other non-consenting mail relay systems.
7. You must not reproduce, distribute, transmit, publish, copy, transfer or commercially exploit any information or material of any kind (including but not limited to information or material accessed through or received from the Services) that infringes any copyright, patent, trade mark, design or other intellectual property right or, in our reasonable opinion, is likely to mislead or deceive any person accessing the relevant information or material.
8. You are responsible for: obtaining all necessary permissions, authorisations, licenses and consents in relation to the use of any third party materials used in the provision of the Services; and payment of all royalties and other fees associated with the use of such third party materials, and you must indemnify us in respect of any liability arising directly or indirectly from a failure by you to observe your obligations under this clause.
9. You must respect the privacy of others when accessing and using the Services.
10. You must, in accessing and using the Services, only use software that you are legally entitled to use and such use must not infringe any third party intellectual property rights.
11. You acknowledge that we do not and cannot in any way supervise, edit or control the content and form of any information or data accessed through the Services and we shall not be held responsible in any way for any content or information accessed via the Services.
12. You acknowledge that we must comply with the Telecommunications Act 2005 and other laws and directives from state or law enforcement agencies that have jurisdiction over the use of Internet services.
13. We disclaim all or any liability for any material on the Internet that you find offensive, upsetting, defamatory, personally offensive and in any way unsuitable for minors.
14. You are responsible for maintaining the secrecy and confidentiality of all access information required by you to access the Services, and you agree not to disclose to any other person, corporation, entity or organisation any access information, whether in use or not, nor any other confidential information relating to the Services.
15. You must notify us immediately if your username and password are lost, or you have reason to believe that someone other than you is using them. You will be liable for all fees resulting from use of the Services accessed through your access information, whether authorised by you or not.
16. This AUP can change without prior notice.

SAINET Internet’s ACCEPTABLE USAGE POLICY FOR ADSL

This notification serves to inform you of the SAINET Internet Acceptable Usage Policy (AUP), in relation to fair usage of your uncapped Business ADSL service. The SAINET AUP is designed to assist in protecting the SAINET Network, the service, our Users and the Internet community as a whole from improper and/or illegal activity over the Internet, to improve service and to improve service offerings. As stipulated in this policy SAINET reserves the rights to monitor usage and apply certain restrictions if need be.

ADSL Shaping
SAINET’s ADSL offerings are based on the “best effort” premise, where no guarantees on throughput can be provided, a standard within the South African ADSL market. In an endeavour to improve the user experience on this “best effort” service, and to better manage business critical protocols, SAINET shapes the ADSL Uncapped traffic, in order to ensure these protocols receive priority on the SAINET network.
These protocols include:
• HTTP (internet)
• HTTPS (secure internet)
• SMTP and POP 3 (mail)
• IMAP (mail applications)
• FTP (document uploads)
• TELNET SSH (remote secure access)

Traffic with the following protocols, which are not deemed mission critical for business use, will receive the lowest priority on the SAINET Network:
• P2P
• BitTorrent
• Gaming

Fair Usage Pool of Bandwidth
In the event that SAINET identifies abuse of the service a “fair user” standard will be applied. Abuse of the network will be based on the drawing of monthly usage reports by SAINET, taking into account the actual vs. projected usage, per customer. Projected usage will be calculated on the historical usage, per customer. Uncapped services will only provided on the actual Telkom speed on the line eg. a 384K service will be provided on a 384K line only.

Current fair pool excessive usage per service:
384K - 62GB
512K - 75GB
4096K - 100GB
Free Uncapped After Hours - 60GB

Should a customer be considered to be abusing protocols P2P, BitTorrent and Gaming etc., the aforementioned protocols will be moved into a fair usage pool, without prior notification and with immediate effect. This will result in the aforementioned protocols receiving the lowest priority across the SAINET network, as well as the fact that the customer will have to compete for bandwidth with other users, within this pool. Protocols considered to be business critical (i.e. HTTP, HTTPS, SMTP, POP3, IMAP, FTP and TELNET SSH) will continue to receive normal prioritization and the customer should not experience a degradation of these services – therefore users are not capped and are not rate limited. Customers demonstrating commitment to reasonable use can be rescheduled to normal network priorities on a month to month basis on the discretion of SAINET.

Concurrent connections:

Uncapped ADSL Service - Once session - Single DSL line
Capped ADSL - One Session - Single DSL line
Flexibill ADSL - four sessions - Multiple DSL Lines

Resell or Re-use
Under no circumstances may the services be resold, contended or used by any operator including authorized resellers for the purpose of commercial gain.

SPAM EMAIL

The SUBSCRIBER (or any party given access via SUBSCRIBER's contract with SAINET) will not use SAINET's facilities to send "mass E-mailing" to parties who have never had voluntary personal interaction with the SUBSCRIBER. A "mass E-mailing" shall be the ordering of an E-mail message (or group of related messages) to more than 25 people SIMULTANEOUSLY who themselves have not had personal interaction with one another.
SUBSCRIBER shall further not perform such a mailing through any facility so that replies will come to an E-mail address served by SAINET, or refer to any web page, FTP site or other resource served directly by SAINET.
In the event that SUBSCRIBER violates the above clauses, the SUBSCRIBER's internet service may be terminated immediately, without refund or further access to any associated services, such as received E-mail, files on SAINET's machines or servers. In addition the SUBSCRIBER shall be liable to SAINET for the full costs, plus 200% incurred by SAINETin dealing with the consequences of such a mass E-mailing, including but not limited to system loads, system failures, and staff time and overtime related to complaints and other problems. In addition, SUBSCRIBER shall be liable for a minimum of R 50 per address in the mailing.

The SUBSCRIBER warrants that he/she, nor any party he or she represents or will allow access to SAINET's facilities, is not at present nor has at any time in the past been subject to discipline from another Internet Service Provider or related company for violation of contractual terms regulating bulk E-mailing.

Frequently Asked Questions