Comments on: Q&A with MWeb CEO Rudi Jansen

By: Hendrik

Hendrik — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 16:13:10 +0000

A word of warning those who are about to sign up: They prevent users from downloading too much by reducing the speed for anything that can possibly drain MWEB’s cap. This is how they can get away with selling a no-cap service. For example; on 384 lines, the actual speed is reduced so much it cannot be called ADSL any more. This very heavy shaping is supposed to occur at off-peak times, but in reality MWEB have it turned on all the time, even on a lazy Sunday at 2:30AM in the morning. As a result, even if you sit at your computer all day, you still would not be able to browse your way through enough cap to worry MWEB’s cap-policemen. They have hit torrents with a baseball bat, Rapidshare too. YouTube stutters a lot – so much it isn’t watchable. You have to ask why they need to shape 384 anyway, considering it doesn’t achieve more that around 35-40 Kb/s on a good day on a semi or unshaped line.

By: Kim White

Kim White — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 08:19:42 +0000

@Steve: 5GB is not even able to get you any modern game on Steam. Dragon Age was a full 15GB download and the last patch was another 900 something MB. I just received my cancellation notice from another ISP for their uncapped and will be popping onto MWeb or whomever comes out cheaper (yay us fickly South Africans) from the 1st.

By: W

Sun, 21 Mar 2010 14:49:32 +0000

Steve: You don’t have to use the uncapped option, obviously.. you can stick to your 5Gb but you’ll find that if you start using the internet more and more, or making full use of it, 5GB is a tiny amount that isn’t nearly sufficient for modern web applications and new uses of the internet. We’d like to move on to the standard of the rest of the world and rather not have extremely restrictive bandwidth caps like 5GB.

Great move from Mweb, their professionalism is refreshing really, this is a proper uncapped service unlike DigiChilli and Screamer who were really just chancers trying to be the first to put out cheap uncapped accounts even with a terrible network.

By: Steve

Steve — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 20:29:49 +0000

Are we missing something here. I currently pay R299/month for the 4096 kbp service which will now go up to R539/month. That is an 80% price increase and the only differece is i go from a 5 Gig cap to uncapped. If i dont need more than 5Gig per month why should i be forced to pay the huge increase? I would much prefer faster speeds and for them to retain the Cap

By: Wogan

Wogan — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 14:16:33 +0000

I think just the fact that MWeb is a south african company already makes it a lot less rigid than, say, Comcast – saffers are very tolerant people by nature, heheh.

Finally, I can look forward to Grooveshark at home again

~ Wogan

By: Trekelny

Trekelny — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 10:10:10 +0000

My BB service provider here in the U.S. has a cap limit of 250 Gb per month. We have never popped it once, family of three, watching Hulu maybe a couple hours a month, looking at videos for school work, etc. I work at home, my colleagues and I lob multi-MB files at each other all day long. I don’t think we’ve even come close. Of course, most of the material is a lot closer to us here! But this “unattended” clause, that never enters into the conversation- we leave the web page open for days at a time, no worries.

All the best to South Africans with this offer. These kinds of services are long overdue and I think you’ll really see some changes now. Finally.

By: sarantis

sarantis — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 08:45:48 +0000

personally i think that the terms of service are not as literal as they are made out to be and they are inline with what happens in the rest of the world. if you download videos every day in usa or greece,like 100 GB a day, the isp in that country send you a letter asking you to stop and will cut you off if you don’t. so as long as you don’t host your website at home and dont down every season of every show ever aired everyday i think mweb will consider you a valued client.

By: Thuto Moloi

Thuto Moloi — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 06:51:44 +0000

WOW!!!! I love the last question, that could solve a lot of people money!!!!!

By: Greg

Greg — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 20:54:43 +0000

@Dave Not really true – for R219, I’m getting this for my mother, my sister and will recommend it to anyone that’s not familiar with internet… never having to field a call like “my internet stopped working” because of a cap is worth the few extra bucks. It’s a whole change in mindset of how people see the internet. I die a little inside whenever I have to give a technophone an explanation of what caps are and how they work. Now I can just say “Get this account, have fun on the net. byeeeeeee”.

By: Dave

Dave — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 19:13:09 +0000

They can come down hard on the abusers but then they gonna lose business, as anyone that wants uncapped is getting it for unlimited downloads. . I can pull 20GB a day

By: Anonymous Coward

Anonymous Coward — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 17:22:47 +0000

Excellent to hear.

Hope they come down hard on network abusers, and throttle them to 56k

By: Omgee

Omgee — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 17:21:15 +0000

5.10 Isnt that rule violated by any person using Skype or some service that needs to check whether you are online, and have any new messages. What about windows. If windows needs to update while your not at home then every user would have to setup their windows updates to manual.

Basically we should shut down our modem when we leave ?

unless (“You may stay connected as long as you are actively using that connection.”) ‘you’ means the user account on the PC ? Therefore my pc user is actively using the connection

5.6 1- Dont go linking your home with your home in Cape Town and continuously monitor your security cams 24/7.
I presume it would be okay to continuously stream a Youtube video

2- Dont make a program re-download the same file/s from an FTP site

By: GlobetrotterSA

GlobetrotterSA — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 16:30:43 +0000

Unfortunately the updated MWeb ADSL Terms and Conditions page contradicts what Rudi Jansen said. See par 5.6 and 5.10 on:
http://www.mweb.co.za/legalpolicies/ProductsServices/ADSLTerms2010/tabid/1918/Default.aspx
5.6 No continuous video streaming allowed, no continuous FTP downloads
5.10 May not use ADSL service for unattended automated operation. You may stay connected as long as you are actively using that connection.

By: Luke vB

Luke vB — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 16:20:23 +0000

Don’t think Mweb can realistically get any credit for starting the price war. The latest chapter in the price wars already been underway for about 6 months. Seacom has been the enabler and Afrihost the most recent prominent leader. Other participants have been SAOL, CyberSmart, DigiChilli, etc, all with some or other innovative offering. Web Africa can’t get any credit unfortunately since they’ve fallen quite behind the other players and have shown no intentions of competing on price with the likes of Afrihost.

Mweb stands out as the first heavy-weight ISP to enter the fray. Their uncapped offerings ought to get credit for making cheap, uncapped Internet a reality at last for the South African home user and hopefully prohibitively low caps become a thing of the past. Let the uncapped era begin!

By: Antonio

Antonio — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 16:02:29 +0000

Yeah, that definitely clarified some inconsistencies in articles that I’ve read.
Very happy about the streaming and BitTorrent.