ADSL accounts cut off

Rudolph Muller

Rudolph Muller is the editor at MyBroadband and covers telecoms and broadband news. Rudolph comes from an academic background, but left the University of...

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MWEB recently announced that at the end of April it will discontinue its unlimited free local-only ADSL bandwidth trial.  As of 1 May 2009, MWEB will allocate subscribers a free 10 GB quota of local-only bandwidth.

“The decision to provide a quota of free local-only ADSL bandwidth will bring MWEB in line with the rest of the market. During the MWEB Trial programme, it emerged that some 95% of MWEB customers were only using about 2GB of free local-only ADSL bandwidth per month,” the company announced.

This announcement did not go down well with MWEB subscribers who have grown accustomed to free local bandwidth, but there was another surprise waiting for MWEB clients who made use of ‘too much’ of the free local bandwidth.

According to feedback from some MWEB ADSL subscribers they were informed that their service was going to be suspended due to high usage.  These users typically made utilised MWEB’s unlimited local bandwidth trial for bandwidth intensive purposes.

Many of these users were unhappy about MWEB’s decision, saying that they were informed that local bandwidth was free when using an MWEB account.

“How can they do this, they are contradicting themselves by saying this, due to their advertising product which they have been promoting since February 2008, saying that local bandwidth is for free, once you are capped,” one MWEB customer told MyBroadband.  “When I questioned the manager, I was told that he would not answer nor transfer me to somebody higher than himself and I was told to put my complaint into email.”

Some users also argued that it is against the current ADSL regulations which stipulate that ‘local bandwidth shall not be subject to the cap’.

According to one subscriber MWEB told him that ADSL users will receive a local only bandwidth allowance of 20 GB for the month of April, and that their accounts will be ‘cut off’ after that allowance has been reached.

MWEB Responds

MWEB confirmed that they are making contact with users who have had “extremely high usage consistently over the past 3 to 6 months”.  MWEB did not want to say whether these users were cut off or not, but anecdotal evidence suggests that their accounts were suspended.

Capping ADSL subscribers is against the ADSL Regulations, but MWEB evaded the question about whether they are acting unlawfully.  “MWEB is not breaking ADSL regulations as we are not capping local-only after 1 May 2009,” the ISP said, but they did not provide feedback about the accounts which they may have cut off today.

When asked what misconduct the users are these users guilty of, MWEB said that “…one of the users has used 2 terabytes of data, others over 100GB in one month.”  MWEB could however not provide the relevant company terms and conditions that these users are guilty of contravening.  Their response was that users did not adhere to “various provisions contained in either 6 of our ADSL Product terms and clause 11 of our General Terms”.

While it is understandable that market conditions may make it financially unfeasible to provide unlimited local bandwidth to ADSL subscribers, the way in which MWEB has handled this situation may cause damage to the ISP in the long term.  

MWEB cutting off ADSL users? – give your views