**MWeb Uncapped - A Real Life Account - Afrihost To The Rescue - Go Capped**

Z

Zarathustra

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South Africa.
I have to admit, that I was seduced by MWeb's Uncapped promises and subsequent offerings.

For months I've been struggling with a MWeb Uncapped account, both @ home on a 384K line and @ work on a 4Mb line. I ended up using a NeoTel 'broadband' backup more often than the MWeb ADSL option, because @ the best of times, it was simply unstable and unusable. The NeoTel connection is also unstable and there are frequent seconds & minutes where the connection is dropped.

I'd tried every thing from swopping out routers, logging calls with Telkom, plenty of calls to the MWeb help desk who sent me line interrogation tests claiming line sync of 4kb instead of 4Mb and attenuation of 2Db and lower instead of 6Db and higher. Every time, Telkom disputed this information and everytime, based on Telkom's history, I gave MWeb the benefit of the doubt.

Since the peering cut-off, things have also just become worse if your hosting is someplace not offering free peering connections to MWeb.

So, yesterday after having reaching my frustration/annoyance-cap-limit, I decided to test the free 1Gb account which I obtained from Afrihost. I wish I had done this a week earlier, I can honestly say, MWeb's uncapped offering is a complete & utter waste of time and is only good for connecting one to the Internet if all you expect is to download text e-mails and browse the MWeb website.

In the past, I've also tried both MWeb & Telkom's Capped offerings, but nothing has been as good as the Afrihost connection.

The Afrihost connection goes through Internet Solutions and apparently utilises SEACOM, flies. After a day of testing, I contacted Afrihost who confirmed that the only limit on their Capped option is the line speed and distance from the Telkom exchange. There is no shaping or throttling etc.

I have now signed up with an Capped 15Gb option which is month to month and am as I write this extremely impressed & stress-free. The MWeb account has been cancelled and according to www.pingtest.net, I've gone from a frequent F-Grade and a sometimes D-Grade to an A-Grade Internet connection.

I know that Uncapped is Shaped, but what MWeb is doing, is insane and actually makes one want to write using old fashioned letters instead of e-mail etc.

Learn from my mistake and ask yourself if you really need that Uncapped MWeb account?!?

Well done Afrihost, you have done what MWeb is promising to do - free the Internet, well @ least for me.
 
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Reading that you sound like a user who should never have gone the uncapped route, but rather a more expensive per gig capped option.

Afrihost is pretty solid. Intl latency is a bit weak but acceptable. Also at month end things slow down a bit.
 
Mate I've done around 300GB already on Mweb this month so though your experience may have been poor mine is excellent. In fact I don't know why I stuck with Axxess Uncapped + till they changed the product when I could have been using a much cheaper package a lot sooner.
 
Are we comparing capped to uncapped accounts again? Afrihost uncapped = the dogs balls. Apples vs. apples.
 
Yip, I was using MWeb's Capped services before moving to Uncapped.

Based on my OWN experience, AfriHost Capped, which I'm currently using, is much better than MWeb's Capped service ever was.

The pricing between MWeb and Afrihost cannot be compared. I'm sure that there are ISP's with better pricing and better speeds than AfriHost, but I am thus far impressed with speed, service and support.

Also, last night, pinging a server hosted in the Cape also yielded some very interesting results.

On the MWeb Uncapped service, there were time-outs and response times of 300+ milliseconds after the first couple of hops.

On the AfriHost Capped service, there were no time-outs and all responses were all less than 30 milliseconds.

This was the final proof I needed to move from MWeb to another ISP.

In MY opinion, I think that MWeb has been and still is using everyone as guinea pigs to test and troubleshoot their network which isn't stable or able to deliver the required through-put. They have also used the Uncapped service to generate capital in order to do network upgrades which may or may not solve the issues which they currently have.

I have shared MY opinions & MY experiences of frustrations, and am now happy. If nothing else, it can be used for information purposes only or ignored. If however, only one person learns from my mistake and experience and doesn't go the Uncapped route, then I have achieved something worthwhile and saved them from learning the hard way as I did.
 
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I average 10Gig a night on my uncapped Mweb account. So I can’t complain. (using hotfile etc). This is only takes place while I’m fast asleep. After 11pm. Before that it is extremely slow although normal browsing and YouTube work fine.
I can’t complain for what I’m getting. I still get an excess of 300Gig a month and know I won’t find it anywhere else.

I don’t use this solution for business, there are packages for that and to be fair I don’t do my downloading in office hours for my entertainment needs.
So far nobody beats what I get with Mweb, not Axxis, Afrihost or Openweb.
 
reading what you have said you do business at home?

if you took the time to read, that should not be done on their account you where prob using... so expect bad speeds.

during the day i can game/youtube hd/ stream other stuff. yeah my torrents during the day are slow, but who cares... busy doing other things..


and for you to say, oh hes not got any experience with different options.

my friends and their parents are all on diff providers.
range from 384 capped, to 10mb uncapped unshaped from Mweb.

some do work at home, others not.
who complain the least? Mweb users. the Afrihost/Webafrica and some other randoms all complain about speed more than we do.


personal problems with Mweb? ---> our router died out after 6 years, only time our internet has been down, not even mwebs problem... and they sent someone out to have a look.

(oh and earlier when it was down for about 10 min)

true story.
 
You can never go back once you have had a taste of mweb 4mb/s uncapped.it may never reach 4mb/s but i will never go back to the likes of telkom or afrihost.
 
Its pretty simple,
Mweb uncapped is the best option for downloading.
For high priority stuff you need a few capped accounts. (axxess, afrihost, webafrica)
You get what you pay for.
 
I've said it a million times before. If you guys expected the same level of speed from an uncapped account as you would get from capped account you seriously are not too bright. Even the guys who don't usually have major problems with Mweb's Uncapped still get annoying hiccups that you rarely ever see on capped accounts.

The inconsistent speed and reliability is the hidden price you pay for being able to download 60+ gigs per month and not paying R20+ per gig.

*Edit. Dammit Lope beat me to it!
 
DCBloodHound said:
You can never go back once you have had a taste of mweb 4mb/s uncapped.it may never reach 4mb/s but i will never go back to the likes of telkom or afrihost.
Click to expand...

And yet another expert comparing apples vs oranges. BloodHound, as long as you're on ADSL there is NO WAY you get around Telkom - they own and supply the friggin network infrastructure!
Now MWeb and Afrihost are bandwith resellers, the only difference between them is their pricing and the way they manage your account in regards of national and international backbones. I know that Afrihost capped/unshaped is truly unshaped. All occuring restrictions in speed are caused by your last mile provider. Which is - if you are aware of it or not - Telkom.
 
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