This is my summary of Mweb's bad dealings in the whole affair...
In February 2008 Mweb began a trial to offer unlimited local bandwidth to all of its subscribers. There was no limit and no charge for its use. They promised to inform their customers by e-mail when the trial was over. They finally sent that e-mail on the 1st of April 2009 and officially ended the trial. From now on they will only offer 10 Gigabytes of local access and will charge 3 cents for every megabyte over that.
That is all well and good, but there were several problems with this process...
1) The announcement was made without fair warning (on the first of the month) not giving users enough time to cancel the service, and thereby in effect forcing another month's charge on them (May 2009).
2) Mweb began calling users who had made heavy use of the service and suspended their accounts for this "heavy usage". Those who have been using more than 500 Gigabytes of local bandwidth a month have had their accounts suspended without any warning and despite the fact that this was an "unlimited service". Whether or not you believe that this is heavy usage, the fact is there was no warning and no limit placed on the accounts.
3) Mweb has been giving confusing statements about the service for months now. People who called Mweb were told that there was no limit, or that there was a 10Gb limit. they were told that the trial had ended and that it had not ended and it seems like even the Mweb customer service agents had no clue what was going on.
4) In limiting and restricting the local bandwidth Mweb is going against the regulations published by ICASA in 2006. to whit “Local bandwidth usage shall not be subject to the cap.” by placing a charge of 3 cents per megabyte on local usage Mweb is in effect "capping" the service by making it unaffordable to the average user.
5) On the 26th March 2009, Mweb General Manager Natalie Thayer was interviewed by the
www.mybroadband.co.za website and stated "MWEB ADSL subscribers will be glad to hear that there are no plans as yet to discontinue unlimited local traffic. MWEB customers will therefore still be able to access all local content despite the status of their overall cap." This was one week before Mweb decided to change the service and start charging for it. This statement was misleading and blatantly designed to lull the subscribers into a false sense of security. She should have instead given the subscribers fair warning that the service was about to be changed.
6) Mweb remains one of the most expensive ISPs in South Africa typically charging 10 to 30% more for their services than most other ISPs. In this case the charge for local bandwidth (beyond the 10Gb free allowance) amounts to R30 per gigabyte. You can buy local access from some ISPs for as low as R10 or R15 per gigabyte! Even Telkom themselves offer 10, 20 or 30 Gigabytes free local access depending on your International cap and they rarely charge for any usage beyond that.
7) The whole issue of capping in general is a sore point with South African Internet users. While most Internet Users worldwide enjoy no caps or large caps of up to 250 Gigabytes we in South Africa are still stuck with an average cap of 3 Gb for our international access. This capping policy is ludicrous and has stifled broadband growth and innovation in South Africa. By making this move to restrict local access Mweb is supporting Telkom's policy of restrictive capping and charging users excessively for accessing what should be a free resource - the local internet!
