Mweb Abuse Notification

I think it is irrelevant how much and what you download. It's an MWEB uncapped product with AUP. As such the product advertised is to download as much as you like at a speed as fast you can. All people who have been caught in the MWeb abuse warnings wanted to take reasonable steps to avoid getting warnings - such as governing downloads during certain time periods or using certain protocols.

The complaints are really about MWeb just sending out warnings and not giving users guidance of what should be changed.

This was my most recent email exchange after receiving an abuse warning (my mail first and then their response - I did not bother quoting my daily BW usage - it's really between 9-20GB depending on the day)

My email to MWeb said:
Thanks for the response,

so on MyBB there is the sentiment that it is absolutely okay to run downloads at full line-speed (in my case I will probably get about 380KB/sec) between 6/7pm till 6/7am (i.e. 12 hours) and just not use the ADSL connection for downloads during business hours. Another sentiment seems to be that it's perfectly okay to run full line-speed for 6 hours, then stop for 6 hours and so on.

I appreciate your response, but I still have not really received a satisfactory answer - my point being:
I downloaded 24x7 at 150-200KB/sec which amounts to 13-18GB/day. The line is never fully utilised.
User A downloads at full line-speed (i.e. 380KB/sec) from 7pm-7am (12 hours) - this amounts to 15-16GB/day but fully saturates the line for that period
User B downloads at full line-speed for 6 hours with a 6 hour break - so that also means 12 hours (i.e. 00:00 - 06:00 download, 06:00-12:00 pause, 12:00-18:00 download) and also amounts to the same as user A

I don't see that I will change what I download but am very well in a position to change how and when the downloads occur and would like to adjust this to avoid being banned from MWEB. Your previous responses did not really answer my question to take those actions.

Since there seem to be no guidelines, I will try the following and perhaps this will suit your dynamic/automatic mechanism:
00:00 - 05:00 = max 350KB/sec (max 6,1GB)
05:00 - 20:00 = max 150KB/sec (max 7,7GB)
20:00 - 23:59 = max 250KB/sec (max 3,6GB)

Appreciate your guidance / suggestions
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MWeb Abuse Department said:
Once again we expressly do not communicate any numeric limits to our customers. The abuse process is triggered by examining the long term behaviour of customers and as only a tiny percentage of our customers exhibit patterns of behaviour which warrants the sending of these warnings, we do not believe that it is in keeping with the spirit of our uncapped products to outline a set of rules for all customers to follow or to specify bandwidth/data limits per day/week/month. There are no preferential times we could specify for doing bulk data transfers.

Reporting for accounts suspected of network abuse has changed significantly over the last year. Our management team have however taken a firmer stance on network abuse, especially where Shaped products are in use since some responsibility still lies with the account holders to manage their product within the guidelines of the MWEB AUP.
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^^^ I mean, what more can one do to be within their policies? It's really a joke to refer to "internal policies" - those are rules or no rules. I am starting to think that MWeb themselves have no clue what those policies and limits are.
 
I've done whatever the hell I've wanted to for the last two years with Mweb uncapped. Monthly usage is typically between 350GB and 500Gb. Haven't heard a squeak from Mweb.

- Don't download 24/7. I don't do this because it would be inconsiderate to the other people using the connection and because I want to be able to actually browse the web. The only stuff I download during the day is one or two music albums and TV episodes.
- Don't download with https or VPN's
- Don't have ridiculously high monthly usage consistently, ie. over 600GB. Considering that downloading overnight every night on a 4Mbps connection is only about 300GB a month, you can't achieve ultra high usage without persistently downloading during office hours.

If you adhere to those very reasonable guidelines and still get bunted, feel free to have a moan.

My household pays around R2/GB. My only complaint is that it's BS that torrents aren't unshaped after hours. I'd prefer not to have to use usenet.
 
Slootvreter said:
No.

What do you download that takes 400-600 GIGABYTES every month? Perhaps here and there you are in a situation that all your work is done in the 'cloud', and even then half a terabyte is a lot. Linux distros? Updates? Gaming? What takes so much that you constantly download at full speed 24/7?
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Who died and made you download sheriff?
 
efitol said:
How do you equate 400GB with downloading full speed 24/7? Would love to see your maths.
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My point is made. I'm sure you get it. ;)

Crowley said:
Who died and made you download sheriff?
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Why ask such a stupid question? I really don't care who downloads what. I'm just really curious as to what takes so much bandwidth, but it seems to be a big secret around here :confused:
 
MagicDude4Eva said:
^^^ I mean, what more can one do to be within their policies? It's really a joke to refer to "internal policies" - those are rules or no rules. I am starting to think that MWeb themselves have no clue what those policies and limits are.
Click to expand...

MWEB purposefully does not reveal how much is acceptable and when. They want you to download as little as possible by promoting FUD (fear, uncertainly and doubt). It's a good tactic, and using these forums, where no doubt a large proportion of heavy users lurk, they are able to deter excessive downloading. Now had they said, sure you can download overnight as much as you want, but only do minimal http traffic during the day, people would overload their circuits overnight and I'm sure we'd see people moan about slow performance at 3 am. They'd have to do upgrades. But this way they can cull progressively the higher downloaders, working their way down from guys who do 500GB/mo to 200GB down to 100-50GB. They're not on record saying 100GB is ok, because next they may be axing 100GB/m guys, and then 50GB guys.

Suffice to say, if you don't want to be banned from the service, DON'T USE IT AT ALL. That's the only way to guarantee not being kicked off. And for those of us with granfathered mweb email accounts, that would suck and lead to a lot of unnecessary trouble.
 
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Space_Chief said:
Suffice to say, if you don't want to be banned from the service, DON'T USE IT AT ALL. That's the only way to guarantee not being kicked off. And for those of us with granfathered mweb email accounts, that would suck and lead to a lot of unnecessary trouble.
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Why are they kicking people off ? I had the idea that with all the new international cables there would be plenty cheap bandwidth around?

This kind of behaviour from Mweb must be doing wonders for their image. Especially this forum thread.

As an ex Mweb customer I will probably never go back and I'll never recommend them to anybody. I think heavy downloaders in general are very likely to be involved in the IT industry... and I doubt that they will recommend mweb after getting kicked off.

Mweb is doing a great job of spreading the cheer in proving that they're just a bunch of *$&#$@$ tards..
 
Just got warned to leave so I will be doing so, also in the IT business will never do business with mweb again, gonna cancel my dstv and I will stop reading new24 and switch to the new age ...

What is your ISP need a new home?

plugger123 said:
Why are they kicking people off ? I had the idea that with all the new international cables there would be plenty cheap bandwidth around?

This kind of behaviour from Mweb must be doing wonders for their image. Especially this forum thread.

As an ex Mweb customer I will probably never go back and I'll never recommend them to anybody. I think heavy downloaders in general are very likely to be involved in the IT industry... and I doubt that they will recommend mweb after getting kicked off.

Mweb is doing a great job of spreading the cheer in proving that they're just a bunch of *$&#$@$ tards..
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Banned! said:
Just got warned to leave so I will be doing so, also in the IT business will never do business with mweb again, gonna cancel my dstv and I will stop reading new24 and switch to the new age ...

What is your ISP need a new home?
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I got booted a few months ago. Cancelled DSTV in Dec 2012 and cancelled my reseller account with MWeb.
Never read News24 though so could not give that up.

Bounced around after MWeb. Afrihost then Axxess. Awesome until their move to MTN. Now with OpenWeb and seriously happy. Doing double what I used to with MWeb and no warning, threats, etc...
OpenWeb provide uncapped in the true sense of the word.
 
So after signup with new service provider, you signup for mweb 7 day trial, download 500gigs worth of HD Linux distros if you can. They might call to follow up on your experience and then will be a good time to tell them that you are not interested and was only trialing them to see if they will send a warning letter or cancel your account etc. I used about 120gig on the 7 day trial, but could only go full speed out of office hours.
 
Hi plugger123,

I think things like IPConnect costs also need to be taken into account.

I think it's an excellent strategy. As you say many of the heavy downloaders are IT guys, and maybe they recommend ISPs and maybe they don't, but MWEB has a marketing budget and uses TV, internet, radio, Facebook, etc. ads. They don't need IT guys' support. And IT guys will still recommend MWEB for lower usage people when its cheaper and more reliable. If you know people who will use 20-50GB per month on 4Mbit, and want an all inclusive product, MWEB will be No 1 choice. 20-50GB is still a lot of Facebook, email, updates, mp3s, youtube, iTunes and occasional movies.

In the meantime they get rid off the heaviest downloaders who cost them the most money and those who stay on by falling under the rader may actually reduce their usage. One guy who downloads 500GB per month = 10 x 50GB per month users. It's a winning strategy, and probably if I was MWEB, I'd do this too. Can't fault them for this, since after all MWEB's shareholders are their true customers and their purpose is profit for shareholders.

OpenWeb is a little more expensive. And they're very fast. I tested their Silver account and it went full speed - sure after hours - but I had no issues with it. I think it's good enough. But OpenWeb is attracting heavy downloaders, so I wonder how long they'll be able to keep up. Maybe OW's overheads are much lower and they can afford to cross subsidize heavy users. Who knows.
 
Space_Chief said:
,,, And IT guys will still recommend MWEB for lower usage people when its cheaper and more reliable.
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All those IT moving to other ISPs will then tell all their family members to move to another ISP. TBH: You will hardly ever need support from an ISP - in most cases it is a line issue or an uplink issue - in either case, nothing they can help you with.

For the lack of having any guidelines, I have changed my behaviour so that I don't download for prolonged periods. The end-result will still be the same amount of data, just at short burst intervals. Despite what MWeb says, they are profiling users as abusive based on a mix of daily/monthly bandwidth. So for most it is an uncapped product (provided you do less than 10GB/day on a 4mbps line or perhaps 50GB/month) but in it's true sense it isn't.
 
MagicDude4Eva said:
All those IT moving to other ISPs will then tell all their family members to move to another ISP. TBH: You will hardly ever need support from an ISP - in most cases it is a line issue or an uplink issue - in either case, nothing they can help you with.

For the lack of having any guidelines, I have changed my behaviour so that I don't download for prolonged periods. The end-result will still be the same amount of data, just at short burst intervals. Despite what MWeb says, they are profiling users as abusive based on a mix of daily/monthly bandwidth. So for most it is an uncapped product (provided you do less than 10GB/day on a 4mbps line or perhaps 50GB/month) but in it's true sense it isn't.
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I don't know. Many of these guys know their family and know that Uncle Joe only uses 20GB/mo and cheapest MWEB account is OK for him, while grandma uses 10-15GB /m but in case she ever uses 16GB by mistake, to avoid cutoff, cheapest MW uncapped is good for her.

We've been doing about 70-145GB/mo on 4Mb. We don't do 24/7 and during office hours - very little - mostly just browsing by whoever is at home. I average 4GB on most days and up to 8-11GB on some and as little as 400MB on some others.

(That's 1 desktop, 4 notebooks, 2 iPads, several smart phones).
 
whats the sense of paying an arm and a leg and not being able to use your adsl in fear of getting the boot? there should be laws against this. oh, there is. its called the consumer protection act.

i'm busy studying it.
 
Its not about how much you download, my monthly usage is around 200 Gig a month on 4 Meg uncapped Premium (3 pcs and 4 virtual box pcs and 2 smart phones and an ipad 2). I have never received an abuse notification.

I do download Linux distro's, my distro downloads are maybe 3 hours a day and the wife works from home so there is traffic during the day, mostly emails and general surfing, however I don't download 24/7 and that where the problems comes. Occasionally my machine does download through the night.

They dont care if you throttle your speeds, as that is not the point. 24/7 downloading is the issue.
 
Space_Chief said:
In the meantime they get rid off the heaviest downloaders who cost them the most money and those who stay on by falling under the rader may actually reduce their usage.
Click to expand...

Doubt that this is a good strategy. It's like Mweb saying to people: We refuse to do business with you because we are to technically inferior to manage our own network properly.

There are wonderful things programmers can do. Like automatically shape heavy downloader accounts when the network is under pressure... instead they throw their hands in the air and boot people.

Much like the wonderful search results google provides you with...(there is some clever software sitting behind it)

Mweb should be looking for a better solution.. In the long run they will be damaging their reputation.
 
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