MWEB Uncapped ADSL - Official Q & A

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bradlesliect said:
I am complaining - does that make me a moron or a consumer exercising his right to complaint and demand the service he is paying for? Careful with those statements, ppl might just get their backs up and turn on you... not everyone can afford the line rentals and/or services you have. What if the shoe was on the other foot?
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You mis-interpreted what I said, I meant if they stoped signing up people. Read the full context of the conversation.
 
shapes, throttles, policy-based routing, access-lists - they all do the same thing....limit the service

@Kosmik - Apologies for misunderstanding and thanks for clarity.

Question remains - is anything going to be done now or is MWEB going to keep signing up new users to eventually become MK@K? Will they actually listen to the masses(forums, facebook, hellopeter.com, consumer sites) and take heed of our calls? I have recorded a few of their ads(radio and tv) and have made contact with ASA and the Competition Commission. Just waiting on some answers from them.

You know what I find amazing is that a few weeks ago ppl wanted to ban me from this forum for speaking my mind and telling the truth and now...well...lets just say...nah...rather not
 
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bradlesliect said:
Question remains - is anything going to be done now or is MWEB going to keep signing up new users to eventually become MK@K? Will they actually listen to the masses(forums, facebook, hellopeter.com, consumer sites) and take heed of our calls? I have recorded a few of their ads(radio and tv) and have made contact with ASA and the Competition Commission. Just waiting on some answers from them.
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Time will tell. At least they are interacting with the public and making attempts to actually use the money to enhance/enlarge their capacity.

But we shall see. A lot of folks are upset and a lot of peeps are coming across next month. @Mweb I hope you guys are ready for this.
 
Pariah said:
mweb shapes not throttles
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They shape at the outset and then heavily de-prioritise according to contention and protocol.

Application-based Optimization
Application-based traffic optimization uses the properties of each network protocol to provide
the minimum bandwidth that guarantees acceptable quality. Bulk file transfer applications are
given the lowest priority since they are typically non-interactive and long-lived. For example, a
one way bulk interactive application such as a file download would be lowest priority, a oneway
streaming media like YouTube ® may be next in priority and an interactive application
such as VoIP would have the highest priority. As the network becomes heavily congested this
prioritization becomes important as each application is degraded if it is not prioritized.
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http://www.sandvine.com/downloads/documents/Evolution_of_Traffic_Optimization.pdf
 
I am of the opinion that MWEB should STOP ANY new take-ons until the network is sorted, routing policies defined, T&C fixed and clarified and they actually deliver on their promises. They not going to lose any revenue - rather strengthen the relationship with the existing clientbase, making sure every effort is made to ensure that is well supported.

What say you?
 
bradlesliect said:
shapes, throttles, policy-based routing, access-lists - they all do the same thing....limit the service

@Kosmik - Apologies for misunderstanding and thanks for clarity.

Question remains - is anything going to be done now or is MWEB going to keep signing up new users to eventually become MK@K? Will they actually listen to the masses(forums, facebook, hellopeter.com, consumer sites) and take heed of our calls? I have recorded a few of their ads(radio and tv) and have made contact with ASA and the Competition Commission. Just waiting on some answers from them.
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If MWEB are advertising Fast ADSL and then reduce the speed for activities that normally take place on the internet (apart from simple browsing), then they are in effect changing the speed and definition of the underlying prduct. 384 ADSL becomes dialup, 4Meg becomes 2 and so on. They also changed their ads recently to remove the 'ideal for gaming' statement.
 
bradlesliect said:
I am of the opinion that MWEB should STOP ANY new take-ons until the network is sorted, routing policies defined, T&C fixed and clarified and they actually deliver on their promises. They not going to lose any revenue - rather strengthen the relationship with the existing clientbase, making sure every effort is made to ensure that is well supported.

What say you?
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The alternative is for them to increase bandwidth. That involves a purchase and lower profits. So no guessing what they won't do to any significant degree.

I would like someone to come up with a suitable benchmark for customer QOS and then have MWEB stick to it. It's the constant back & forth, up and down unpredictability that will set people off and make them lose custom.
 
to make money ...one needs to spend money and if NASPERS sees what the projected/potential return on investment is going to be, I dont see why they won't invest. MWEB was running at a MAJOR loss a few years back, NASPERS was about to cut their losses and sell off MWEB but instead opted not to. MWEB is not showing a proper return on investment yet but the shareholders have not decreased any of the $$ they investing.

So ...MWEB...I think its time you start pulling finger! Leave the red-tape and politics to the politicians unless they having influence as well?
 
I subscribed to the 4mbps uncapped data-only offering earlier this week. I heard that Mweb was the best option of the ISPs - speeds were slow during the day but picked up after hours. However, after a couple of days of use I have to admit, I never imagined it would be quite this shockingly pathetic.

During the day ANY kind of download (news servers, torrents, etc) seems to be capped at 50k/sec. I can forgive this however, as I understand that during peak times, they want to preserve their bandwidth capacity for corporate users and people using their connections for something other than downloading, and in my personal experience browsing and general connectivity still seem to be good.

However, I was extremely surprised when I saw that after hours, nothing changed. 6pm brings about an addition of maybe 10-20k/sec, and that's it. Sometime in the early hours of the morning (seems to vary between 1am and 3am) speeds pick up a bit, and seem to settle between 300-400k/sec, until 7am, when they cut out again and we're back to the wonderful world of 50k/sec. I understand what's meant by a "best effort service". Telkom have been bandying about this term for years. But this is not "best effort". Certain protocols are not "de-prioritised", they are solidly throttled. It's not like during the day/night, download speeds are fluctuating between 50k/sec and higher as network load increases and decreases. They are LOCKED at 50k/sec. This is throttling, plain and simple. We're basically paying for 4mbps for 5-6 hours every day.

I also do not understand why speeds don't improve after office hours. Surely utilisation on your network drastically decreases after 6/7pm - so why is this not reflected in transfer speeds? Are you trying to tell me 7am to 2am are PEAK hours? Give me a break.

I might be willing to put up with this if it was indeed "best effort", but that is not the case, and this is a rather large misrepresentation by Mweb which people seem to be overlooking. I'm sure I'll be told "it's better than anything we've had in the past" and "if you don't like it go somewhere else", and I will. But the rest of you guys with your heads in the sand are still not getting what you're paying for, plain and simple.
 
@Seeyou

Welcome and fight the good fight....

Once again our "MWEB" rep that was answering FAQs on this topic has vanished like mist....guess he now needs to back and talk to the bosses and bring us some more BS... yes... I am annoyed!

@Seeyou - you're lucky, at least you get about 50k-80k...just imagine us using 384k,512k lines and services - we getting dialup speed(3.6k - 5k) throughputs...so... count your blessings. Yes, its not what you expected but its better than ours.
 
I have signed up with MWEB on 16th of this month. Everything was well for a few days, but every day it seems to get slower. Downloads max at about 34KB/s on 4Mbps line, it used to be 100KB/s. I wish that someone from MWEB would give feedback on this. I am getting worried that they might be happy with the way things are going now that competition has been eliminated. I really want to stay with MWEB and the few days that the service has been working well gave me hope for the future. I hope that they acquire some more bandwidth to restore balance. Please let this be the case.
 
@brad

That's even worse. So by the looks of it they're basically throttling each package to 5-10% of max line-speed during the day, and hiding behind their "best effort" clause when asked about it.

I see they just appointed a whole TEAM of Mweb people to respond to queries on this forum with much fanfare and boot-licking by their followers. Perhaps one of these guys can pop in here and address some of the concerns.
 
Seeyou said:
I also do not understand why speeds don't improve after office hours. Surely utilisation on your network drastically decreases after 6/7pm - so why is this not reflected in transfer speeds? Are you trying to tell me 7am to 2am are PEAK hours? Give me a break.
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Well they sort of are. They are peak DOWNLOADING hours now, just a result of everyone trying to get what they can due to daytime shaping and over-subscription. The question should be when the next upgrade from MWeb will be. Eventually the influx of new subscribers will level out, until then it will be a bit of a roller-coaster between the upgrades and increasing contention. Sucks, doesn't it?
 
farimir said:
I have signed up with MWEB on 16th of this month. Everything was well for a few days, but every day it seems to get slower. Downloads max at about 34KB/s on 4Mbps line, it used to be 100KB/s. I wish that someone from MWEB would give feedback on this. I am getting worried that they might be happy with the way things are going now that competition has been eliminated. I really want to stay with MWEB and the few days that the service has been working well gave me hope for the future. I hope that they acquire some more bandwidth to restore balance. Please let this be the case.
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I'm not so sure about that. Check the Afrihost threads. Speeds are improving, and there's talk of increasing the threshholds. It could turn out that slower to start is better than faster to finish...
 
Sucks is an understatement ...as I said we ARE being SCREWED by both Telkom and the ISP and they are well within their right to do this cos we signed up for those specific services. As said before, I'm taking this to ICASA, ASA and the Competition Tribunal...but right now I'm a small fish in a HUGE pond and I need support. I suspect price fixing...its happened in other industries...so dont see why its can't happen in this one?

Anyone out there want to join me? I will create the petition. Please PM me should you be interested.
 
@wasp

Don't kid yourself. I used to be with Afrihost too. There have been loads of complaints about them too - check the other forums. The only ISP that I have seen extremely little complaints about is WebAfrica. I changed from WA because of affordability but let me tell you, they don't unleash anything on their users without prior testing and feedback from the user base.....now that....makes good business sense! thats why they win awards
 
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