MWEB Uncapped ADSL - Official Q & A

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MWEB said:
Hi All,

With the amount of chatter its near impossible to respond to each question/person individually, however I will try to address some of the main themes ...

1. MWEB bought uncapped ADSL to the market and we would not have done this if it weren't viable. Our commitment to providing the best uncapped service to the market has not change and has the full backing of our parent group. Remember we are barely over one month down the road, so in essence we've only just started.

2. We are aware of the levels of contention being experienced in the non-priority BW pool (bulk download inc. torrents, news, rapidshare & other one-click hosting). Our priority however is to ensure a premium experience for the priority BW pool (browsing & email related traffic) as illustrated by these speedtests (http based, thus falling into the priority pool) done not too long ago on a 4096 package ...

Pretoria: http://www.speedtest.net/result/791750519.png

Brussels: http://www.speedtest.net/result/791751335.png

3. MWEB has many scheduled capacity upgrades for our network on order, some of which are due for delivery now/shortly. If our providers could deliver them at this moment, we would provision them immediately. We are certainly not trying to maximise profits here by purposefully squeezing the avalaible capacity.

4. MWEB do not perform per user throttling of any protocols, only priority based shaping on a global level. Our BW mgmt systems are very accurate at distributing the avalaible excess capacity (of the non-priority BW pool) proportionately by package to the active users. So while the steady download speeds may seem like throttling, I assure you if half the users currently downloading suddenly disconnected, the remainer's throughput would double.

How this answers a few of the questions.

MWB.
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I'm not sure why you posted those SpeedTest results. Apart from a remarkably low ping (10ms), which many people can't achieve, we already know that the majority of HTTP is far less affected. Speedtest just shows HTTP.

We didn't sign up for uncapped just to browse. The internet is for a whole host of other things, including video streaming, voice comms, P2P sharing, online gaming and so on. Your network appears to be shaped and then prioritised, with very low numbers allocated to the above. You have even gone as far as removing "ideal for gaming" from your website, which speaks volumes.

We all understand that some limitations are necessary in order to keep prices low and usability high.

The question is how you go about it. Your CEO said we wouldn't experience so much shaping after business hours, but we do. So we already have two promises that are worthless, namely gaming and after hours shaping.

We can easily call what MWEB does to Rapidshare 'throttling'. This is the best word for it. This is also HTTP by the way, so MWEB have flagged it for special treatment.

As I've said before, the user experience is very unstable. At the beginning it seemed fair and equitable. Now that you have many more subscribers, the QOS has deteriorated. We can't log in at 1AM and expect to see a better experience, because we just don't know what the shaper/throttler status is. Equally so for gaming. If I want to settle in for some online gaming at 10PM tonight, then am I going to be disappointed? As your CEO says, this is after business hours and things should get better, but they don't. This is how we can conclude that you aren't providing sufficient bandwidth to cope with demand.

It would be better to allocate bandwidth to individual accounts so we can prioritise our own protocols. I'm not sure if this is possible on your network at the moment. Until then, please read the comments people are making on FB and here. We aren't complaining for the sake of it. We want an unshaped service at a reasonable price, but we don't want the up-down haphazard nature of your shaping and heavy protocol prioritising currently employed.

One wonders why you need to shape 384 at all, since current speeds are barely manageable ATM. A user on Telkom 384 doing some light online gaming is not contributing to much usage. Neither is one using a torrent at 3AM on a Sunday. Perhaps when Telkom gives us a speed boost, the problem will be lessened, but we will always remember how hard you were on us.
 
Tanya35 said:
One wonders why you need to shape 384 at all, since current speeds are barely manageable ATM. A user on Telkom 384 doing some light online gaming is not contributing to much usage. Neither is one using a torrent at 3AM on a Sunday. Perhaps when Telkom gives us a speed boost, the problem will be lessened, but we will always remember how hard you were on us.
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+1
384 implies that you should get at worst the speed of a heavely shaped 4MB line, not modem-speed.
 
SabreWolfy said:
The last scheduled maintenance was postponed for two weeks IIRC.
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Hi SabreWolfy,

Unforunately the rescheduling of this was completely beyond our control. We were informed it would be 2 weeks from last Sunday, but this was suddenly revised last night.

As mentioned in the announcement we have secured alternate capacity so we hope there will be minimal disruption although some downtime is expected as the re-routing process occurs.

MWB.
 
I think this thread is getting out of hand - can we not have a thread that only ISP reps can post in? We can have a discussion thread on which they may reply if they get to it. Asking the reps to post answers to each and every one of the tons of posts is getting a bit hectic. Anyhoo.

I can't complain about Mweb speeds or service - I had one brief issue (sorted, thanks MWEB) and my line speed tests pretty much match the ones posted by MWEB exactly. I've been running PRTG since I started on uncapped and it's been pretty constantly on spec.
 
@bradlesliect: ICASA will not act in this. The CC will only get involved if MWeb is abusing a monopoly position, or if there is collusion in the market. The ISP market is showing signs of healthy competition, not collusion, so you don't have much of a case there. And ASA will only judge what was advertised. I don't see that MWeb breached any advertisements. You can also try to make a civil case, but that requires that MWeb has substantially breached the contract with you. In all of these cases, you will need to prove that consumers are being harmed first.

I think this service is good for what I use it for. Yes, torrents are slow, but I am patient. That 40GB torrent will download eventually, whether it's done in a day or in 2 weeks is irrelevant. If you want guaranteed line speeds, you will need to look at MWeb's business option, or one of the IS accounts. Or alternatively pay per GB for your downloads. All of these are much more expensive, but deliver better performance. No. this is not a good account if you want full line speed for your downloads, or if you want to download 24/7.

What's important to me is that I can download both the new RHEL 6 ISO images (yes, it took slightly over a day to do), and I don't have to worry that they are 8GB combined. I can sit in Second Life, listening to a music stream, and not feel guilty that I am wasting GB I am paying for. I can go to a image site, load up a couple of hundred images in separate tabs, and a few minutes later they are all there. I can spend a whole day on YouTube if I wanted to, watching videos, with very little need for buffering. None of this is possible with a capped account for me (too expensive), and I can't afford the high-end uncapped services.

Prices can't come down much further right now, not with the prices Telkom charges for IPC and backhaul links. If these prices were to come down, then there could be movement in the market again, perhaps lowering of prices, and perhaps lowering of contention ratios. But until that happens, or LLU happens, Telkom still completely controls the ADSL market, and by extension the ADSL ISP's.
 
AntiThesis said:
I think this thread is getting out of hand - can we not have a thread that only ISP reps can post in? We can have a discussion thread on which they may reply if they get to it. Asking the reps to post answers to each and every one of the tons of posts is getting a bit hectic. Anyhoo.

I can't complain about Mweb speeds or service - I had one brief issue (sorted, thanks MWEB) and my line speed tests pretty much match the ones posted by MWEB exactly. I've been running PRTG since I started on uncapped and it's been pretty constantly on spec.
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Oh I dunno, at worst it's good entertainment when the trolls come out :D

But seriously, the fact that Mweb have got someone on the forum, replying to public posts , is GREAT!. Seriously how much would it cost to keep such a substantial portion of your subscriber base happy by having a person read and respond to forum threads. And its public which is the big +

A rep only thread would suck.
 
Oh I dunno, at worst it's good entertainment when the trolls come out :D

But seriously, the fact that Mweb have got someone on the forum, replying to public posts , is GREAT!. Seriously how much would it cost to keep such a substantial portion of your subscriber base happy by having a person read and respond to forum threads. And its public which is the big +

A rep only thread would suck.
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Yeah but my point is more to do with effective communication. Though it's fantastic that MWEB is taking part in the forum so openly, a lot of important information is lost in the chaos. For example, how many people missed the post about network maintenance being rescheduled? Guarantee there'll be at least 10 people fuming and throwing their toys because "MWEB conspired against me and moved the maintenance!"
 
Valerion said:
@bradlesliect: ICASA will not act in this. The CC will only get involved if MWeb is abusing a monopoly position, or if there is collusion in the market. The ISP market is showing signs of healthy competition, not collusion, so you don't have much of a case there. And ASA will only judge what was advertised. I don't see that MWeb breached any advertisements. You can also try to make a civil case, but that requires that MWeb has substantially breached the contract with you. In all of these cases, you will need to prove that consumers are being harmed first.

I think this service is good for what I use it for. Yes, torrents are slow, but I am patient. That 40GB torrent will download eventually, whether it's done in a day or in 2 weeks is irrelevant. If you want guaranteed line speeds, you will need to look at MWeb's business option, or one of the IS accounts. Or alternatively pay per GB for your downloads. All of these are much more expensive, but deliver better performance. No. this is not a good account if you want full line speed for your downloads, or if you want to download 24/7.

What's important to me is that I can download both the new RHEL 6 ISO images (yes, it took slightly over a day to do), and I don't have to worry that they are 8GB combined. I can sit in Second Life, listening to a music stream, and not feel guilty that I am wasting GB I am paying for. I can go to a image site, load up a couple of hundred images in separate tabs, and a few minutes later they are all there. I can spend a whole day on YouTube if I wanted to, watching videos, with very little need for buffering. None of this is possible with a capped account for me (too expensive), and I can't afford the high-end uncapped services.

Prices can't come down much further right now, not with the prices Telkom charges for IPC and backhaul links. If these prices were to come down, then there could be movement in the market again, perhaps lowering of prices, and perhaps lowering of contention ratios. But until that happens, or LLU happens, Telkom still completely controls the ADSL market, and by extension the ADSL ISP's.
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+100
 
AntiThesis said:
Yeah but my point is more to do with effective communication. Though it's fantastic that MWEB is taking part in the forum so openly, a lot of important information is lost in the chaos. For example, how many people missed the post about network maintenance being rescheduled? Guarantee there'll be at least 10 people fuming and throwing their toys because "MWEB conspired against me and moved the maintenance!"
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There is an entire seperate thread on it, plus I'm willing to bet a network notice posted and probably a email to be sent out. It's not in their control.
 
Kosmik said:
There is an entire seperate thread on it, plus I'm willing to bet a network notice posted and probably a email to be sent out. It's not in their control.
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I suppose :D I'd just love to limit the amount of crazy if possible.

I'm all for troll baiting and the entertainment it provides but they tend to feed off each other. Anyhoo, I'm going to stop cluttering the thread :D
 
AntiThesis said:
I suppose :D I'd just love to limit the amount of crazy if possible.

I'm all for troll baiting and the entertainment it provides but they tend to feed off each other. Anyhoo, I'm going to stop cluttering the thread :D
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I received email notification of the maintenance scheduled (last?) week and then one announcing the postponement. Haven't received email about tomorrow's maintenance.
 
AntiThesis said:
Yeah but my point is more to do with effective communication. Though it's fantastic that MWEB is taking part in the forum so openly, a lot of important information is lost in the chaos. For example, how many people missed the post about network maintenance being rescheduled? Guarantee there'll be at least 10 people fuming and throwing their toys because "MWEB conspired against me and moved the maintenance!"
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I don't think this forum is the most effective way to communicate such anyway. I looked in my spam folder earlier this week, and found two emails from MWeb about the SEACOM maintenance, one saying it's about to commence and one saying it's been rescheduled for 2 weeks. So they did at least try to notify me, even though I did not really see it. The best place to look is the MWeb notice board. I also follow both mweb_support and MWEBConnect on twitter. They also mention the SEACOM outage there, under MWEBConnect, and linking to Facebook.

I am very happy that there is a rep available on the forum. This helps a lot, having someone see the various complaints and compliments being delivered by people.
 
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Valerion said:
I don't think this forum is the most effective way to communicate such anyway. I looked in my spam folder earlier this week, and found two emails from MWeb about the SEACOM maintenance, one saying it's about to commence and one saying it's been rescheduled for 2 weeks. So they did at least try to notify me, even though I did not really see it. The best place to look is the MWeb notice board. I also follow both mweb_support and MWEBConnect on twitter. They also mention the SEACOM outage there, under MWEBConnect, and linking to Facebook.
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I just got an e-mail about the SEACOM maintenance (5.40pm Fri). I guess its hard to notify hundreds of thousands of customers individually...

At this point in time there is nothing about SEACOM on the Network Notices page.
 
right now I’m getting average 15kBs, on my 384k line, considering many people will be downloading atm i feel it is decent
 
schumi said:
right now I’m getting average 15kBs, on my 384k line, considering many people will be downloading atm i feel it is decent
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This means twice as long for my downloads than I am used to... damn, do I do Mweb uncapped or do I stay with Telkom local for my downloads?!?

Does Mweb only offer debit orders?
 
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