MWEB Uncapped Subscribers Feedback

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Will@MWEB said:
... While we do make every effort to identify and assist customers who fall prey to this type of incident we have very little control over the reaction of the owners of remote sites such as you have experienced. Blacklisting the entire Class B does seem a little extreme. If you are in touch with the site hosts please recommend to them that they mail our abuse team if they encounter any further such issues and we'll do our best to identify the source of the problem and eliminate it.
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I was the one that did my homework for this issue #justsaying. Anyway, this blacklisting business has become problematic for me recently. This particular site has not been an issue since I could PM the webmaster(/s) directly (here's hoping they read the XBMC forum regularly); but MWEB seems to appear on a number of banned lists which a number of sites are using to block access, and a number (I mean like four) of my e-mail contacts aren't receiving my e-mails (confirmed the fact, n00bs).

Now, one person has revealed that the IP address range was marked as SPAM by their provider and the e-mail never even farted near their inbox/spam as it was caught by the server. So I did some peeking around here: http://whatismyipaddress.com/blacklist-check. 3 databases red light.

This was the outcome of http://www.spamhaus.org/pbl/query/PBL381490:
Ref: PBL381490

41.132.0.0/15 is listed on the Policy Block List (PBL)


Outbound Email Policy of MWEB CONNECT (PROPRIETARY) LIMITED for this IP range:

It is the policy of MWEB CONNECT (PROPRIETARY) LIMITED that unauthenticated email sent from this IP address should be sent out only via the designated outbound mail server allocated to MWEB CONNECT (PROPRIETARY) LIMITED customers. To find the hostname of the correct mail server to use, customers should consult the original signup documentation or contact MWEB CONNECT (PROPRIETARY) LIMITED Technical Support.


Removal Procedure

If you are not using normal email software but instead are running a mail server and you are the owner of a Static IP address in the range 41.132.0.0/15 and you have a legitimate reason for operating a mail server on this IP, you can automatically remove (suppress) your static IP address from the PBL database
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Crux of my post:. now, why is that BS baloney in the T&C's? Why can't I use my own outgoing mail server? If not my own, why not Gmail's or my webhosts SMTP? I mean, I can do it... but its against the T&C's? Surely thats a bit antiquated?

--> I have no idea how mail servers work mind you. I won't even pretend to know. Just asking the question, if there is an answer.
 
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Restarted PC and router, still no access.

For the last two days.
 
Mephisto_Helix said:
What is weird is that an app I have been using for years, Soulseek, has been dead as a doornail since Mweb had issues last week. I'm lucky to get between 0.5 and 1.0 kbps whereas any other account is no problemo. A port closed up perchance?
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I'm using Soulseek too and its been kaput since Mweb's issues a few weeks ago. I've NEVER had a problem with it before. It even works on my Telkom Account. I'm in Durbs too btw.
 
MWEB Guy said:
Hi Randhir,

I have just spoken with our Network coordinators and they have tested the news server and have found no speed issues.

Kind regards,

MWEB Guy
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@MwebGuy

Is that meant to say that there are no real speed issues, the 30KB/s shaping is all you are allowed to get from the Mweb news.server since the last few weeks to forever in future.

Please respond because I am seriously contemplating and looking at alternative ISP options for my R539.00/month. It is fine to say that we should not look at our speeds, but rather look at the total bandwidth for the month. I am not content to wait endlessly to download something at old Telkom dial-up speeds if I want to view or experience it today, that my friends at Mweb is a typical old Telkom way of justifying their consumer abuse. So basically you have relegated the service back to a Telkom standard of browsing and e-mails, anything else will be at dial-up speed? If we want anything better then we are forced to buy the unshaped product. Unfortunately from complaints in this thread it seems similar "shaping" policies is also enforced on that "unshaped" product, so it does not seem like a viable solution to me.

What I really cannot understand is that you stated that the speedtest.net speed test function is not accurate therefore you even recommended us using the Networx utility? That is not the same, I am running on your recommendation Networx at the moment and all it gives is the current speed and total bandwidth used, the same as the 100 other programs available we can use. The speedtest.net tells me how sound the internet to local ISP servers are at any time of the day, comparing Mweb with Afrihost shows remarkable differences in quality of service. Mweb is great at certain times and terrible at other times whilst Afrihost is constant most of the times. It seems that you guys are running out of ideas when you suggest such feeble solutions to our speed issues.

In short, you are 100% correct to say that this is an uncapped but shaped service and we share the bandwidth with all the other P2P users. So we can safely assume that things will not get better, or at least back to what we were accustomed too, but rather worse as new subscribers join the Mweb service?
 
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Now I can't even browse. Have to use my Afrihost account to post this.
 
MegasXLR said:
@MwebGuy

Is that meant to say that there are no real speed issues, the 30KB/s shaping is all you are allowed to get from the Mweb news.server since the last few weeks to forever in future.

Please respond because I am seriously contemplating and looking at alternative ISP options for my R539.00/month. It is fine to say that we should not look at our speeds, but rather look at the total bandwidth for the month. I am not content to wait endlessly to download something at old Telkom dial-up speeds if I want to view or experience it today, that my friends at Mweb is a typical old Telkom way of justifying their consumer abuse. So basically you have relegated the service back to a Telkom standard of browsing and e-mails, anything else will be at dial-up speed? If we want anything better then we are forced to buy the unshaped product. Unfortunately from complaints in this thread it seems similar "shaping" policies is also enforced on that "unshaped" product, so it does not seem like a viable solution to me.

What I really cannot understand is that you stated that the speedtest.net speed test function is not accurate therefore you even recommended us using the Networx utility? That is not the same, I am running on your recommendation Networx at the moment and all it gives is the current speed and total bandwidth used, the same as the 100 other programs available we can use. The speedtest.net tells me how sound the internet to local ISP servers are at any time of the day, comparing Mweb with Afrihost shows remarkable differences in quality of service. Mweb is great at certain times and terrible at other times whilst Afrihost is constant most of the times. It seems that you guys are running out of ideas when you suggest such feeble solutions to our speed issues.

In short, you are 100% correct to say that this is an uncapped but shaped service and we share the bandwidth with all the other P2P users. So we can safely assume that things will not get better, or at least back to what we were accustomed too, but rather worse as new subscribers join the Mweb service?
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+10000000000

That pretty much sums it up. Mweb are no longer putting their customers first.

So whose moving to uncapped gold with me??
 
My bandwidth graph over a 384K account for the last 7 days:


I use it mainly for NNTP (.229), but it definitely gives me good speeds for that. The top of the graph would effectively be full speed 384K of data.

Sure it's not 100% line speed all the time, but definitely better than a lot of people are complaining about...

Since I'm not using MWEB's dns (it's not my main connection), the news.mweb.co.za url is useless to me.
 
My line got bumped to 1mb :D

Hit it's max speed for about 10min just now. Lol.

NNTP is shaped, definitely!
 
My router won't connect to mweb since last night. Its gets DSL, but keeps on saying connecting, changed to @tiscali and back to @dslmweb - still nothing.
Please fix now.
 
I realize that for reasons which will probably forever remain a mystery that up until recently some of you were getting full speeds on the news server and that now there is a perception that we have in some way implemented a harsher shaping policy and are now trying to brush things over with a generic responses.

Please allow me to clarify a few points here:

Firstly news is and will remain for the foreseeable future a shaped service which is categorized as p2p. These traffic types get the lowest priority on the network, this is not something that we've just implemented it has been the case from day one.

Now secondly in terms of the complaint that something has changed in the last few weeks a number of QoS improvements have been put in place, however nothing has been done to intentionally decrease, or negatively impact on news and p2p traffic. In fact a lot of the work that was done has been centred around improving QoS to allow a more dynamic shaping experience for p2p users. I am working from home today and I just launched a torrent test which is running at 220KB/s - not bad for 10 past 8 in the morning I'd say.

Having said all of this I have heard and acknowledged the fact that some of you feel that the NNTP experience specifically has worsened.
I have taken this feedback to our network team and they have assured me that nothing specific that they have implemented over the past 3 weeks should have had this effect. They have also showed me graphical evidence which indicates that going back to last month measured overall throughput on nntp traffic and specifically to the MWEB news server has not significantly changed. You can draw your own conclusions from this in light of the fact that previously some of you were reporting getting full speeds.
Notwithstanding this I have asked them to continue to investigate and to try and see if there is any way that they can improve on the NNTP experience within the boundaries that are set by the overall amount of bandwidth available for p2p.
However as I have stated previously I cannot offer you any guarantees that they will be able to accomplish this in the short term.

I have responded to posts on this subject previously as well as to private messages, if my responses seemed a little generic then I apologize. The answer above is the best one I can give you for now. Also please understand as a general rule MWEB Guy will not engage in too much discussion around p2p other than to remind people of the shaping policies if they are queried.

Thanks
Will
 
Will@MWEB:
You know, if you have just directly said that the full speed some got was a mistake on your part you would have spared yourself a lot speculation. This kind of talking around things is exactly why people end up loosing trust in MWEB, that and desperate kneejerk reactions because people used their lines in the way they thought they were paying for....making examples of people exposes you as being bullies. On the bright side at least now a lot more leechers will go somewhere else.
 
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hambone said:
I was the one that did my homework for this issue #justsaying. Anyway, this blacklisting business has become problematic for me recently. This particular site has not been an issue since I could PM the webmaster(/s) directly (here's hoping they read the XBMC forum regularly); but MWEB seems to appear on a number of banned lists which a number of sites are using to block access, and a number (I mean like four) of my e-mail contacts aren't receiving my e-mails (confirmed the fact, n00bs).

Now, one person has revealed that the IP address range was marked as SPAM by their provider and the e-mail never even farted near their inbox/spam as it was caught by the server. So I did some peeking around here: http://whatismyipaddress.com/blacklist-check. 3 databases red light.

This was the outcome of http://www.spamhaus.org/pbl/query/PBL381490:


Crux of my post:. now, why is that BS baloney in the T&C's? Why can't I use my own outgoing mail server? If not my own, why not Gmail's or my webhosts SMTP? I mean, I can do it... but its against the T&C's? Surely thats a bit antiquated?

--> I have no idea how mail servers work mind you. I won't even pretend to know. Just asking the question, if there is an answer.
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Actually it's ahead of the curve from a south African ISP point of view as there are not many others who have taken the decision yet to block, or redirect offnet port 25 traffic, which is a commonplace practice internationally. You are more than welcome to make use of outbound mail servers other than our own, but you will need to make use of the mail transmission port (587) if you wish to communicate with an outbound server other than our own.

We do also have exceptions in place for services such as Gmail so this should not be an issue.

Also please bear in mind that running your own outbound server on a dynamic IP consumer product is not in keeping with the AUP and our dynamic ip ranges have been pre-registered with services such as Spamhaus, which is again a common practice to prevent domain level blacklisting.
 
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rambo919 said:
Will@MWEB:
You know, if you have just directly said that the full speed some got was a mistake on your part you would have spared yourself a lot speculation. This kind of talking around things is exactly why people end up loosing trust in MWEB, that and desperate kneejerk reactions because people used their lines in the way they thought they were paying for....making examples of people exposes you of being bullies. On the bright side at least now a lot more leechers will go somewhere else.
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Appreciate the point rambo and if I had felt it was simply a mistake I would have said so straight away.
honestly I really don't know why this was the case. Shaping and bandwidth allocation is done in very broad strokes and when it comes to p2p it simply isn't possible to slice the pie neatly and make sure everyone gets the same size bite. The bottomline really if you're on a shaped product is to keep you expectation in terms of p2p traffic realistic and if something is going faster than you expected it to, just enjoy it and realize that tomorrow the experience might not be the same. Ultimately you can still download a ton on these shaped products and everytime I look at top user stats (which I'm sorry it's not our policy to publish) I can only wonder what the impact is that our products have had on hard drive sales.
 
@MegasXLR
do let us know of the other ISP options as I just signed up with mweb this month and I am already ready to give them the boot. They only say that there is a problem with the line, but telkom say there is nothing wrong. Amazingly though, after 7pm, things seem to work a lot better, yet mweb keep on saying its not their shaping.
Will be cancelling as soon as I find another option.
 
@Will, So Mweb didn't know they were making a mistake for the past 9+months? LOL!!!! I know maybe a month or 2 back a few people got similer speeds on the news servers that they got now, Mweb guy said they were working om it and a week later BAM! Full speed again. So to tell us this is normal shaping is total BS!!! Mweb is shaping NNTP harsher than usual, and for the complete LACK of integrity and dishonesty I will be looking out for a new ISP. Thank you for the service I got for 8 months prior to this btw.
 
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