The story behind MWEB ADSL abuse notices

pmbellis said:
The moment they make a threshold public, a larger proportion of users who are paying for the "uncapped" will see it as a "target" and not a limit. It's human nature.

Personally I have no issue with being throttled if I'm among the top few %, but why not make it a graduated throttling, so that as your usage goes up, you get progressively throttled more and more .... much better than crashing from 4Mbs to 12kbs one fell swoop.
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Other ISP's all listed the throttling thresholds and I'm sure if what you say is true they took that into account. And honestly most of mwebs customers have uncapped and only do email and web surfing, they won't suddenly start torrenting everything to reach the threshold, they will carry on as normal. Those that do use a lot will at least know how much is too much.
 
JStrike said:
Good, get rid of the abusers
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My average for the past 12 months is 180GB a month, I stream more than I download (without using VPN), and this is considered abuse? Oh, and yes it is a multiple device household.
 
Nduimiso said:
Those that do use a lot will at least know how much is too much.
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That is indeed what many of us want - I am more than willing to manage my usage if I know what is considered acceptable. Right now I'm wondering is it over 150GB...100GB....90GB?
 
Garyvdh said:
There may be good reasons for the warnings, but there is no longer any good reason to continue calling the product 'uncapped'.

That was a misnomer from the start.
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Electron1 said:
This is the issue - don't call it uncapped, unlimited or any other term implying the service has no restrictions.
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Guys - seriously. This is all about reason. For all intents and purposes MWeb offers a uncapped product for consumers. All consumer access products all over the world have contention ratios. Mweb can either enforce contention ratios using shaping (urrggg) or by applying some terms and conditions. I think terms and conditions offer a better deal for consumers. Because you will probably get leeway for the occasional time where you use a lot more data. It is not as if MWeb applies the T&C at 3GB - they are talking about limiting users pulling in terabytes.

Seriously ... if you are mirroring the Piratebay... you probably should not use a consumer connection. What do you do with 1500GB of data? It is over a thousand hours of 720p HD video - and there are only 744 hours in a month. And don't tell me that there is that much content in 4k resolution already. I suspect there are some real abusers out there....
 
Johand said:
Guys - seriously. This is all about reason. For all intents and purposes MWeb offers a uncapped product for consumers. All consumer access products all over the world have contention ratios. Mweb can either enforce contention ratios using shaping (urrggg) or by applying some terms and conditions. I think terms and conditions offer a better deal for consumers. Because you will probably get leeway for the occasional time where you use a lot more data. It is not as if MWeb applies the T&C at 3GB - they are talking about limiting users pulling in terabytes.

Seriously ... if you are mirroring the Piratebay... you probably should not use a consumer connection. What do you do with 1500GB of data? It is over a thousand hours of 720p HD video - and there are only 744 hours in a month. And don't tell me that there is that much content in 4k resolution already. I suspect there are some real abusers out there....
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You have people 'round the 100 gig mark getting notices, which kinda renders your whole post moot.
 
This would be a great time for the other ISP's to chip in and use the backlash against MWEB as a marketing opportunity.
 
Johand said:
they are talking about limiting users pulling in terabytes.
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The email was essentially sent to anyone doing over 100GB a month, not just the TB (ab)users. I have never even come close to half a TB and got 'the letter'.
 
MWEB ISP CEO Derek Hershaw said that it is unsustainable for the top 3% of their users to continue to consume more and more of their network capacity.
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Um all ISP's face that, the solution is called shaping, shape P2P during heavy load times and let it fly when the network is underutilised (ie 4am) you pay per megabit pipe not per gigabyte so if a customer downloads a lot at 4am but there is still spare capacity on the network it should not matter, they aren't affecting other customers and could conceivably manage high usage without abusing the network

“Just to be clear, we see that on average all our users are consuming a bit more data every month,” Hershaw said.
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So instead of upgrading your network you kick off the top few %, then when usage again increases overtime and stresses the network you kick off the next few %

Hershaw said that the top 3% of their users – those who were sent notices – currently consume 25% of their total network capacity.

The biggest culprit for the high usage is peer-2-peer (P2P) traffic, which is mainly used to download TV series and movies.
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Again shape your network and manage it better, no one is expecting full speed torrents at midday. If you network was properly managed with sufficient capacity then it wouldn't be a problem, openweb and afrihost haven't had to send out letters, they just shape as needed.

Some of the high-end users consume in excess of 1.5TBs of data per month. At a price of R999 per month for an uncapped 10Mbps service, this equates to less than 70c per GB.

The cost per GB of wholesale ADSL data is multiple times higher than 70c per GB, which means that these high-end users are getting their service at well below cost.
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What about the granny with uncapped using 4 GB a month? She's grossly overpaying but I don't see that being brought up, she subsidises the heavy users. If you find this unfair charge her less in line with her actual usage and charge heavy users more. But don't come with this bull**** about users paying well below cost when many others are paying way above cost, a 97/3 split if we use your numbers.
 
From Richard Vice, as per Lord-Flame 13
we don’t think that the other 97% should have to concern themselves with a limit they are unlikely to ever reach.
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From the article on the main page
“Just to be clear, we see that on average all our users are consuming a bit more data every month,” Hershaw said.

“It’s driven by things like multiple devices in the home, more HD content and even the fact that Telkom has bumped up lines speeds a couple of times. So we expect this sort of trend.”
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So will the mystery 'threshold' continue to be raised in accordance with the other 97%, or are all your departments working from a different rule book?
 
Until they can define excessive, it's just blah blah blah to my ears. Submitted cancellations this morning. Next step is let my folks, family, friends know it's time to change.
 
Nduimiso said:
What about the granny with uncapped using 4 GB a month? She's grossly overpaying but I don't see that being brought up, she subsidises the heavy users. If you find this unfair charge her less in line with her actual usage and charge heavy users more. But don't come with this bull**** about users paying well below cost when many others are paying way above cost, a 97/3 split if we use your numbers.
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Agree...

Do not blame the user for using the product, as advertised, just because your business model works against you. It was not the user who designed said business model which is now blowing up in your faces...
 
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