The Truth behind MWEB's uncapped

"pay for shaped" the whole point of this forum is for the industries customer base to have a voice. Positive or Negative. We have moved out of Communist Russia.....

True, there must be a voice, but there is a difference in complaining about something "real" and something people "came up with".

Its like getting a blue car, a colour that you chose, and once you get it, you complain that its not blue enough, that would just be stupid.

These complaints/complainers are misguided, they don't grasp why whats happening is happening and then fabricate their own reasons and fuel each others anger.
 
D34M0n7,

With all due respect please stop labeling people!! You have no idea of who they are, their background, experience levels and what qualifications they might have.

Not everyone is downloading the internet, use the service for legitimate reasons and just expect a decent service. This is Efrica though so I should maybe not expect much more then I suppose!
 
True, there must be a voice, but there is a difference in complaining about something "real" and something people "came up with".

Its like getting a blue car, a colour that you chose, and once you get it, you complain that its not blue enough, that would just be stupid.

These complaints/complainers are misguided, they don't grasp why whats happening is happening and then fabricate their own reasons and fuel each others anger.

What if there were a mass of complaints regarding this blue car not being blue enough. Surely there can be some improvement as it is seemingly demanded by the customer base.

Without getting a silly 'n that it doesn't help their staff blaming Telkom lines either as a quick scape goat. If it's written in the terms & conditions why not point there instead.

Are their adverts too vague & giving the customer false information regarding "free the internet".
 
D34M0n7,

With all due respect please stop labeling people!! You have no idea of who they are, their background, experience levels and what qualifications they might have.

Not everyone is downloading the internet, use the service for legitimate reasons and just expect a decent service. This is Efrica though so I should maybe not expect much more then I suppose!

I am not trying to DL the interwebs, my usage was 70GB last month, I did not DL more because I did not need more.

The OP commented on MWEBs service in an ill informed manner, my posts are written in such a way to address what he wrote and those that support what he wrote. For the people using the service in a legit way, downloading via torrents, if its slow, they can't complain to such an extent, voice your concern yes, but understand that this service is not meant for such thing, legit or not.

For people experiencing slow HTTP downloads (say from Adobe/Nvidia) and high latency with games this is not attributed to a shaping issue, therefore don't label it as such. If gaming and general HTTP was affected by shaping ALL of us would notice it and right now I can game perfectly and DL at close to full line speed over HTTP and its constantly been this way - not shaping/throttling.
 
What if there were a mass of complaints regarding this blue car not being blue enough. Surely there can be some improvement as it is seemingly demanded by the customer base.

Without getting a silly 'n that it doesn't help their staff blaming Telkom lines either as a quick scape goat. If it's written in the terms & conditions why not point there instead.

Are their adverts too vague & giving the customer false information regarding "free the internet".

My statement about the car was metaphorical in the sense that I was describing how people always want more than what they get - aka not that the car was light blue and they wanted dark blue, (even if it was, they chose the colour and they should live with it but thats beside the point)... its that they want more then what they get.

Perhaps I'll use a better example as to avoid confusion.

If you go into steers and get their 2 for 1 Wednesday special, but when you get your food you complain that you want 3 for 1, with double patties and extra sauce.

Right now people are expecting too much, they ignore what mweb has said about the accounts and expect full line speed on all protocols, rather these people go for a capped shaped/unshaped account then, mweb has made no false claims about their product, its the people who misunderstood/ignored them.
 
My statement about the car was metaphorical in the sense that I was describing how people always want more than what they get - aka not that the car was light blue and they wanted dark blue, (even if it was, they chose the colour and they should live with it but thats beside the point)... its that they want more then what they get.

Perhaps I'll use a better example as to avoid confusion.

If you go into steers and get their 2 for 1 Wednesday special, but when you get your food you complain that you want 3 for 1, with double patties and extra sauce.

Right now people are expecting too much, they ignore what mweb has said about the accounts and expect full line speed on all protocols, rather these people go for a capped shaped/unshaped account then, mweb has made no false claims about their product, its the people who misunderstood/ignored them.

Understandable but then surely their staff should have adequate knowledge on how to deal with questions like this...

Client: Are you shaping my service ??
Mweb: You referring to any protocols such as...... / are you downloading......
Client: Yes
Mweb: In that case yes we are. All can be found in our terms & conditions.

Not:

Client: are you shaping my service ??
Mweb: It's probably your Telkom line...you know them....*phone flat lines*

Perhaps the Mweb ad regarding caps etc. should have them fly off & reveal a cone head on the persons to bring out their shaping policy ?? OK enough for me now LOL
 
Understandable but then surely their staff should have adequate knowledge on how to deal with questions like this...

Client: Are you shaping my service ??
Mweb: You referring to any protocols such as...... / are you downloading......
Client: Yes
Mweb: In that case yes we are. All can be found in our terms & conditions.

Not:

Client: are you shaping my service ??
Mweb: It's probably your Telkom line...you know them....*phone flat lines*

Perhaps the Mweb ad regarding caps etc. should have them fly off & reveal a cone head on the persons to bring out their shaping policy ?? OK enough for me now LOL

yea same thing with TRL Tech!!! reset the prot as if is my line!!

why do ISP's think their customers are such idiots??
 
Understandable but then surely their staff should have adequate knowledge on how to deal with questions like this...

Client: Are you shaping my service ??
Mweb: You referring to any protocols such as...... / are you downloading......
Client: Yes
Mweb: In that case yes we are. All can be found in our terms & conditions.

Not:

Client: are you shaping my service ??
Mweb: It's probably your Telkom line...you know them....*phone flat lines*

Perhaps the Mweb ad regarding caps etc. should have them fly off & reveal a cone head on the persons to bring out their shaping policy ?? OK enough for me now LOL

Ok, yea I get that and its frustrating I know.

However you know what protocols they shape, they state it clearly.

The thread is about the performance of the account itself and not the customer service (not that there are no problems there, there are), this is off topic.
 
Ok, yea I get that and its frustrating I know.

However you know what protocols they shape, they state it clearly.

The thread is about the performance of the account itself and not the customer service (not that there are no problems there, there are), this is off topic.

Funny, please put a hold on all shaped protocol moans & groans for the rest of your stay. Unless HTTP - Which is now blurred too from my reading.....
 
Technically there is no such thing as uncapped. You are capped by the thoughput of your line. You are capped even further by your ISPs available bandwidth to wherever you are downloading from. Then you are capped even further by congestion on your ISPs network. Is all semantics.

Rubbish. Uncapped means download as much as you want. The real world limitations of your line are a given and not taken into account. But any other constraints are not acceptable with the use of the term. Uncapped means download as much as your line and bandwidth supports. The entire world knows this.

If you see a restaurant advertising all you can eat... it is a given that you cannot eat more than they can physically provide. That is just plain common sense.
 
Funny, please put a hold on all shaped protocol moans & groans for the rest of your stay. Unless HTTP - Which is now blurred too from my reading.....

Exactly - Stop complaining about shaped services, they state it is not meant for p2p and therefore if you are not happy with the p2p performance... tough, you knew.

Its like if an ISP says in their T&Cs "We BLOCK all porn", you get the account and are then unhappy because you can't get your fix, you KNEW!

MWEB has specific accounts that cater for people who want an unshaped experience, they have provided you with an alternative.

However if HTTP starts becoming iffy then things change, but it may not be caused by shaping. There are connection ratios to pay attention to.
 
All is agreed, but what about someone who got uncapped because they wanted to use like 60gb a month? i dont think thats a heavy downloader, thats like punishing everyone, ive seen tncs on another ISP's website and they have a tiered system which makes sense, because u cant punish everyone, really what if somoene only needs 300mb to 1gb of BW a day, which i imagine is a "fair" percentage of their customer base, why punish them too?

i also saw something on their fb page that they are shaping p2p heavily - ".........Peer-2-Peer traffic is, however, being heavily shaped. We don’t have an ETA yet as to when we expect this failure to be rectified. We will keep you posted.on Wednesday"

is this temporary? i asked this on the page and Mweb Guy didnt reply.... hmmm silence is golden?
 
All is agreed, but what about someone who got uncapped because they wanted to use like 60gb a month? i dont think thats a heavy downloader, thats like punishing everyone, ive seen tncs on another ISP's website and they have a tiered system which makes sense, because u cant punish everyone, really what if somoene only needs 300mb to 1gb of BW a day, which i imagine is a "fair" percentage of their customer base, why punish them too?

i also saw something on their fb page that they are shaping p2p heavily - ".........Peer-2-Peer traffic is, however, being heavily shaped. We don’t have an ETA yet as to when we expect this failure to be rectified. We will keep you posted.on Wednesday"

is this temporary? i asked this on the page and Mweb Guy didnt reply.... hmmm silence is golden?

Some ISPs that you find in other countries, I'll take Virgin in the UK for example, they shape everyone during business hours (not heavily, just making HTTP prio) and after that they shape the top 5% of their users heavily.

Right now its a bit difficult to do that in this country but we will get there, hopefully soon.

The biggest obstacle in the way is telkom, its because of their prices that ISPs can't afford to give us a lower connection ratio and relieve a bit of the shaping. The new international cables will help though.
 
They don't really shape HTTP and E-MAIL because they can't really... but just let someone find a way of doing this and this will really screw MWEB's plans - I CHALLENGE SOMEONE TO FIND A WAY TO USE HTTP AS A WAY OF DOWNLOADING!

ROFL you kidding me right? Never heard of Downstorm or AeroVPS to only name a few. I ONLY download using HTTP. PS they do shape HTTP downloads as well.
 
Rubbish. Uncapped means download as much as you want. The real world limitations of your line are a given and not taken into account. But any other constraints are not acceptable with the use of the term. Uncapped means download as much as your line and bandwidth supports. The entire world knows this.

If you see a restaurant advertising all you can eat... it is a given that you cannot eat more than they can physically provide. That is just plain common sense.

The restaurant can supply bread rolls faster than it can cook an eisbein. Therefore if you get only breadrolls you will be able to eat a lot more than the eisbein/ribs/steak-only people. Does this make it any less "eat as much as you like"? After all, the supply of steaks is slower than the supply of rolls.

HTTP browsing works a lot faster than torrents. This does not make it less uncapped.
 
Okay, so here is how I see it.

MWEB shape the hell outta people during the day and evening for as long as possible.

Okay, so according to my logging (FACTS being delivered here - not guessing and such)
Speeds start GRADUALLY increasing from 1am (100KB/s), with 200KB at about 3am and at 6am, you getting 400KB/s (on a 4MB line) so if I left my connection going all day, I'd do about ±10GB

typicalmwebusage.jpg


Now, today, I had a chat with MWEB (they called me) to explain why I get slow speeds during the day.

The guy kept on stressing "the bandwidth is given on 'availability' " and MWEB "buy bandwidth as often as needed" this lead me to think the following;

So... let's think about it;

MWEB work out that they'll need XXX for the month of "insert whatever month here" but... now it gets a bit more interesting.

If they limit (and really limit us) say to 10KB/s (let's say anything from 10KB to 20KB) then open up the ports early in the morning, they'll need XXX amount.

So they only purchase XXX amount and have to stick to that.

They clearly don't want to buy more bandwidth so this, the truth is as follows;

They limit us HEAVILY during the day and at night to keep us "downloaders" within a acceptable limit.

We have (what MWEB advertise as uncapped) uncapped internet, but it is shaped so heavily, any sort of protocol that can do downloading (of any sort)

Ultimately, it's not really UNCAPPED, but a 300GB account per person (±10GB a day) (Also, if I'm not wrong, this has been mentioned before)

They don't really shape HTTP and E-MAIL because they can't really... but just let someone find a way of doing this and this will really screw MWEB's plans - I CHALLENGE SOMEONE TO FIND A WAY TO USE HTTP AS A WAY OF DOWNLOADING!

Now, MWEB's Free The Web South Africa fan page seems to have alot of 'haters' (These are people who really use their accounts to the best of their ability) and 'lovers' (who don't) but clearly, those 'lovers' don't really do downloading or heavy use - honestly (IMO) I don't think they know how because if they did, they'd join the 'haters' category and demand a service from MWEB.

When people complain on the Facebook group, MWEB request contact details, I think it's so they can call the user and BS the user about how things work.
Passing details onto the technical team so they can do what?!? They can't do anything.

MWEB have claimed that there might be problems with my ADSL line... yes MWEB, go try that BS story on someone 'stupid' - I'm sure you'll find someone, you have 18,134 people who 'might' fall for it.

Comments? Thoughts?

I've found a really good way of making the most of your MWEB & Telkom (SAIX) account: Read here

Wanna keep people happy?

Give users 100KB/s during the day, I think that's acceptable.
At 8pm (that's 3 hours AFTER OFFICE HOURS) open the ports to 200KB/s and at say, 11pm, 400KB/s till 8am

I really think this is a acceptable solution.


Thanks for your thoughts :) really appreciated a few things
  • how did u manage to get that graph? what app did u use to view your speeds etc
  • I am on an mweb uncapped and for the last 2 months i have done 410gigs and 450gigs last month pretty constant speeds all round - this is my speeds through the month last month http://www.glowfoto.com/static_image/04-030412L/3437/jpg/06/2010/img4/glowfoto
  • my gaming all through the day is great and at night - i do admit though during the day my pings are higher but not unplayable - i use torrents to download the open source files i do download and on most nights can use the torrents and play games online (COD4) local with a ping of say 120ms WHILE DOWNLOADING and about 30-40 without download.
  • the only thing that has bothered me really on mweb is that the SEACOM issues but hopfully thats all sorted now with the new link in Egypt for backup routes

I am probably one of a few that are happy with mweb but me personally everyone around me that has mweb 4-5 friends are extremely happy with mweb and have actually moved from other ISPs (Afrihost) to MWEB

I am personally finding it really difficult to see how all these people are complaining about their mweb when mine runs beautifully all round
 
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Not really, Rapidshare may be... Nvidia/Downstorm really most HTTP no, they don't shape it.

There are times they do shape HTTP, I have had that from experience. I am talking about sites such as Microsoft, Apple etc.
 
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