Warning: Mweb will slow down heavy Internet users

Captain Beer said:
Someone at mweb told me that it will be 256kbps, that's on my 2meg premium account, resets on the 1st of the month.
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Rolling windows, which they've referred to repeatedly, would by definition not reset on the 1st day of the month. So, someone at MWeb's talking ****, but then that's been the status quo for a few days now... ;)
 
This is the mail I got. So from the 1st of September you would sit with a reduced speed over a rolling window. Since Mweb is unwilling to say what that speed might be, you would not enjoy the full service of your line. Technically they could go as far as dropping your 4mb line to 1mb and with that you might still be above the threshold and would never see the light of a 4mb line again. If you have not moved, you should - you just in for more pain in September (and with their current stance Mweb will stretch you out till October and you pay a premium for sub-standard services).

We will do this by temporarily imposing a speed limit on users who are consistently exceeding reasonable usage levels. This will be calculated on a daily basis and will measure usage in a 30 day rolling window. We would like to stress that this is not imposing a cap on the service as usage will continue at a reduced speed. We would also like to stress that the limits being imposed are designed to specifically target a very small percentage of abusers and do not alter the fact that this is still a premium service.
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^^^ So they are not capping, just reducing the speed. This is non-sense, as it is technically "soft-capping" - still false advertising as an uncapped/unmetered line and premium service becomes something more inferior than a capped product.
 
fbman said:
I do over 100 gig every month I never got a letter
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Interesting - are you on the 1MB package?

I was told by MWEB support that the mailer was sent to all users with more than 100GB usage. He however might have been referring to the 1MB product which I am currently using. He also stated that they had not been provided with the defined parameters which were considered abuse but he did not think all clients who received the email would be impacted. My average usage over the last 12 months was 133GB per month with 93GB the lowest and 178GB the highest. I find it difficult to believe that with this usage I am in the top 3% of mweb's clients who are "abusing" the network.

Although originally on MWEB's 4MB premium package I switched to the 1MB uncapped package as I found I was seldom getting anything near 4MB speeds. On the 1 MB package for the first year I normally found my speeds were at least equal to 85% of that that I got with the 4MB package. However this has degraded substantially over the last few months.

I was originally going wait until September to react to this letter, however, primarily due to MWEB guy's insistence that all clients who received the letter are classified as abusers, being ignored when requesting information to clarify and the overall highhanded approach to the whole saga I have decided to cancel my MWEB uncapped account and convert to a 10MB Telkom uncapped account which has increased my monthly costs by about R250 but to date seems to be a great improvement. I have also stopped recommending to clients and friends that they consider MWEB as an uncapped ISP.
 
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I'm so happy mweb sent me that email, I see I can get twice the speed at a different isp, for less than a R100 more, and that isp has made their throttle parameters public 'so I can manage my usage'!! Can't believe we all waited for a stupid email to tell us there are much better deals than mweb!
 
markings said:
Slowing down the connection is not capping it. We know that the low end users are subsidising the uncapped ones. Don't exepct that on top of it we should also put up with a degraded network connection because of the the way you use your uncapped one!
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Don't see me complaining that I never go to the doctor but pay my medical aid, where "Tom" is sick all the time and in hospital etc and we paying the same amount...

marine1 said:
I would think they could open themselves to either legal action or cancellation without 30 days notice.
You can't just changed things when someone is in a contract and when you have been doing 400 gigs a month for 3 years and that was fine, mweb can't just change their minds and say it's now unacceptable
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That is what is grinding me!


fbman said:
I do over 100 gig every month I never got a letter
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I avg 173GB (highest 270GB, lowest 86GB ) on 2MB premium account a month and did not get one either.

Conack said:
While those users are slowed down, lots of extra bandwidth is freed and available for Naspers' other internet TV streaming projects.
Rinse and repeat until they get a happy balance of ADSL user income and TV streaming for maximum profit.
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That my friend, is why this all started..

Necuno said:
DSTV subscriber ?
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Yes
 
Even if you didn't receive a letter, you will probably get throttled if you consume a lot of data. It is unlikely that their process of sending out an informational email is linked in any way to their throttling system.

So yeah, the lack of an email from MWEB does not exempt one from being throttled.
 
This thread has a deep-seated irony to it. Most of the people complaining in here must be within the 3% of abusers, and it actually suits MWEB for abusers to cancel their accounts. The only reason uncapped works anywhere in the world is that the majority of users subsidize the bandwidth hogs by using only a few gigs a month, if that. If everyone had to download 100G per month, there is simply not enough bandwidth in the country to accommodate this, if you do the maths.

To those who want to move to Afrihost - beware - they were one of the first ISP's to introduce uncapped and were also one of the first to implement unreasonable throttling.

My word of advice (I am a downloader too) is: be selective of what you download. There is not enough time in your life to watch terabytes of movie content per month. You don't watch 8 hours of TV per day - so why download 8+ hours of movies per day?
 
SaiyanZ said:
Even if you didn't receive a letter, you will probably get throttled if you consume a lot of data in a short time. It is unlikely that their process of sending out an informational email is linked in any way to their throttling system.

So yeah, the lack of an email from MWEB does not exempt one from being throttled.
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Fixed. I cannot wait to see the huge backlash during and after September. The way I see it even if I have not been downloading anything lately and suddenly I decide to update steam then very quickly you are trapped in that rolling window and the service slows down as you are throttled. I have experienced first hand lately and so did many others. What do you think is happening when Mwebguy says he is "refreshing" your account? This has been going on for a while , just look how the problems and speed complaints escalated recently while Mweb was fine tuning the new system live. Early this morning it would take a MyBB page 30 sec to hopefully load. OOkla battled to do a test and when eventually it loaded the results was 0.3 down with a local ping of >100. Mweb claimed "congestion, at 3am? I could forget to remain in a game server for longer than a few minutes.
 
It's all about profit.
They make the top % users out to be the enemy and then at the same time offer to upgrade the top uses to an account better suited to their usage.
I thought there wasnt enough bandwidth to go around but now you want me to get a higher package and pay more.
So it's you who wants more money.

You pulling the same stunt Axxess did a couple years back and saying the top % will get throttled so then everyone downloads less to avoid being in the top %, that has the potential to bring the average down and put other people in the top %.
That and the fact that download speeds went down the toilet is why I left them.

Give us a fixed limit or shut up.
That's why I have a premium account.
My usage pattern has not changed in the 12+months I have he this account and I'm still paying what I agreed to pay.
You changed your product, now change it back to what it was when I signed up.

If not, then mweb, you can go eat a bag of dicks
 
They make the top % users out to be the enemy and then at the same time offer to upgrade the top uses to an account better suited to their usage.
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So essentially, they want to keep the abusers and they want to keep them abusing, provided they pay more than they are now.

What does this say about their claim to be doing this only for the benefit of the other 97% ?
 
If they can't handle "normal" adsl usage wtf is going to happen when vdsl rolls out??
 
daveza said:
So essentially, they want to keep the abusers and they want to keep them abusing, provided they pay more than they are now.

What does this say about their claim to be doing this only for the benefit of the other 97% ?
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Because if the abusers get the account for their needs mweb can actually afford to buy more capacity.
 
mikef said:
Interesting - are you on the 1MB package?

I was told by MWEB support that the mailer was sent to all users with more than 100GB usage. He however might have been referring to the 1MB product which I am currently using. He also stated that they had not been provided with the defined parameters which were considered abuse but he did not think all clients who received the email would be impacted. My average usage over the last 12 months was 133GB per month with 93GB the lowest and 178GB the highest. I find it difficult to believe that with this usage I am in the top 3% of mweb's clients who are "abusing" the network.

Although originally on MWEB's 4MB premium package I switched to the 1MB uncapped package as I found I was seldom getting anything near 4MB speeds. On the 1 MB package for the first year I normally found my speeds were at least equal to 85% of that that I got with the 4MB package. However this has degraded substantially over the last few months.

I was originally going wait until September to react to this letter, however, primarily due to MWEB guy's insistence that all clients who received the letter are classified as abusers, being ignored when requesting information to clarify and the overall highhanded approach to the whole saga I have decided to cancel my MWEB uncapped account and convert to a 10MB Telkom uncapped account which has increased my monthly costs by about R250 but to date seems to be a great improvement. I have also stopped recommending to clients and friends that they consider MWEB as an uncapped ISP.
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Nope on the 4 Meg Premium Package.
 
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