You can never go back to a capped world: MWEB CEO
Twelve months ago MWEB South Africa’s management faced a challenging task after Naspers decided to not sell the company (it was for sale, but there was no successful offer) and reposition it within the group.
Until early 2010 MWEB was mainly known as a reseller ISP with fairly high prices, facing the challenge of numerous subscribers migrating from high-margin dial-up accounts to low-margin ADSL services.
Speaking at the 2010 MyBroadband Conference held at Vodaworld, MWEB CEO Rudi Jansen said that MWEB had to reinvent itself to become more relevant and prominent in the South African ADSL market.
Launching uncapped ADSL
A year ago MWEB came up with the initial idea to offer affordable uncapped offerings since it felt there was a big gap in the local ADSL market which was not being addressed.
According to Jansen it took a lot of blood, sweat and tears to develop a workable business model, sell the idea to their shareholders and to get all systems up and running.
Despite facing numerous challenges everything came together in March 2010 when MWEB launched their (and South Africa’s) first affordable uncapped ADSL services.
It created tremendous excitement in the local ADSL and broadband market, and Jansen said that the response, both in terms of uptake and general feedback, was astonishing.
Excitement in the market and challenges
Jansen said that the excitement and uptake of its uncapped ADSL products showed the massive pent-up demand of uncapped services, and that anyone who thinks that one can go back to a ‘capped world’ is completely misguided. “You can never go back. You can never offer an inferior service,” said Jansen.
The tremendous uptake meant that MWEB’s network demand will outstrip what they have planned with and that they have to keep ahead of that planned network build schedule.
These network upgrades continue unabated and MWEB has now become the biggest buyer of ADSL IPC capacity in the country – around 70% more than its closest competitor.
This is only the beginning for MWEB. The company has a bigger role in the Naspers group as an online media and content distribution channel, and uncapped ADSL merely forms one part of a bigger strategy.
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