The man who brought South Africa affordable uncapped broadband

Former Mweb chief executive Rudi Jansen was an Internet innovator who launched South Africa’s first affordable uncapped broadband and pioneered free and open peering.

Mweb rocked the South African broadband market on 22 March 2010 when it launched uncapped ADSL starting at R219 per month.

At the time, Telkom’s ADSL service dominated the broadband market, and Internet service providers (ISPs) sold data by the gigabyte (GB).

For nearly a decade after ADSL was launched in 2002, the price of ADSL data remained largely unchanged at around R70 to R80 per GB.

The high data prices stifled innovation and held back the country’s streaming, e-commerce, and other online industries.

For example, an iPhone update would take up half your monthly cap. You could also not do Microsoft Windows or Office updates without incurring high costs.

Netflix had started its incredible growth in the United States, but capped Internet hampered similar services in South Africa.

“Metered Internet has kept growth back and the writing was on the wall,” Jansen said at the time.

However, with the high cost of international bandwidth, it was inconceivable that an Internet service provider could launch uncapped broadband.

Things changed after Jansen and his team at Mweb realised there was a better solution than buying a set product from Telkom and selling it to subscribers.

They built their own national and international network and partnered with Seacom for affordable international bandwidth.

There was also a local challenge in South Africa because big telecommunications operators were very protective of their networks and did not want to peer with Mweb.

“Nobody wanted to open up as they thought their own growth would stop, and they charged a fortune for transit between networks,” Jansen said.

They solved the problem by routing their traffic via Europe and passing their network traffic over the free peering links there. Locally, Mweb peered for free with whoever it could.

“The plan was that the other networks would realise that it cost them more to accept our international traffic than simply peering locally and then start peering locally,” Jansen said.

Mweb started off by peering with whoever they could, big or small. That upset the big guys, and they started losing revenue early on.

“The more smaller players peered with each other, the better the entire South African Internet experience got,” he said.

“Some bigger players were quick to react, and some bigger ones took a long, long time, but in the end, they all came around. Today, we have a more open peering regime.”

Peering was a big win for the industry. An international peering expert even used Mweb as a case study on how to change the peering landscape.

The combination of all of these factors enabled Mweb to launch South Africa’s first affordable uncapped broadband service.

The solution was so revolutionary that many industry players and competing ISPs thought Mweb had lost the plot.

Jansen was told that uncapped ADSL was not sustainable and would never work. A few competing ISPs even thought it was just a marketing stunt.

However, the product enjoyed tremendous success, and Mweb showed exceptional growth because of the innovation.

Other Internet service providers were forced to copy Mweb and launch their own uncapped broadband products.

Jansen changed the way people used the Internet in South Africa. It made gaming more enjoyable, and online streaming became a real possibility.

Facebook usage picked up, content consumption in general increased, and people even started shopping a lot more online.

“Anyone who thinks you can go back to a capped world is completely misguided. You can never go back. You can never offer an inferior service,” Jansen said.

Jansen passed away in September 2021, leaving a legacy as an Internet pioneer who brought affordable, uncapped broadband and free and open peering to South Africa.