MWEB’s new uncapped ADSL offering

Published by Charl Norman on Mar 29th, 2010, 4 Comments

MWEB recently made an unexpected – but very welcome – move towards cheaper internet access for South Africans, when they pulled the wrappers off their new uncapped ADSL offering.

Although broadband prices have dropped in the past, two things make it a little different this time: firstly, this is the first time an ISP has offered significantly reduced prices on uncapped ADSL, and secondly, MWEB is arguably the best-known ISP to the average South African – which could mean that we’re about to witness a shift in the way ordinary, non-technical people use the web. Or put differently: it’s only a matter of time before your gran starts downloading torrents.

MWEB’s new data-only packages are as follows:

384Kbps shaped – R219
512Kbps shaped – R299
4Mbps shaped – R539
384Kbps unshaped – R499
512Kbps unshaped – R699
4Mbps unshaped – R1,999

The company is also offering six all-inclusive packages, where the ADSL line rental cost is included in the price:

384Kbps shaped – R349
512Kbps shaped – R599
4Mbps shaped – R899
384Kbps unshaped – R629
512Kbps unshaped – R999
4Mbps unshaped – R2,359

Over the past week, a few other ISPs have scrambled to follow suit, having apparently been caught somewhat off-guard by MWEB’s announcement. None of the new packages produced so far differ significantly from MWEB’s pricing, though.

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Allonyoav

I have been exceptionally dissapointed with the performance of MWEBs ADSL. I was on the unshaped, uncapped package, and found that despite claims that it was unshaped, I was consistently being thottle back and very rarely able to get speeds higher than 30kb/s! Trying to discuss this MWEB technical support is an exercise in futility as they assume every customer is a moron and will accept any line of bull fed to them. Actually tryign to speak to them as one IT professional to another is pointless as it quickly becomes apparent that thier technical support people are not technically competent (though there are probably some exceptions). And of course they have a habit of putting the phone down if you get too technical and they cannot understand you (made even worse by the fact that at times you can wait 15-20 minutes for them to answer the phone!)

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