MWEB’s Free the Web (FTW) initiative has taken up the cause of Naked ADSL, calling on South Africans to take a stand and add their vote to remove mandatory landline billing with ADSL lines.

Derek Hershaw, CEO MWEB ISP, says: “With Uncapped ADSL finally becoming the norm for fixed line access, the time has come for Free the Web to focus on the next cause. So we’re asking consumers to take a stand and call for Naked ADSL.”

“There are currently three costs associated with having ADSL connectivity in South Africa: the ADSL line rental; the cost of the ADSL data; and the cost of the landline rental from Telkom,” says Hershaw.

As Telkom is bundling the landline with the ADSL line, consumers are unable to subscribe to an ADSL-only service, where they just rent the ADSL line and pay for data usage. If they want ADSL, customers are forced to also pay the rental fee for the landline, irrespective of whether they use the line for voice calls. Although our voice lines do currently subsidise a portion of our ADSL line costs, consumers should still see a reduction in costs if you didn’t have to have a landline.

“Since a landline is not required for ADSL connectivity, Naked ADSL calls for Telkom to unbundle landlines from ADSL lines, ensuring that ADSL customers who don’t want a telephone line don’t end up having to pay for one unnecessarily,” says Hershaw. (more…)

In March 2010 Mweb stunned the broadband market in South Africa when they announced that they were to bring affordable uncapped internet to both home and business ADSL users from just R219 a month. Despite all the excitement there were doubts about the service and whether this was ‘true uncapped’ or a knock off, where if you downloaded too much you would be heavily shaped and throttled. At the time Mweb released a statement saying that although there is a fair usage policy in place there is not a specific download limit and that they will never throttle the account above the normal shaping.

But why should you care as an uncapped subscriber how much other users download? The answer is simple, if everyone downloaded what they needed instead of what they think they might need then prices of uncapped could come down. Uncapped works on a very clever model, users who only download 5GB of data sustain uncapped for users who download over 100GB for example. In other words without the client who only downloads a few gigabytes a month the ISP would never be able to provide uncapped to the users who abuse the system. The two groups balance the usage out and if there are too many users abusing the system and not enough users using less, the uncapped model will not work and the ISP will sooner or later have to start throttling accounts or even worse add data caps.

I personally believe we need lower per gigabyte costs over uncapped, that way there will be less abuse and there will be an overall saving for most internet users in South Africa who don’t download just because they “paid for it”. If people keep downloading anything and everything they can get their hands on they are going to make the service unsustainable for the ISP and we will all have to pay for the other user’s ‘mistakes’. Hopefully over time throttling will become less and less of an issue with increases in bandwidth coming to SA. That WACS cable better get here soon…

Internet users in South Africa, and MWEB uncapped adsl clients in particular, now have one more reason to be happy. At last South Africa has a Video-on-Demand (VOD) service, thanks to a partnership between MWEB and MultiChoice.

The service is being offered exclusively to DStv Premium subscribers, and they will be able to access it free of charge via both their PVR decoder and MWEB ADSL broadband.

1. The DStv On Demand HD PVR offering, accessible via PVR decoder, will provide 20 hours of the most popular TV series, sporting shows, magazine shows and movies, for up to 7 days after their broadcast on DStv Channels.

2. The DStv On Demand online offering, available exclusively to MWEB ADSL customers (both capped and uncapped), will provide 800 hours of premium content including blockbuster movies, award-winning series, all the best sporting action, kids’ shows and documentaries.

Programmes are chosen for the On Demand service based on monthly consumer surveys. Content will be continually updated after each show appears on DStv channels; international series will be available for 7 days, and local content and movies for 30 days. The pilot episode will always be included.

MultiChoice says of their partnership with MWEB, “DStv Online is committed to delivering the highest possible quality of service to our subscribers. As a result, we request certain guarantees from our ISP partners – the most important of which is uncapped broadband access. MWEB was the first ISP to offer an uncapped ADSL service in South Africa and to meet our quality of service and technical requirements. We are excited to partner with them to offer you unlimited viewing pleasure at no extra bandwidth costs.”

DStv plans to roll out this service to the rest of Africa shortly. They are also investigating the feasibility of launching a Transactional Video on Demand (TVOD) service, which would allow subscribers to have access to the latest movies on a pay-per-view basis, before they are screened on DStv.

Find out more about the DStv On Demand online offering.

Local wireless broadband provider, iBurst, has hit back at the broadband war currently being waged by MWEB and other ISPs by introducing a free three-month trial for current iBurst Wireless subscribers.

Starting in April iBurst is to launch free internet access between midnight and 8am to all active iBurst Wireless customers.

The trial is open to both contract and month-to-month subscribers on all iBurst Wireless packages. Subscribers will be able to use the Internet freely between midnight and 8am, with all traffic being zero-rated and therefore not counting towards their monthly bandwidth cap.

Having free Internet access late at night is extremely useful to people synchronizing their online backups, doing large file transfers, for late-night surfing or online gaming.

This service is initially being introduced as a free trial to ensure that iBurst can deliver good customer experience and to test market viability before officially launching it as a value added service, set for July this year.

Earlier this morning we announced the winner of the uncapped MWEB adsl competition. Congratulations to Monique Theron and we thank her for supporting our competition! (She retweeted our post quite a few times!)

Bandwidth blog hopes you enjoy your two months of uncapped 4MB adsl!

MWEB shook up the local broadband market last week when they announced their uncapped ADSL offering. Competitors like Afrihost and Axxess DSL quickly reacted announcing similar uncapped packages of their own. Finally, the South African broadband market is seeing good competition and giving some affordable choice to consumers.

With all this choice which uncapped offering is the best? Well, there’s only one way to find out – test ‘em!

Bandwidth blog is giving you the opportunity to get your hands on two months of uncapped MWEB bandwidth. All you need to do to enter the competition and stand a chance of winning the uncapped account is tweet the below message and follow @bandwidthblog on Twitter.

RT @bandwidthblog: Win uncapped MWEB ADSL for 2 months! To enter RETWEET this tweet! Winners announced by Friday http://mzan.si/MWaC

(click here for an easy retweet)

We will contact the winners by Friday via Twitter with the ADSL login details. You will need a Telkom ADSL enabled telephone line to take advantage of the uncapped account. Ask your followers to retweet your tweet as this will better your chances of winning the uncapped account. Good luck!

Disclaimer: Bandwidthblog is not affiliated with Mweb for this competition. We received a test uncapped account and decided to give it away.

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.