MWEB: “This is the real deal”

MWEB announced uncapped ADSL services for South Africa on Thursday. This sparked a flurry of questions and was met with some skepticism from SA’s more wary internet users who have dealt with claims like these in the past. After chatting to Andre Joubert, MWEB’s GM of its business division, however, I get the feeling that MWEB intends to provide truly uncapped services.

“We don’t want to promise a service like this and then not deliver it – people would just hate us all over again if we did that,” says Joubert.

“This is the real deal,” he insists, adding that MWEB has done extensive testing on the offerings to ensure that customers will get what they sign up for.

Joubert said that the home packages, starting at R219/month for a 384kbps service and going up to R539 for 4Mbps, would be shaped. But there will be no other limits on the service. No day/night split, no soft-capping, none of that.

“The only thing I can’t tell you about is contention on our network, for competitive reasons,” he says.

“Also, on the home packages, your web, mail and other commonly used ports will be unshaped. Things like peer-to-peer will be shaped, depending on contention – if there is capacity available, those services will burst onto unshaped bandwidth,” he explains.

“But we are doing things differently from other companies that have tried it. We know what we’re doing and we have the scale to pull it off,” adds Joubert.

He says that the new packages would not be a loss-leader for MWEB.

“It makes business sense given our economies of scale,” explains Joubert.

He adds that it wouldn’t make much sense for MWEB to compromise its core services by subsidising lower prices. Competitors like Afrihost have done this, hoping to attract subscribers now and keep them around when the economies of scale improve, but Joubert largely pooh-poohs that strategy.

“It works for us without being subsidised,” he states, confirming that MWEB will make money from the service from day 1.

For business customers MWEB’s uncapped ADSL is completely unshaped and unhindered by restrictions, according to Joubert. For this you pay more – R499 for 384kbps up to R1999 for 4Mbps.

These prices exclude Telkom line-rental, however, but MWEB has also put together packages that include line and bandwidth.

These all-inclusive packages, including ADSL line rental and uncapped bandwidth, go for R349, R599 and R899 per month for line speeds of 384kbps, 512kbps and 4Mbps respectively, for shaped bandwidth. All-inclusive business (unshaped) packages will cost R629 for the 384kbps option, R999 for the 512kbps and R2 259 for the 4Mbps package.

There is simply no cheaper broadband connection currently available in SA – and very few networks who could beat it. Joubert says that MWEB is heavily utilising international bandwidth on the SEACOM cable for this offering, along with some bandwidth on Telkom’s SAT3 cable.

Joubert says that when other undersea cables such as Eassy and WACS come online, prices will be adjusted down again.

“This is just the beginning,” he agrees.

There is also a point to be made about local bandwidth – which it now more expensive than international bandwidth in South Africa thanks to incumbent network Telkom’s stranglehold on the ‘local loop’. ADSL line-rentals are also way too expensive, and bandwidth is steadily becoming cheaper than line-rentals – which is just ridiculous.

I’ll reserve final judgement on MWEB ADSL until I’ve tried it myself, but there is cause to be excited methinks.

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Simon Dingle is a technology journalist, writer, broadcaster and professional speaker based in Johannesburg, South Africa. He compiles the technology pages for Finweek magazine and contributes to Fin24.com and hosts the ZA Tech Show podcast and (Tech)5 on 5FM. Read more...

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