Web Africa discontinues FreeZone for uncapped ADSL users

[Necuno]

Lycan has issues *erm*

[Lycanthrope]

Lycan has issues *erm*

Tell me about it

At least the online ones have been resolved for the last 24-hours. Here's hoping it holds!

[shadowfox]

Na, mweb is easy and hassle free, took 10 minutes to get the account, i havent spoken or heard from mweb since. Dl what i want when i want without any speed issues or latency problems.

lol ... lucky indeed. When I initially tried signing up for MWeb it turned into such a pain in the ass that I cancelled and went with WebAfrica instead.

[Lycanthrope]

lol ... lucky indeed. When I initially tried signing up for MWeb it turned into such a pain in the ass that I cancelled and went with WebAfrica instead.

That was what ticked me off the most!

When I signed up, they charged me for three months! They charged me pro-rata for the last three days of the month I ordered in, then charged me for the next two months and told me I'd only be billed again at the end of the second month. I was like "Whaaaaat?" No wai! GIEFS MONEH BACK NAO!

Took ages to get a response out of that. And the one rep on the MyBB forums, who reassured me that it would only be pro-rata for the current month and full-price for the following, went quiet after I asked him what happened. The last I heard from him was "I'll look into it."

It was actually the other rep who helped sort me out after I cancelled (big kudos to him!).

NONE of those issues with WebAfrica. First subscription went off flawlessly for R599 on my credit card

And support is always friendly, courteous and professional. Although I kinda got a little ticked off with one guy the other night who asked me for a traceroute and a screenshot of my SWTOR lagspikes even though there were bajillions of those already done further down in the ticket AND a video posted to YouTube.

But apart from that, happy days

Best ISP I've come across and best uncapped service too. At least for me And as long as the hiccups have been dealt with, it'll stay that way >:3

[souluser7]

This is pretty much all the more reason to change over to MWEB

[Graal]

And support is always friendly, courteous and professional.

The last response in my ticket with WebAfrica was "our engineers said theyre not refunding the data because steam is not officially supported by freezone"

Just like that, no punctuation. Not even a 'sorry' anywhere in sight. And I might add that this response came only after I hadn't received an answer to the ticket for more than a day and had to contact them to find out whether they had an answer to my ticket yet. I absolutely flipped my lid over it.

Either way, for what it's worth, my OpenWeb Gold account on VB is more or less the closest I'm going to get to a true uncapped account without actually having a true uncapped account. Perfect latencies all day long, Steam downloads at full speed all day long, just http downloads and torrents are slightly shaped during the day.

They might be one of the 'underdog' ISPs, and talking to their support feels like talking to a wall, but I'm OpenWeb for life yo.

[Jase]

I'm no loyalist by any means but I have to agree with Lycanthrope on WA. I've bounced from Afrihost, to MWeb to WA to a few others and I've had capped and uncapped accounts with a lot of ISPs and WA has given me the best service to date.

I am not a heavy user but since I was on leave for 6 weeks over Dec / Jan, I decided to see how far I could push the WA rolling window and how badly I would be throttled. I set up random downloads and killed that 3.46Gig rolling window over a few days and I would drop from 350Kbp/s to around 250Kbp/s which in my books was not bad at all.

The only time I really noticed poor performance was during the 12:00 - 1:00 DL+ when things were really slow.

As to gaming, my son and I played quite a bit of BF3 and our pings average around 30ms to SGS and WAGE servers.

Bottom line, I am happy with the service as an average user and part time gamer.

[Pada]

If you want to keep the FreeZone with your WebAfrica uncapped account, I would suggest that you get yourself a R15 once off prepaid 1GB local only account and then simply route the FreeZone traffic via that account.

This way you'll have uncapped + FreeZone access at the same time

IIRC one of the Steam content servers of WebAfrica falls under the FreeZone. You can use like my Traffic Splitter application to do this.

I already have a bunch of routes which I've saved as WAGE. Here's my current list that I have, and I would appreciate it very much if someone could confirm the list of FreeZone/WAGE IP addresses:

# WAGE: 41.185.60.0-41.185.60.127 & 41.185.
# - Game servers found at http://www.wage.co.za/games/status
# - steam.wa.co.za
41.185.60.0,255.255.255.128

# steam2.wa.co.za: 41.185.24.21
41.185.24.21,255.255.255.255

# WA/WAGE FTP: ftp.wa.co.za
41.185.24.23,255.255.255.255

# ZA-News: zanews.co.za
41.185.16.112,255.255.255.248

[Satarial]

This didnt really bother me because it never really worked for me.
Tried the setup like 4 times, even phoned and had WA help me set it up.
So now i just let my steam update from 12 - 6

[shadowfox]

If you want to keep the FreeZone with your WebAfrica uncapped account, I would suggest that you get yourself a R15 once off prepaid 1GB local only account and then simply route the FreeZone traffic via that account.

This way you'll have uncapped + FreeZone access at the same time

IIRC one of the Steam content servers of WebAfrica falls under the FreeZone. You can use like my Traffic Splitter application to do this.

I already have a bunch of routes which I've saved as WAGE. Here's my current list that I have, and I would appreciate it very much if someone could confirm the list of FreeZone/WAGE IP addresses:

# WAGE: 41.185.60.0-41.185.60.127 & 41.185.
# - Game servers found at http://www.wage.co.za/games/status
# - steam.wa.co.za
41.185.60.0,255.255.255.128

# steam2.wa.co.za: 41.185.24.21
41.185.24.21,255.255.255.255

# WA/WAGE FTP: ftp.wa.co.za
41.185.24.23,255.255.255.255

# ZA-News: zanews.co.za
41.185.16.112,255.255.255.248

Funny thing is, I had issues in the beginning - even using using filtering software, some of my Steam usage came off my normal data bundle (and since I'm on a capped account I wasn't entirely happy). However, WA's always said that you use it at your own risk - I got the we're not refunding data reply as well - and that it wasn't fully supported.

Nowadays, I don't bother filtering, it all comes off my freezone anyways.