The local broadband environment has been a hive of activity after MWEB’s announcement on Thursday morning that it is now offering subscribers uncapped ADSL services from R219 per month.

Many Internet Service Providers (ISPs) responded quickly, including Openweb which is reselling MWEB’s services at the same price and Vox Telecom which undercut MWEB’s bundled uncapped ADSL prices.

Many consumers have asked what Afrihost, the ISP which started the per-GB price war late last year, will do in response to MWEB’s announcement, and their subscribers will not be disappointed.

Afrihost today announced that it has developed its own uncapped ADSL services, with pricing which compares favourably against other offerings in the market.

Afrihost has launched three data-only uncapped offerings, with the following pricing:

   1. Uncapped ADSL 384 Kbps: R197
   2. Uncapped ADSL 512 Kbps: R297
   3. Uncapped ADSL 4 Mbps: R497

According to Afrihost Sales Director Greg Payne their uncapped offering is sustainable, and users can expect good service levels from them. “With an uncapped model you have certain users subsidising other users, and as long as you can control the shaping you can still give a decent service to the majority of your users,” said Payne.

“When we launched our R29 per GB offer almost six months ago, we knew that South African users craved more affordable ADSL. At the time, most ISPs charged around R70 per GB (and many still do) so our move really shook up the ISP industry,” said Gian Visser, CEO at Afrihost. “But we knew that many users wanted more. Over the past few months, we have been testing an uncapped product, which we are now ready to introduce to the market.”

Afrihost is surprised that another ISP has beaten it to the punch with an affordable uncapped ADSL offering, but is now ready to respond with a set of products that are now the cheapest on the market, added Visser. “Our intention when we introduced our R29 offer was to put pressure on the incumbents to lower their prices, and I think we can safely say that we have achieved that goal,” said Visser.

“Initially we are only making the Uncapped 4096 kbps package available so that we can comprehensively test our Uncapped performance,” said Visser.  “The Uncapped 512 and Uncapped 386 will be available for purchase as soon as we’ve finished monitoring the Uncapped 4096 performance.”

More on what uncapped means for gamers.

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