Last week one of SA’s biggest ISPs shook the local telecoms industry when it announced new uncapped ADSL offerings at ridiculously low prices (relative to recent local market trends).

What followed was a virtual avalanche of similar announcements from other ISPs; namely Vox, Openweb and Afrihost.

MWEB Uncapped Pricing

MWEB Connect (month-to-month)

1.    Uncapped ADSL 384kbps: R219
2.    Uncapped ADSL 512kbps: R299
3.    Uncapped ADSL 4096kbps: R539

All inclusive (ADSL line included)

1.    Uncapped All-inclusive 384kbps: R349
2.    Uncapped All-inclusive 512kbps: R599
3.    Uncapped All-inclusive 4096kbps: R899

For more on what this potentially means for gamers, read the original announcement article.

It seems that for the first time in SA, uncapped broadband is becoming an affordable reality, but gamers demand solid performance, with low latency online gaming, and consistent full line speeds. If either MWEB, Afrihost, Vox or OpenWeb can get this right, then they will have an unbeatable product, for gamers in particular.

We got hold of a 4Mb account from MWEB, and immediately fired it up for testing. MyBroadband did comprehensive speed test last week, while I used our account to focus on gaming and Steam downloads.

My findings were pretty straight forward and encouraging. When playing Call of Duty 4, Bad Company 2 and Modern Warfare 2, I found no difference between the performance offered by MWEB’s uncapped service, and other capped ISP accounts from Webafrica, iBurst, and Afrihost.

CoD4 latencies on the SGS and iGame severs were stable at around 58ms which is identical to what I experience with other accounts from Web Africa, Afrihost and iDSL. This indicates that MWEB is not oversubscribing its uncapped service at this stage, and in terms of local latencies, the quality is of an acceptable standard.

Similarly, performance in Battlefield: Bad Company 2 and Modern Warfare 2 was up to scratch. In terms of international MMO gaming, we tested Aion, and again, performance was of a competitive standard.

The last pillar of our testing program was Steam downloading. I was able to get solid line speeds of between 160kB/s and 400kB/s. This means that gamers will be able to access the full potential of Valve’s digital retailer

After testing MWEB’s uncapped 4Mb/s service, I can safely say that at present it is a worthwhile option for gamers. Latencies and Steam download speeds are as good as other shaped bandwidth offerings, and you can’t argue with the pricing. However, it remains to be seen if MWEB can maintain the quality of this service as more people sign up for the uncapped offering.

Discuss MWEB’s uncapped ADSL in the forums