When MWEB shocked the broadband market just under two months ago by launching uncapped ADSL for R219 (384Kbps) and R539 (4Mbps) per month, heavy internet users and gamers around SA celebrated. This was a massive step for local broadband, and made things like buying games online from the likes of Steam, PSN and Xbox Live a real possibility.
It also meant that gamers could play online as much as they wanted without worrying about games like Modern Warfare 2 or WoW eating through their data cap.
It seemed like our broadband dream was coming true. However, as many onlookers noted early on, the model was potentially unsustainable. Unfortunately, the reality of internet bandwidth supply to South Africa is such that true uncapped broadband cannot work as we would like it to.
While it is a complicated situation, the general consensus is that for uncapped to really work in SA, the average user can use no more than around 20GB. After that, it starts costing the ISP money, and with many users clocking up 30GB+, thing begin getting ugly.
The low-end users (<20GB pm) are essentially subsidising high-end users, but as soon as the balance starts tilting in such a way that there are not enough low-end users to compensate for all the high-end users, ISPs are forced to take action. This means that ISP’s begin throttling heavy users, effectively decreasing their line speed. Furthermore, contention ratios are forced up, and we have a high volume of users sharing a limited bandwidth supply.
Essentially what happens is that what we gain in quantity, we lose in quality of service, and for gamers in particular, this can become problematic.
Afrihost have already outlined their throttling process, which essentially starts cutting down the line speed of users as soon as they hit 30GB.
Dozens of complainants on the MyBroadband forums have reported drastic line speed drops, heavy throttling and generally poor service levels on a number of the current uncapped offerings. While this may be acceptable to some, gamers in particular will take exception to high latencies, and slow patch/game downloads.
So the question then, is should gamers sign up for uncapped, or should quality of service be more of a priority? Many online gamers are likely to move for the later, and for them there are a number of intriguing offerings on the market.
Openweb’s “Gold Uncapped”
First off is Openweb, who is offering a “Gold uncapped” upgrade for R99 per month. What they are essentially offering is a tack on to their newly introduced cheap uncapped offerings, which increases the quality of service of the account. By upgrading their uncapped to “Gold uncapped”, users are able to convert their regular shaped accounts to “semi-shaped” accounts. Gold users are separated from regular users, and given unshaped broadband access (significantly improved international gaming latencies) at night, and lower contention ratios at all times, which provide generally faster speeds. While I have not tried this service myself, early reports suggest that the Gold upgrade provides performance that is significantly better than the regular uncapped accounts.
WebAfrica’s Titan DSL
WebAfrica yesterday announced new capped offerings that are so well priced that they are able to compete with current uncapped offerings. Because the accounts are capped, we can expect less so called “bandwidth hogs” to congest the network with constant torrent downloads. Therefore the quality of service should theoretically be a lot better than that of the uncapped accounts, although this remains to be proven as more users adopt the offerings.
Many gamers would prefer to spend R499 of 50GBs of better performing bandwidth, than the same amount on uncapped yet less stable bandwidth. Furthermore, WebAfrica has its Freezone, which allows gamers to play on its servers without using any bandwidth, not to mention the local Steam mirror which gamers can also use without spending any precious bandwidth.
Axxess Unshaped R19 per GB
Another very strong contender for gamers is Axxess’ unshaped Lite account. Making use of unshaped bandwidth provisioned via the Sat-3 fibre cable, the Lite account will be the best choice for gamers who do not want a massive amount of bandwidth, but want the fastest possible connection to international gaming servers, at a low price. Like regular per GB ADSL packages, users can choose how many GBs they want, and pay a fixed rate of R19 per GB.
And many more
These are by no means the only offerings that gamers might want to consider over one of the new uncapped offerings. Just remember, if its high-speed online gaming you are after, then bandwidth quality will be more important than quantity.
Please feel free to add any other great gaming ADSL packages in our forums.
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