MWEB revolutionised the local ADSL market just over a year ago when it released new uncapped bandwidth packages at affordable prices. Many argued that the new services would be unsustainable, or that the end-user experience with these packages would be sub-par. 

We promptly set about testing the 4MB uncapped product, and found at the time that the performance was solid, and offered similar latencies to competing capped products from the likes of Afrihost, WebAfrica and Axxess.

One of our chief concerns was whether the product would continue to offer solid gaming performance as more users hopped onto the uncapped network. 

For the entire duration of my experience with a 6 month review account, I was extremely satisfied with the performance offered in gaming. Latencies in a wide range of locally hosted games were identical to those offered in capped products I had been using previously. These games included Call of Duty: 4, CoD: Modern Warfare 2, Battlefield: Bad Company 2, StarCraft II and others. 

When the trial account expired, I moved back to my old Afrihost account, and actually found that my 50GB capped account was less stable in games than the MWEB test account I had been using. This was most noticeable in StarCraft II, and I was being dropped from one of every five games, which is extremely frustrating in when you’re playing in online leagues, and every match counts towards your rank. 

FPSs were not quite as bad, but lag spikes appeared to be more common with Afrihost. I promptly switched to a WebAfrica account, which was an improvement, and offered the benefit of the Freezone which allows you to download certain content from Steam and play on the WAGE servers without using up bandwidth. 

A few months later, I found myself back on a dedicated 4MB shaped uncapped MWEB account, and was pleased to discover that the ISP has maintained the performance levels that were present with the launch of the product. 

Testing

Speedtest.net results

To get a basic idea of what sort of performance the account was providing, I started with Speedtest.net. 

Local (JHB): Ping 21 ms, download speed 3.53 Mbps, upload speed 0.43 Mbps

International (Berlin): Ping 266 ms, download speed 3.19 Mbps, upload speed 0.40 Mbps

International (New York): Ping 321ms, download speed 3.55 Mbps, upload speed 0.39 Mbps

Off the bat, it was good to see that the general integrity of the uncapped 4Mbps product had remained intact. The 21ms latency can be attributed to my close proximity to an exchange, and is in line with what I experienced with capped ADSL offerings. The international latency result was also promising, with consistent sub 300 ms pings to a variety of European locations. Similarly, my ping to US servers was encouraging. 

Call of Duty: Black Ops

With the basic Speedtest results coming out positive, I moved on to CoD: Black Ops. Despite the nasty backlash caused by the buggy and laggy state of Black Ops at launch, it remains one of the most widely played online shooters in SA right now. All local Black Ops servers are hosted on MWEB’s network thanks to a deal which the ISP has with GameServers, so I was expecting to return good results. 

The server browser typically finds 3-5 local servers within a few seconds. As is illustrated in this screen shot, I was able to access most local servers at between 20 and 50 ms, and my experience in each server was pretty consistent. Connection errors were rare, as were lag spikes. 

StarCraft II

A poor StarCraft II experience was the reason I left Afrihost, and I was pleased to discover that upon returning to MWEB’s uncapped account, the random disconnects, and occasional inexplicably laggy games disappeared. 

StarCraft II has you playing against players in Europe for the most part (assuming you have an EU account), so there will always be a slight delay, which is only really noticeable in the opening seconds of a match. Thereafter, the gameplay experience on MWEB uncapped is solid. 

Battlefield: Bad Company 2

My latency to local Bad Company servers was nice and low, although the pings reported in the server browser do not seem to tie in to the ping experienced in game. While the server browser reports between 15 ms and 50 ms, the in game latency indicator puts this figure at closer to 70 ms, which sounds higher than the actual in game latency experience seems.

Suffice to say that there is no noticeable lag when playing Bad Company 2 on MWEB uncapped, and lag spikes are far and few between. One thing worth mentioning is that playing on Telkom (SAIX) hosted servers with local latencies is impossible. This is because MWEB and Telkom do not peer, so when you connect to anything hosted on the Telkom network, you effectively connect via London, which causes latencies in excess of 600ms in most cases. Fortunately, it is possible to connect to the likes if iGame, WAGE and of course MWEB servers and achieve low latencies.

Steam downloads

Steam download speeds were tricky to judge, because while certain content would pull down at very pleasing 425Kbps, other stuff would struggle to break the 200Kbps mark. For instance, I was able to download the 2GB Dragon Age 2 demo in around 80 minutes with a constant speed of 425 Kbps, while the Dungeon Siege III gameplay trailer cruised at between 150Kbps and 200Kbps. This may be down to a number of factors, such as network resources being allocated by Steam, or certain items being hosted on the local MWEB Steam mirror while less popular content is not.

Fortunately, even with obscure demos and trailers that are unlikely to be hosted on the MWEB mirror, seldom can you not at least achieve a constant download speed of around 100Kbps. There was no noticable Steam shaping on MWEB’s uncapped, and we were even able to achieve full line speed during the day.  

WoW

Our final test was World of Warcraft, which remains a popular choice for local MMO fans who typically connect to European servers. With a WoW test account, I was able to consistently connect to a European server at 350-400ms, and the connection was relatively stable, with only occasional lag spikes. 

While this provides an adequate gameplay experience, it is not as good as certain capped unshaped offerings which can often achieve 250-300ms latency on European servers. 

Overall, WoW is the only game we tested which did not deliver a comparable experience to certain capped offerings.

Conclusion

MWEB has had its current affordable uncapped ADSL offerings out for about a year now, and we are pleased to see that the performance levels for gaming are being maintained. Latencies to local servers are solid, and the connection does very well with StarCraft II. In some cases it is possible to achieve full line speed when downloading from Steam, while sometimes you won’t get much more than 150Kbps. 

The only real drawback is that latencies when connecting to European MMO servers might be just a touch higher that what is achievable with a good unshaped line. For this reason, hardcore MMO players might not find MWEB’s shaped uncapped packages ideal.

Apart from that, there is very little to fault with MWEB’s shaped uncapped accounts in terms of gaming.

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