“you are such an internet junkie!” i hear this from people from sometimes as i’m checking my iphone for the gazillionth time a day. “and your point is?”, would be my usual snarky response. though i guess the fact that  the bf sometimes acts as if the interwebz is/are his personal rival should tell me something! 😉

anyway, i digress. now that the bf is working from home, we are burning through bandwidth like  we still live in the u.s. where uncapped doesn’t mean you’re going hatless or are minus the arms and legs you’ve paid for your internet connection. this month we’ve had to boost our 5gb package not once, not twice, but 3 times. 9.5gbs all in all  – and i’m hoping it lasts us the day before we roll over into next month’s package.

now, i originally got my web connection 2 years ago on a dstv/mweb package. it made sense at the time – discount on a pvr recorder and  a combined dstv-internet bill, which is what i was used to in l.a.. that didn’t last too long though, before the 2 split and i was getting 2 bills in any case.

here’s a screengrab of the  mweb fee structure  at the highest 4mg line-speed, which is what i have (of course!)

mweb price-list

now, i buy the 5gb bundle, but i probably use about 8 a month. i usually boost by buying 1.5gb at R99. sometimes i boost at least twice, which has me spending R777 for 8gb. however, if i bought the 7.5gb package  which is closer to my actual usage, i’d be paying R42 more for less bandwidth. i don’t get it! surely there ought to be an incentive for buying a larger bundle!

for some reason i was struggling with boosting for the third time and had to call mweb in order to do so. then, while i was talking to the call-centre guy, he told me that actually, these are old prices – the new price for 7.5gb is now R952!!! WTF?! and that’s where they lost me. a few twitter conversations later and i’ve now emailed mweb my cancellation letter and i’m hopping onto the afrihost bandwidthwagon where i can get 10gb, note, TEN gb, for R290+R413  telkom line rental which gives me 2gbs more than i currently get, for more than R74 less than i’d be paying mweb.

i may be an internet-junkie, but i hate feeling like i’m being ripped off. so mweb, so-long, fare well off someone else’s money, not mine.

sayonara.