Re: Voice spectrum swapped for LTE

On 13 Feb 2013, at 5:07 PM, Colin Alston <[email protected]> wrote:

> Graham; when last did you even reside in South Africa?

I run a business in ZA, and therefore need to be on top of what goes on in the ZA market.

> Unfortunately I doubt anyone on this list can comment usefully about
> network operations any more. That said I've had very few issues with
> the Vodacom network other than their willingness to sell my details to
> contract scam artists who harass me, and the blatant theft of data
> bundle expiry. In that regard Graham has a point, why are we even
> wasting our time with this country? Doesn't seem like anyone is
> interested in being competent or forward thinking any more, certainly
> they never could handle even the lightest of criticism - that just
> seems to end in court cases. It appears for all intents beyond repair,
> and there's no chance anyone's going to reduce data costs to a level
> that would make it useful to those in poverty which are all who
> remain.

Not beyond repair, no, the solution is this:

http://mybroadband.co.za/news/telecoms/69146-level-3-in-sa-better-faster-internet-promised.html

When international ISP businesses believe the time is right to invest in the ZA market and have a reasonable chance of getting a return on their investment they will march in with their global staff base and take over the market.

I know from bitter experience that major ISPs in ZA run on skeleton staff. "24 hours support" is one guy answering the phone giving moral support during the night, "send us a support email any time day or night" means "we'll get to it on tuesday morning when the long weekend is over but it will be glossed over till then". What the big international players have are competent staff covering all the world's time zones. At 3am you'll get a bright eyed staff member in the middle of their work day who is fully prepared to help you, in some timezone in the world. If you're local only, you can't compete with that.

The winners in the game are those who own physical network assets, be they holes in the ground, fibre tubes, or fibre cable itself. Sure, the guy at home is going to have to wait until all the business users are fully served before they get a look in, but that's simply a consequence of it costing the same amount of money to serve both a home user and business user but the business user is willing to pay more, they both need at least one hole in the ground, and a hole in the ground costs what it costs.

Regards,
Graham
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