@Toxic... It is not what equipment/tech you have, it is what you do with it. If you have a weapon you can protect yourself, rob a bottlestore or shoot yourself in the foot. Neotel has fumbled their implementation badly. If properly installed and maintained they could have provided "good enough" service by deploying GPRS (which is relatively old technology... which is what Vodacom did). But no, they had to go fast (2.4 to 3.1mbit/s) with an immature backbone.
So the equipment is sufficient. It is not 7.2mbit/s HSDPA-ish speeds but the hardware can actually do the 2.4 to 3.1 speeds (if setup well). For wireless CDMA2000 is not the "latest technology" but it is mature. I assume their fiber technology is fairly recent. But in reality bad planning, too little bandwidth/congestion, lack of expertise and no visible plan for the future is causing then to slowly sink. They are only putting out fires at the moment. Resellers don't even want to push the product.
Maybe Neotel's management is living in total denial. But then again we, the "sheeple", probably don't know everything. Probably their fiber network is running 110% with those clients orgasmically happy (think "When Harry met Sally"). But the wireless crowd, us, maybe a very small part of their customer base, are the only ones having issues. I don't know. Maybe the fiber based clients are taking up all the priority. Maybe Neotel is not happy with their CDMA2000 deployment and wants to, in reality, for it die a slow and definite death. Keep the system alive for as long as possible, to get some cash in to cover the hardware (infrastructure/routers/modems), but eventually get every wireless client so mad that they angrily demand a full refund cancellation of their contracts. The only way we will know is when they bring out their new yearly financial figures. If the figures look good we will then know that the wireless market means nothing to them. If bad we will know they are living in denial.
The cost and service advantages I can understand as well. No lines, easy to move etc... It looks good on paper but if the backbone sucks then it starts costing money. I now have to suppliment my Flex account with Vodacom 3G.
Doing my bit in the electronics world I can say that there is said very little good about Neotel. From clients (only wireless so far), resellers and subcontractors I only hear bad things. Even a company doing their fiber support is constantly furious with them.
But maybe opening more stores, boosting their market exposure and becoming more excessible to the public is a good thing. Maybe Neotel will improve and be the best ISP in 5 years. ????? (or not). I just remember how Vodacom was in 2005, when they officially launched 3G. It did not work!! It sucked big time. Those problems remained prominent for a few years after that as well. Now you can wack in a USB 3G modem and get high speed just about anywhere.
The one thing you will never see in company ads is some form of admission of guilt. Neotel won't post an ad saying: "Yes, we know we suck, but when it works you get relatively cheap data at 5kbytes/s". They will boost themselves to make the biggest possible profit, even if it means that they are lying.
. It is very far from being a latest technology. It is utter crap.
