3G data tariffs - feedback from Vodacom

Im really confused with all this talk bout fast speeds on 3G.

Imagine getting 2mbit/s as a user said... I would never want faster speed than adsl on 3G technology, can you imagine having spyware or any kind of trojans/worms with infamous Windows and coming back to ur pc seeing you just downloaded in the last 10minutes being in the toilet a total of 1200mbit and imagine the scary bill you will receive for this.

I think you will have more and more suicide reports :/
 
ic said:
Have you got a suitable hat to eat :p - if not I'm sure the MTN dude can provide you with his, after all he wasn't required to eat his bcos his prediction was accurate ;)

Message for the day: when RPM says it is authentic you had better believe it! :)

<disclaimer text="Excludes 1st April Fools Days"/>
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I misread rpms post, so I am indeed ready to chow on a hat.

I went to the pub to watch soccer and the Amstallions took a grip. That’s my excuse anyways :p

So when can we expect Telkom /Sentech to introduce similar packages me wonders.

I don’t dowload music or video or file swap so 250Mb @ R200 a month means I will sign up today. Does that mean you do not need to pay for an ISP account ?
 
This is a hell of an improvement - but I wonder why the new pricing is not reflected on their site?
 
As Vodacom appreciate the feedback from forums like myadsl, the information on the new packages was first published on this site to gauge user feedback and response. It is good to see the positive feedback received so far.

As indicated in the original post, the launch of these packages is imminent. They will appear on the Vodacom site at launch time and obviously will be available to the entire community.

Vodacom prides itself on listening and responding to customer comments, suggestions and requests. This is reflected in the structure of the new packages within a month of launching the 3G service, making the offering the most complete of all broadband service in South Africa.
 
"Vodacom prides itself on listening and responding to customer comments, suggestions and requests" - Says who?? absolute rubbish!

Dealing with vodacom customer care is like pulling teeth. They deny any problems exist with their vodafone software (amongst other thing) and then they admit it and then don't even have the decency to apologise or thank us for pointing it out!

They wasted lots of my time and caused enormous frustration and unhappiness! (It took 11 (YES, ELEVEN) days for them to provide me with my usage stats!

Responding? - I am still waiting for Nathier Price to get back to me from the 28/12/2004! They are great at hading our reference numbers (12-24 hours later) and then claim somebody will get back to you! I have about 7 bloo*y reference numbers and have only received one call!

The only decent one of the lost seems to be Riaan Steenberg (Vodacom Products and Services team.) He has at least bothered to thank me for my feed back and has asked vodafone to include some of my suggestions in the new software releases.

PS> Disabling compression in the vodafone software DOES NOT WORK!
 
vodacom3g said:
Vodacom prides itself on listening and responding to customer comments, suggestions and requests. This is reflected in the structure of the new packages within a month of launching the 3G service, making the offering the most complete of all broadband service in South Africa.
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Sorry Vodacom six months ago I may have agreed with you but not anymore. The 24hr response time seem to have gone and it appears as if nobody checks open tickets anymore.

The problem which people are experiencing lies with customer care - they are not refering problems to the reponsible departments anymore. Having recently queried incorrect information on the Vodacom website, customer care confirmed three times that the information was correct. I gave up contacted the department concerned directly and the website was corrected within 24 hours
 
vodacom3g said:
This is reflected in the structure of the new packages within a month of launching the 3G service, making the offering the most complete of all broadband service in South Africa.
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Is it reflected in the fact that your charging R599 for 1gig of data ?
I mean really, that's just a HUGE rip-off.

How much is vodacom being charged per 1gig of data ? - I'd love to know, considering Telkom own 50% of vodacom.
 
bb_matt said:
How much is vodacom being charged per 1gig of data ? - I'd love to know, considering Telkom own 50% of vodacom.
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The fact that Telkom is a shareholder in Vodacom is probabily a big negative for Vodacom. With regard to interconnect Telkom is required to provide service at the same cost to all mobile networks although data most probabily falls out of interconnect. Problem is Telkom is normally the most expensive and Vodacom is forced to use them.
 
Do the same tariffs hold for GPRSM?
Unfortunately I do not have a 3G phone, I believe that only the Ericsson is currently supported, but would still like occasional access via my PDA.
I have activated GPRSM but am scared to use it as I am unsure of the cost involved.

Cheers
Chris
 
One of the big reasons I didn't go with Vodacom3g is that customer care informed me they only offer data on the 1 Gig packages you cannot have it activated on your existing contract and pay the out of bundle rate - I understand there are no phones available but let me try find one. Only video call will be activated on your existing contract.

I see no reason for signing a 24 month contract at exportitant costs to get a free data card which is most probabily useless in 5 months when the next phase is launched where 2mbits is being talked about. Seems Vodafone may just be in it with Vodacom to sell a bit of old stock.
 
Excellent point GPRS on Vodacom costs R10 per meg unless you subscribe to a mymeg100 package for a R1000 per month and get 120mb included. For R599 you get 1GIG on GPRS with a seperate subscription. To have all the services on one SIM card i.e. 1 Gig GPRS it will cost approx R9136 as opposed to R599. Is this the cost of only having all my services on my phone. 3G does not provide you with public IP address so having a PCMCIA card in my laptop just wastes a slot. I would rather use 3G over bluetooth when needed.

Seems like not a lot of though has gone into anything. Maybe they offered a 3G network before the end of 2004 but whether its a commercial service I don't know because it makes no commerical sense. I certainly don't require anybody at MTN to eat their hats.
 
vodacom3g said:
As Vodacom appreciate the feedback from forums like myadsl, the information on the new packages was first published on this site to gauge user feedback and response. It is good to see the positive feedback received so far.

As indicated in the original post, the launch of these packages is imminent. They will appear on the Vodacom site at launch time and obviously will be available to the entire community.

Vodacom prides itself on listening and responding to customer comments, suggestions and requests. This is reflected in the structure of the new packages within a month of launching the 3G service, making the offering the most complete of all broadband service in South Africa.
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Thank you for the feedback Vodacom.

Bear in mind that this is a public forum and, as such, anyone having a bad day can lay into you. Hence it will be necessary to be thick skinned and take the good with the bad.

Once again thank you for showing a willingness to engage with your users. While this will never be easy and probably downright unpleasant at times Vodacom will reap the rewards in due course.

I have one suggestion for you: As things stand your only real competition is iBurst. The only thing holding you back from claiming their entire target market is the difference in cap i.e. 1 GB vs. 3 GB. I suggest you reconsider your policies here! Equal their cap and you will provide a much more attractive service. Your lower cap is your only competitive disadvantage. Take that away and your great brandname, financial muscle and rollout experiance can REALLY be leveraged to deliver a compelling offering.

While offering a higher cap will undoubtedly eat into your profits slightly I believe that most of your 3G traffic will infact be local (e.g. business people) making it only a marginal cost.

In order to "save face" you can perhaps offer it at a slightly higher cost? e.g. +R100.

Why give the competition (iBurst) any leverage to sway your potential customers?

And just a reminder again ... companies that are willing to interact (to some extent) on public forums are noticed by customers and potential customers. This method of company-customer interaction will become the norm as the infromation society develops so well done taking a progressive attitude.
 
3G and GPRS Tariffs

To answer some of the points regarding GPRS, using 3G phones for data and non-approved phones.

1. There is no distinction between 3G and GRPS data usage. Both add up to the monthly usage.

2. Data bundles are created to allow the user to select the right price/performance option.

The current packages are:

2.1 The 3G-One (1G) package: you pay an effective 60c/Mb or R600/G. This option is only available with a 3G Data card and allows 3G and GPRS connectivity.
After the first 1G, you pay the out-of-bundle rate of R10/Mb. Pending ICASA aproval, this will change to R2/Mb and multi-Gig packages will also be available.

2.2 The various MyMEG packages. These are currently priced at an effective R10/Mb but pending ICASA aproval will change to the packages listed at the beginning of this thread, ranging from R1.75/Mb to 80c/Mb.

2.3 Out-of-Bundle rate: Currently this is at R10/Mb but will drop to R2/Mb once ICASA aproves the tariffs.

These packages work over GPRS or 3G. If you use your 3G phone (Motorola E1000, for example) and connect your PC/Laptop/PDA with bluetooth, you can connect to the web and download at the bearer (GPRS or 3G) data rate. If you don't have one of the MyMEG packages, you'll pay the out-of-bundle rate.

Remember, the 1G package is not available for doing data over phones, only with the free data card.

To be able to use your 3G phone, your SIM must be provisioned for 3G. It's free, just call Customer Care. And you can now make Video calls as well.

The above bundles, current and proposed, excluding the 3GOne, will work with any GPRS phone as well. So if you're an occasional data user and don't need the 3G capability, you can buy one of the bundles or just pay the out-of-bundle rate.

Currently only the Motorola E1000 is approved for 3G usage and thus the only model supported locally. More phones are in the process of being tested.

If you have a non-aproved 3G phone, you still can provision your SIM for 3G and use it. The local phone suppliers, however, will probably not support you if any problems arise.

Hope this answers the questions raised in this thread.

All comments re Customer Care and product ideas have been passed to the relevant people. Please keep these coming.
 
vodacom3g said:
2.2 The various MyMEG packages. These are currently priced at an effective R10/Mb but pending ICASA aproval will change to the packages listed at the beginning of this thread, ranging from R1.75/Mb to 80c/Mb.

2.3 Out-of-Bundle rate: Currently this is at R10/Mb but will drop to R2/Mb once ICASA aproves the tariffs.
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This is absurd: Having to BEG ICASA to lower prices!

I hope it will happen soon - but looking at the snails pace the ADSL case has been handled...
 
At the proposed new rates, a new kind of scenario opens:

My parents use the internet almost exclusively for email (friends, children and grand children)

This costs them around R150 per month (ISP + Telkom call charges)

At the new rates, they will be able to purchase quite a bit of bandwidth for R100 per month on GPRS. It all of a sudden becomes a viable option to use GPRS via Bluetooth provided they can get a POP3 mailbox/SMTP server for there e-mail.

Will Vodacom consider offering such packages?

I'll rather pay Vodacom than Telkom - only 50% goes to Telkom!
 
I think the Vodacom 3G offering, with the new proposed pricing structure, still does not constitute a broadband service. Vodacom will have to lower their costs much more to complete with any other broadband service. My suggestion, make it R300 a month for 10GBs or more, and I'll sign up right away ... but until then, i'll stick to my dialup.
 
pyrit said:
I think the Vodacom 3G offering, with the new proposed pricing structure, still does not constitute a broadband service. Vodacom will have to lower their costs much more to complete with any other broadband service. My suggestion, make it R300 a month for 10GBs or more, and I'll sign up right away ... but until then, i'll stick to my dialup.
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same with me!
 
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