Alan Knott-Craig retires

Do you guys know, that Vodacom and CapeAds started in the same year!

I met mr Knott-Craig at Vodacom's 10th (possibly) Birthday (with with my gf who works at V) in the CTICC in CPT and told him that, he said he didn't think CapeAds would make it, and here we are, just as old as Vodacom ;)

See ya round Mr! It's been real ;)
 
He is an excellent CEO and has built a great team around him. I often deal with Vodacom and I think the success of the company is firmly rooted in its excellent top level management. Unbeknownst to many people the company is mainly run by techies – no surprise that they could not wait to roll out HSDPA 3.6/7.2 and HSUPA :D And from what I have heard Knott-Craig was the one who simply said ‘swap all old 3G cards for new HSDPA ones free of charge’ when he heard of some customer dissatisfaction….
 
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rpm said:
He is an excellent CEO and has built a great team around him. I often deal with Vodacom and I think the success of the company is firmly rooted in its excellent top level management. Unbeknownst to many people the company is mainly run by techies – no surprise that they could not wait to roll out HSDPA 3.6/7.2 and HSUPA :D And from what I have heard Knott-Craig was the one who simply said ‘swap all old 3G cards for new HSDPA ones free of charge’ when he heard of some customer dissatisfaction….
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S'true, I was there....a customer complained that the 3G->HSDPA upgrade process was too complex and AKC just said 'swap them all'.

Cost VC a cool R100M in new cards ;)

But the big cost was then to much more quickly upgrade the back-haul. We anticipated that subscribers would slowly take up HSDPA and the current 3G users would mostly stay on 3G till due for an upgrade. So overnight we had tens of thousands of subs on 1.8Mb/s rather than 384Kb/s.

In hindsight, I think it was one of those defining moments and helped to ensure the very high adoption rate of HSDPA to the point that SA must be the only country in the world where HSDPA directly rivals DSL in installed base.
 
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ic said:
Despite the backhaul capacity issues, IMO it was an excellent decision which put HSDPA on the broadband map in SA. AFAIK MTN has never done anything similar, which is rather strange.
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Although Knott-Craig, Uys and others have provided Vodacom’s shareholders with excellent returns, I think the fact that they are engineers rather than CAs played a role.

For an accountant such a move will just not make any sense – R 100 Million and with no immediate return on investment...no way a CA will see the value in that :D Lets remember that Sizwe Nxasana – Telkom’s ex-CEO firing staff and rather passing Billions in dividends to shareholders than invest it back into its network – is a CA :rolleyes:
 
vodacom3g said:
But the big cost was then to much more quickly upgrade the back-haul. We anticipated that subscribers would slowly take up HSDPA and the current 3G users would mostly stay on 3G till due for an upgrade. So overnight we had tens of thousands of subs on 1.8Mb/s rather than 384Kb/s.

In hindsight, I think it was one of those defining moments and helped to ensure the very high adoption rate of HSDPA to the point that SA must be the only country in the world where HSDPA directly rivals DSL in installed base.
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This might not have been the case if Telkom was not such a pain to deal with regarding their ADSL service (or any other service that they offer!) ;)

In other words, lack of alternatives.
 
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rpm said:
Although Knott-Craig, Uys and others have provided Vodacom’s shareholders with excellent returns, I think the fact that they are engineers rather than CAs played a role.

For an accountant such a move will just not make any sense – R 100 Million and with no immediate return on investment...no way a CA will see the value in that :D Lets remember that Sizwe Nxasana – Telkom’s ex-CEO firing staff and rather passing Billions in dividends to shareholders than invest it back into its network – is a CA :rolleyes:
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So true. :D
 
Borg said:
This might not have been the case if Telkom was not such a pain to deal with regarding their ADSL service (or any other service that they offer!) ;)

In other words, lack of alternatives.
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Very true. We don't underestimate Telkom's role in making mobile data so successful in this country.
 
The KING is dead --long live the KING

Talking about University Modules -- I hope MR Knott-Craig will be writing a book about his experiences and the birth of the cellphone industry in SA. It should be rivetting & strange. Explaining how a founder member of a large and important segment of the cell industry was a personal friend of Dr Wouter Basson --aka Dr Death.

the DARK one
 
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