Cell C increases minimum recharge amount for free calls

[ajax]

Well I thought this 120mins was from 8pm on Fridays to 7am on Monday...

But it only starts on Saturdays and ends on Sundays.

Maybe by spreading the minutes through the week (no, think about it) the network won't be overloaded like this.

Good idea, call it Woza Off Peak or something. Recharge Monday to Sunday with R10 and get 120 min off peak minutes the next week. The overloading will be much less this way I'd think.

 

[Intelligence]

Gee! people, CellC are the only ones trying to give real value, we are so over charged for Telecoms here and now we want to trash them, get a life! it seems they had a bigger uptake than expected, but what if they sort it out, then what? will the other players bring the same value to us, or just keep cashing in?

 

[xrapidx]

Gee! people, CellC are the only ones trying to give real value, we are so over charged for Telecoms here and now we want to trash them, get a life! it seems they had a bigger uptake than expected, but what if they sort it out, then what? will the other players bring the same value to us, or just keep cashing in?

What about those people that arn't interested in free calls? What about people in emergencies? I suppose they don't matter as long as some people get free talk time.

As soon as they realised they couldn't support it, they should have canned it until they could. Not keep doing it over and over again?

 

[Intelligence]

MMMM! not interested in calls why would you have a cell phone? there is a saying, "without facts and figurs, its just an opion" and whatifs! do we have thememergencies? what did we do when there was not Cell phones, or cars, or plains, or ELECTRICITY

 

[AirWolf]

The network congestion really screws up VM data (more than normal) on weekends.

 

[xrapidx]

MMMM! not interested in calls why would you have a cell phone? there is a saying, "without facts and figurs, its just an opion" and whatifs! do we have thememergencies? what did we do when there was not Cell phones, or cars, or plains, or ELECTRICITY

I meant free calls... cellphones are apart of life now.... and they could save your life...the fact that you can't make a call in an emergency because of CellC's rediculous free minute marketing thing is shocking. Also, emergency doesn't just constitute life and death. On the weekend my girlfriend was flying to see me, she was at the airport and they demanded a copy of my credit card to be faxed to them before issuing her a boarding pass (SAA), she couldn't get hold of me, and almost missed her flight.

CellC cannot provide the service it is intended to.

 

[Syndyre]

Cell C sucks, what's up with the call quality? Even when you have a full signal it still sounds like you are talking to someone on the moon. Do the use Chinese suppliers for their network equipment?

ROFL, I'm guessing they use half rate encoding or something?

 

[Syndyre]

Gee! people, CellC are the only ones trying to give real value, we are so over charged for Telecoms here and now we want to trash them, get a life! it seems they had a bigger uptake than expected, but what if they sort it out, then what? will the other players bring the same value to us, or just keep cashing in?

If they sort it out then good, but lets face it, Cell C have endless problems, half the network was down during the last few days because of a problem with their HLR. I'd rather pay for a service that works than get one for free which doesn't. What about the contract customers that are stuck with them and actually want to make calls they paid for and can't?

 

[ic]

Well I thought this 120mins was from 8pm on Fridays to 7am on Monday...

But it only starts on Saturdays and ends on Sundays.

Maybe by spreading the minutes through the week (no, think about it) the network won't be overloaded like this.

I agree with your idea there - CellC should extend those 120 free minutes per weekend to 120 off-peak minutes per week Monday up to and including Sunday, and if CellC doesn't want to drive away its contract customers, then CellC should abandon the idea that contract minutes need to be depleted prior to getting the 120 free minutes per week.

I guess CellC's real problem would be figuring out how to require a minimum weekly pre-paid recharge amount - the logic shouldn't be too difficult - if a CellC pre-paid customer has not recharged at the start of the current week and makes an off-peak call, then that customer would get charged as per the normal off-peak rate, otherwise allow up to 120 minutes of off-peak calls which are free.

Something like that...

Also, @Intelligence, CellC only has one network, it is a 2.75G network - which means GSM+GPRS+EDGE, but it is still a GSM network which relies on timeslots, and available timeslots are consumed when anyone uses the network for voice &| data, so a serious shortage of timeslots, e.g. due to congestion caused by free minutes being constantly used over weekends, means that lots of CellC customers are definitely left with no service at all for extended periods of time - including not being able to make free calls over weekends. CellC had a good concept for gaining customers in large numbers, CellC's implementation of that concept was crap.