Goodbye Vodacom
I have been a Vodacom 3G customer for the past 3 years. I've used pre-paid as well as post paid and on the whole I rate my experience with the product highly. I will admit that a lot of my satisfaction with the product had to do with Vodacom3G's (Jannie van Zyl) efforts in the MyBroadBand forum. In my opinion he is the behind the scenes glue that keeps Vodacom together. When there were big problems down in Cape Town a few years back he sent engineers out to ginggs's house and we troubleshooted things together till late one evening. Later when I moved house and found I had terrible signal, he had a radio engineer out to do tests and adjust towers. In between where there were other issues Jannie would step in and connect the right people to get things working. It was a sad day when he left to run iBurst.
In 2009 I made a list of things I'd like to see from Vodacom, some of those came true (in some form or another) others did not. One of my key gripes is still the fact that there is no real-time billing and hard cap for contract customers, this is so long overdue it's criminal. The other problem of course was price. It didn't take serious skill to see that for a long time Vodacom and MTN had exactly the same data costs. Only recently with the pittance of a size bump on the standard bundles did this change. The introduction of the advanced bundles was in my opinion flawed. Besides the obvious confusion this created with customers, the In-Bundle (IB) = Out-of-Bundle (OOB) should have been applied to the standard bundles and the prices left as is. Why should we pay premium for IB = OOB? MTN did eventually wake up to this fact, why not Vodacom?
When Seacom landed the reply from Vodacom when questioned on price reductions was that they were using it for redundancy, not cost saving. Surprisingly enough Vodacom Business announced reductions in cost for it's customers in February, which they accredited to the arrival of Seacom. Rather strange that one unit filters down the savings, but another does not? With ADSL dropping to around R20/Gb and the arrival of uncapped, the market shifted, yet MTN and Vodacom remained tight lipped. While I accept the fact that uncapped might not be feasible on a mobile network, most people would have been happy with bigger caps for the same cost or even something around the R50/Gb mark. So we waited patiently and nothing happened for a long time. Then out of the blue came CellC...
As of today I am now a CellC customer. I have reduced my data to what I need for my mobile phone only so Vodacom will no longer be making R385 a month out me for my 2GB advanced bundle that I was using as my primary internet service. While that amount is an insignificant part of your colossal turnover each year, rest assured this will be added to the many other people who have left and will be leaving if your prices continue to stay as high as they are. The recent R399 broadband deal and Night Owl promotion have brought nothing significant to the market and shows the signs of a company who is out of touch with its customers and the general market trends.
With all that being said, I am not blind to the fact that CellC will at some stage hit critical mass and will no doubt go through all the same growing pains Vodacom and MTN have gone (and continue to go through). I do however intend to stick it out, even if Vodacom and MTN have a knee jerk reaction and match CellC's prices I won't move back. Your continued profiteering in the midst of a general market shift to reduced internet prices clearly shows you have no interest in carrying costs savings over to your customers, nor do you listen to what your customers want. You only respond to pressure from competition. Look at the 8ta pre-paid price war as a recent example. If you are prepared to charge that now, why didn't you do it a year ago?
Your customers have been warning you about this for a while.
Feel it. It's here.
I have been a Vodacom 3G customer for the past 3 years. I've used pre-paid as well as post paid and on the whole I rate my experience with the product highly. I will admit that a lot of my satisfaction with the product had to do with Vodacom3G's (Jannie van Zyl) efforts in the MyBroadBand forum. In my opinion he is the behind the scenes glue that keeps Vodacom together. When there were big problems down in Cape Town a few years back he sent engineers out to ginggs's house and we troubleshooted things together till late one evening. Later when I moved house and found I had terrible signal, he had a radio engineer out to do tests and adjust towers. In between where there were other issues Jannie would step in and connect the right people to get things working. It was a sad day when he left to run iBurst.
In 2009 I made a list of things I'd like to see from Vodacom, some of those came true (in some form or another) others did not. One of my key gripes is still the fact that there is no real-time billing and hard cap for contract customers, this is so long overdue it's criminal. The other problem of course was price. It didn't take serious skill to see that for a long time Vodacom and MTN had exactly the same data costs. Only recently with the pittance of a size bump on the standard bundles did this change. The introduction of the advanced bundles was in my opinion flawed. Besides the obvious confusion this created with customers, the In-Bundle (IB) = Out-of-Bundle (OOB) should have been applied to the standard bundles and the prices left as is. Why should we pay premium for IB = OOB? MTN did eventually wake up to this fact, why not Vodacom?
When Seacom landed the reply from Vodacom when questioned on price reductions was that they were using it for redundancy, not cost saving. Surprisingly enough Vodacom Business announced reductions in cost for it's customers in February, which they accredited to the arrival of Seacom. Rather strange that one unit filters down the savings, but another does not? With ADSL dropping to around R20/Gb and the arrival of uncapped, the market shifted, yet MTN and Vodacom remained tight lipped. While I accept the fact that uncapped might not be feasible on a mobile network, most people would have been happy with bigger caps for the same cost or even something around the R50/Gb mark. So we waited patiently and nothing happened for a long time. Then out of the blue came CellC...
As of today I am now a CellC customer. I have reduced my data to what I need for my mobile phone only so Vodacom will no longer be making R385 a month out me for my 2GB advanced bundle that I was using as my primary internet service. While that amount is an insignificant part of your colossal turnover each year, rest assured this will be added to the many other people who have left and will be leaving if your prices continue to stay as high as they are. The recent R399 broadband deal and Night Owl promotion have brought nothing significant to the market and shows the signs of a company who is out of touch with its customers and the general market trends.
With all that being said, I am not blind to the fact that CellC will at some stage hit critical mass and will no doubt go through all the same growing pains Vodacom and MTN have gone (and continue to go through). I do however intend to stick it out, even if Vodacom and MTN have a knee jerk reaction and match CellC's prices I won't move back. Your continued profiteering in the midst of a general market shift to reduced internet prices clearly shows you have no interest in carrying costs savings over to your customers, nor do you listen to what your customers want. You only respond to pressure from competition. Look at the 8ta pre-paid price war as a recent example. If you are prepared to charge that now, why didn't you do it a year ago?
Your customers have been warning you about this for a while.
Feel it. It's here.
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