Please don't get your hopes up just yet. Remember how everyone was praising Sentech a year ago?
While they do have strong background in radio network roll-outs, this doesn't mean that they will be providing anything better than we have now. At least, I won't believe it (or sign a 2 year contract a la Sentech) before I see it. The problem with Sentech certainly isn't radio coverage, or their expertise in the field of radio, they are the national signal carrier after all, the problem is that they are selling MyWireless users bandwidth which they do not have, leading to high contention ratios and bad connectivity.
WBS do not go in to any specifics about their techology, the amount of bandwidth they have available, contention ratios or infrastructure, apart from high sites. This leaves a lot of questions with me. I certainly wouldn't want to sign up with somebody who might have 200 high sites, but use a single 64kbps Diginet to connect to the outside world.
I would very much appreciate it if WBS could give us some more specifics about how all of this will work, how many customers they plan to serve, and where they will be getting the bandwidth to serve them. Don't get me wrong, another new wireless operator is always good, but knowing the history of the ill fated Megawan and, more recently, the now much hated Sentech, I'm never optimistic about new South African operators.
Even worse, my area is not even listed on the roll-out map. I entered my details on their "My Area isn't Covered" form yesterday, and I have an e-mail reply this morning. Sadly, this is not the reply I wanted. I understand that they can't cover the entire country, but I would have atleast expected a reply explaining to me that covering my area is not economical due to supply and demand, or that the current roll-out plan is just for the pilot phase, etc. Instead, I got the plain vanilla "let's wait and see" response:
<blockquote id="quote"><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">
Dear Mr Willie Viljoen
We thank you for expressing your interest in iBurst. Area maps that show
network coverage are available on the website. Areas that are currently not
shown or covered will be covered at a later stage. For any further
information and updates, please visit our website at www.iburst.co.za.
Kind regards,
WBS Helpdesk
<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">
Try again mate.
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