Well, it's been a while, I suppose.
Hi all.
After some rather gruelling months of work, I may be in a position to focus some time on the MyBB community personally rather than via staff members (who have been doing a very good job of it, of late).
I'm sure there are a lot of questions flying around, so let me pre-empt a few and give you guys some insight into what's been happening, what is busy happening, and what's going to be happening in the coming days and weeks:
1) Home Capped - when we initially launched home capped, we utilised some standard reseller profiles for these accounts. This has proved problematic due to the lack of control one can directly take over the profiles. This is now changing as of midnight tonight. We are moving these over to new profiles we have custom built and been beta testing with customers. We've also made some rather massive changes to the network on the backend. The manner in which the accounts operate should largely remain the same, in that NNTP and P2P can contend for bandwidth on home capped (always has and is how we can get the effective rate/GB down to where it is), however we are now going to take some direct control over this and push tweaks once everyone is moved over to get this performance as high as reasonably possible without impacting on other users. This is always a tricky balancing act running multiple profile types, but we think we have the balance right now. What caused some issues here were some delays on the hardware side on the new links being installed, but this is all completed. We'll be making changes over the coming week or so on the network as a whole. During this time we will keep our eyes on the network and all systems to keep things operating as well as humanly possible.
2) Basic Uncapped - here we found the inevitable problem - people wanting to use cheap accounts to download the earth in business and home peak hours and complaining about the associated performance. My forwardness here is borne from a little bit of frustration in handling some issues that have arisen as a result of the launch of this product. We're re-evaluating this specific product range, and also moving them to new profiles to continue to monitor the viability in the business of such cheap data accounts. It's an area we're looking to do a few things with if viability proves successful. More to follow soon following the network data analysis on the new profiles and feedback. But in essence, a R195 account does not perform the same as an equivalent R329 account, and the cheap entry price-point here is intended for guys who asked us incessantly for cheaper access to Crystal Web's network.
3) Portals. We hit a major setback on these and had to redesign a few core elements. Needless to say, it remains in beta with a closed group at the moment, but is rather incredible to be honest. The portals once open will reveal a whole new world, and also reveal why we as management have been rather busy of late. Currently we are opening up a basic front-end for new customers to stay up to date on line migrations and Telkom faults, and more will release soon as well. We are undergoing a complete redesign of our front-ends.
4) New Specials: Crystal Web has just released the cheapest unshaped business data in South Africa, at just R1,50/GB (Yes, R1,50/GB!). It's part of our SMME development program we are now actively investing in, and is available live on the website now. Existing customers can migrate to this product as of today depending on qualification for this.
5) Fibre: Crystal Web accounts are now fully configured to work on Telkom fibre. In addition, our FTTH strategy is evolving at a rapid pace. Furthermore, we have just re-released FTTB (Fibre To The Business) following 2 months of commercial discussions with a number of parties, and have fixed the problem with our feasibility studies not sending out correctly. Together with our fibre broadband (dedicated 1:1 BTW) products, we've also soft-launched our business cloud offerings, which offer full Windows Operating System Streaming, and application streaming from the cloud without code manipulation (i.e. your existing apps can now move to the cloud without being re-coded). Further to this, fibre VPN and VOIP are available too. Our Dedicated FTTB offerings include free installation, free CPE, free feasibility, and are now the most affordable dedicated fibre lines for the quality on the market.
6) Modems/routers: available now via Crystal Web. Fully preconfigured for your Crystal Web connection and more affordable than you'll typically find anywhere else.
7) New products: yes we're launching some new products, and one big one launches together with the portals (hence our own impatience about getting these up asap).
8) My personal availability: Still slim I'm afraid. I'll try to pop in as and when I can to keep you guys updated, but for now please keep all comms moving via our other official channels (like the support channel or support rep on mybroadband) until such time as I can guarantee more availability. As I'm sure you can imagine, our growth has meant I either spend time on mybroadband or working behind the scenes to make things better for everyone at all times, and the latter has taken priority of late. I have however been able to chat to guys on live chat the last 2 or 3 weeks again which is always great, and I certainly keep a close eye out for that.
9) Payments: debit orders have been available for a month now. They are, quite simply, a complete PITA to process and have resulted in us having to change the invoicing cycle to issue invoices on the 1st of each month now. We cannot issue your invoice early now - it's simply not possible. But there are some ways for us to send through payment info early at least, which we'll be doing as of this next billing cycle. Please note that we finalise our batches for debit orders 2 days before the end of each month in order to ensure correct processing. You cannot submit a debit order request at 11:35pm on the last day of the month (as I see someone just did on our system) for this month's run. It won't happen I'm afraid. We're just as much at the liberty of other providers on this front.
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