telkomsuig
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All I can say is have been very happy with Cybersmart over the last 6 or so months....not one billing glitch etc...
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Cybersmart ADSL
- Thread starter Psykro
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Nickste
Expert Member
Hey Laurie,
Thanks for the post, it definitely cleared a few things up
The only thing that is stopping me from jumping ship, is the debit order type of payment. My old man pays the internet account, and is rather weary of a debit order... Any way to get around this?
Cheers, Nick
Thanks for the post, it definitely cleared a few things up
The only thing that is stopping me from jumping ship, is the debit order type of payment. My old man pays the internet account, and is rather weary of a debit order... Any way to get around this?
Cheers, Nick
To those of you who think that cybersmart's TOS is dodgy, I would like to ask you this.
If you were told by Total that you could get petrol from them at R1 less than the current petrol price, but it meant that you could never use petrol from any other company, what would you do. Would you bitch and moan about that fact that you couldnt use Engen or Shell or would you enjoy the savings afforded to you from Total ????
Yes, cybersmart has some different TOS, but that is their perrogative. You dont have to sign up with them. Just because you dont like their TOS, does not mean you have to slag them or their service. If you have a valid example of bad service from cybersmart, then you have a leg to stand on, but not if you feel that their TOS is not right, according to you.
It's a free market economy people, if you dont like it, dont buy it...
If you were told by Total that you could get petrol from them at R1 less than the current petrol price, but it meant that you could never use petrol from any other company, what would you do. Would you bitch and moan about that fact that you couldnt use Engen or Shell or would you enjoy the savings afforded to you from Total ????
Yes, cybersmart has some different TOS, but that is their perrogative. You dont have to sign up with them. Just because you dont like their TOS, does not mean you have to slag them or their service. If you have a valid example of bad service from cybersmart, then you have a leg to stand on, but not if you feel that their TOS is not right, according to you.
It's a free market economy people, if you dont like it, dont buy it...
Geek_wannabe
Well-Known Member
I am going to comment on this.
Firstly, who would you care if someone uses an other ISP? I mean, even if they use an accelerator, or something, you can just point them in the right direction. I mean, seriously, that seems a little odd.
Also, the "You must use the email" thing. I am sorry, but that is like forcing labour. I mean, think about it like this, you pay for a service, and if you don't use the entire service, you have to pay more. That does nto make sense. That is just wierd.
Firstly, who would you care if someone uses an other ISP? I mean, even if they use an accelerator, or something, you can just point them in the right direction. I mean, seriously, that seems a little odd.
Also, the "You must use the email" thing. I am sorry, but that is like forcing labour. I mean, think about it like this, you pay for a service, and if you don't use the entire service, you have to pay more. That does nto make sense. That is just wierd.
Tarzan
Well-Known Member
Geek_wannabe said:
I don't see a problem with the email thing. They prob just want to be able to contact you via their own mailbox. Nothing stops you to have a gmail account. Maybe I am wrong but that is how i see it.
Well if you consider that to be able to use another email account or another isp by going with someone other than cybersmart, then you are going to be paying more anyway....... so it's a toss up between cost and convenience. and if you are looking for the cost effective solution on a tight budget then why not.
It's not like they are being deceptive about their terms, they are up front about it from the word go.
It's not like they are being deceptive about their terms, they are up front about it from the word go.
Abe
Expert Member
In order to access other mail accounts via POP you need to pay an extra R45 per month. That brings the 384 connection price to close to what the other ISP's offer and the 192 to roughly 3/4 of the price of other ISP's which is not such a big savings. The TOS preventing use of other ISPs would make it touch and go in my opinion as the top up charges from Cybersmart are quite a bit more then their original fee.Tarzan said:
My guess is they want people to use their own mail as the traffic does not have to be routed through SAIX international which would be cheaper for them.
Cheers
Abe
telkomsuig
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This ISP has been discussed more than any other on the site i think. Don't think there is much more to say.
They are legit..not fly by night. Many happy users a few non users with lots to say.
Use them or don't. I think the cybersmart topics can now be closed until something new happens with them...
They are legit..not fly by night. Many happy users a few non users with lots to say.
Use them or don't. I think the cybersmart topics can now be closed until something new happens with them...
hj2k_x
Honorary Master
Yeah, i am not keen on this method of payment either. Is there no other option?Nickste said:Hey Laurie,
Thanks for the post, it definitely cleared a few things up
The only thing that is stopping me from jumping ship, is the debit order type of payment. My old man pays the internet account, and is rather weary of a debit order... Any way to get around this?
Cheers, Nick
It is quite interesting to see how our TOS have sparked a debate, so I am going to give a bit more detailed information as to why they are there. I may not have time to reply to comments to this post, not because I don't care, but I am preparing for ADSL hearings on 24th/25th and may not have time.
As a starting point our TOS are not there to screw you the public. There has been much scepticism as to our ability to hold our prices and our TOS are there to ensure the cost is kept where it is. The cynics amoung you will say that does not make sense so let me explain. Support cost is a function of our adsl price to you - you take the (cost of your support staff)/(total users) and that is the total cost per user that we must add on to our adsl price in order stay in business. At the moment we are working on an average-time-to-close a support call being 5 minutes, from that information, we can extrapolate the number of support staff and the number of inbound calls and inbound lines required and thereby the cost per user. We have a flow chart program that has been written to prompt support staff as to where the problem lies. A program like this is easier to write and more likely to yield positive results if we have a known number of parameters to work with, if we have to include other unknown parameters introduced by other ISP's it becomes almost impossible to write. In the cases where the flowchart program is unable to solve the problem the ticket gets handed to me or someone else more experienced (and I might add more expensive) to solve. You must remember that most clients aren't forthcoming that they have installed something and in most cases you get the generic "but nothing's changed". The only thing that alerted me to the fact that this client may have an accellerator product installed was when he said "well when I put in my username and password from my other ISP it works fine" - there would be absolutely no hope in hell that I would have found the problem otherwise and it would have looked like our service was inferior, and since ping responses are posted to these forums almost daily, this is not a situation we would like to be in, furthermore this support call took me 37 minutes not 5 to close. Let me give you an analogy, imagine you go to a large shopping center for supper, you decide to go to five restaurants and buy food from all of them, you then sneak this food into the sixth restaurant you go to, order something else and then stick food from the other five restaurants on your plate and then happily eat yourself silly. At the end of the meal you get terribly sick blame the chef of the sixth restaurant and if that is not damaging enough you go to a public forum and slander them - no mention of the other 5 restaurants is made. None of us here would have any problem being turned away at the door of the sixth restaurant when the owner says please eat at the place you bought this other food or please return the food and come eat here. As this post clearly indicates, it is very hard to offer a good service - it takes very little to have you labelled as "dodgy".
With regards to "you must use the email thing", let me go through that as well. Firstly local bandwidth is significantly cheaper than international bandwidth (it is NOT free, but it is cheaper), if you are using our email address, we know the bandwidth is local, because you are using our servers we do not know this otherwise. Secondly we can guarantee receipt to our servers, where we cannot guarantee that or notices or invoices will not be blocked by some spam filter on another server. Thirdly even when you are capped you can still read this email via the webmail interface off the link on our website. All this reduces our support cost as you would have been informed of your cap being reached and any other problem with your account. This model is very common in the cellphone industry, how many specials have you seen where you can only get the special if you take the itemized billing (and to make matters worse you have to pay for the itemized billing), this is to reduce the calls arising disputing cellphone bills. Bottom line any thing that will help us reduce our overhead we have included in the terms. We don't take credit cards because we don't want to pay the 3.5% commission and we know that you wouldn't like it if we built it in the price so we don't offer this option. We only take debit orders because we don't want to employ someone to phone you or your folks when you forget to pay the topup that you bought during the month, if your debit order bounces your account gets switched off and your location blacklisted, it is an automated process and our debt collection cost is zero.
Our target market is not those users that jump around from ISP to ISP. If you are getting good service from your ISP and the cost is similar to ours then stay with them, they have worked hard to gain you as a client and they deserve your support, some have even incurred legal expenses to fight Telkom in the hope to gain your loyalty. I (and this is my personal opinion ) don't think it is right that users jump ship to save R10-R20, that saving will not even get you a free movie. This is one of the few countries in the world where users can jump around and have multiple ISP's on a broadband connection. In most other countries the ISP purchases the circuit wholesale, then provides the circuit and bandwidth as one price to the end user (contrary to popular belief the circuit is not free overseas it is just bundled), this enables us to offer bundled packages and to compete with Telkom's bundled pc offerings that we cannot do now. We will be pushing hard for this ability in the adsl hearings and rumour has it that it will be possible soon. Should this be the case it will only be possible to have a single ISP on a broadband connection, so we thought we would start training our
customers now. In summary our TOS are different to other ISP's, but so is our price, we have a long term vision of
where we are going in the broadband market and our terms reflect that. If you are thinking of getting adsl, it will be fantastic having you as a customer, if you are unhappy with your ISP then please give us a try, but if your ISP is giving you great service at a reasonable price then maybe you owe them some loyalty and you should stay with them - our term "you are required to cancel with your existing ISP that provides you adsl" asks you to confront that choice.
As a starting point our TOS are not there to screw you the public. There has been much scepticism as to our ability to hold our prices and our TOS are there to ensure the cost is kept where it is. The cynics amoung you will say that does not make sense so let me explain. Support cost is a function of our adsl price to you - you take the (cost of your support staff)/(total users) and that is the total cost per user that we must add on to our adsl price in order stay in business. At the moment we are working on an average-time-to-close a support call being 5 minutes, from that information, we can extrapolate the number of support staff and the number of inbound calls and inbound lines required and thereby the cost per user. We have a flow chart program that has been written to prompt support staff as to where the problem lies. A program like this is easier to write and more likely to yield positive results if we have a known number of parameters to work with, if we have to include other unknown parameters introduced by other ISP's it becomes almost impossible to write. In the cases where the flowchart program is unable to solve the problem the ticket gets handed to me or someone else more experienced (and I might add more expensive) to solve. You must remember that most clients aren't forthcoming that they have installed something and in most cases you get the generic "but nothing's changed". The only thing that alerted me to the fact that this client may have an accellerator product installed was when he said "well when I put in my username and password from my other ISP it works fine" - there would be absolutely no hope in hell that I would have found the problem otherwise and it would have looked like our service was inferior, and since ping responses are posted to these forums almost daily, this is not a situation we would like to be in, furthermore this support call took me 37 minutes not 5 to close. Let me give you an analogy, imagine you go to a large shopping center for supper, you decide to go to five restaurants and buy food from all of them, you then sneak this food into the sixth restaurant you go to, order something else and then stick food from the other five restaurants on your plate and then happily eat yourself silly. At the end of the meal you get terribly sick blame the chef of the sixth restaurant and if that is not damaging enough you go to a public forum and slander them - no mention of the other 5 restaurants is made. None of us here would have any problem being turned away at the door of the sixth restaurant when the owner says please eat at the place you bought this other food or please return the food and come eat here. As this post clearly indicates, it is very hard to offer a good service - it takes very little to have you labelled as "dodgy".
With regards to "you must use the email thing", let me go through that as well. Firstly local bandwidth is significantly cheaper than international bandwidth (it is NOT free, but it is cheaper), if you are using our email address, we know the bandwidth is local, because you are using our servers we do not know this otherwise. Secondly we can guarantee receipt to our servers, where we cannot guarantee that or notices or invoices will not be blocked by some spam filter on another server. Thirdly even when you are capped you can still read this email via the webmail interface off the link on our website. All this reduces our support cost as you would have been informed of your cap being reached and any other problem with your account. This model is very common in the cellphone industry, how many specials have you seen where you can only get the special if you take the itemized billing (and to make matters worse you have to pay for the itemized billing), this is to reduce the calls arising disputing cellphone bills. Bottom line any thing that will help us reduce our overhead we have included in the terms. We don't take credit cards because we don't want to pay the 3.5% commission and we know that you wouldn't like it if we built it in the price so we don't offer this option. We only take debit orders because we don't want to employ someone to phone you or your folks when you forget to pay the topup that you bought during the month, if your debit order bounces your account gets switched off and your location blacklisted, it is an automated process and our debt collection cost is zero.
Our target market is not those users that jump around from ISP to ISP. If you are getting good service from your ISP and the cost is similar to ours then stay with them, they have worked hard to gain you as a client and they deserve your support, some have even incurred legal expenses to fight Telkom in the hope to gain your loyalty. I (and this is my personal opinion ) don't think it is right that users jump ship to save R10-R20, that saving will not even get you a free movie. This is one of the few countries in the world where users can jump around and have multiple ISP's on a broadband connection. In most other countries the ISP purchases the circuit wholesale, then provides the circuit and bandwidth as one price to the end user (contrary to popular belief the circuit is not free overseas it is just bundled), this enables us to offer bundled packages and to compete with Telkom's bundled pc offerings that we cannot do now. We will be pushing hard for this ability in the adsl hearings and rumour has it that it will be possible soon. Should this be the case it will only be possible to have a single ISP on a broadband connection, so we thought we would start training our
customers now. In summary our TOS are different to other ISP's, but so is our price, we have a long term vision of
where we are going in the broadband market and our terms reflect that. If you are thinking of getting adsl, it will be fantastic having you as a customer, if you are unhappy with your ISP then please give us a try, but if your ISP is giving you great service at a reasonable price then maybe you owe them some loyalty and you should stay with them - our term "you are required to cancel with your existing ISP that provides you adsl" asks you to confront that choice.
Nickste
Expert Member
Thanks for the post laurie
Pity about the debit order. I get **** service from telkomISP, and the price is nowhere near yours
Cheers, Nick
Pity about the debit order. I get **** service from telkomISP, and the price is nowhere near yours
Cheers, Nick
laurie said:
Thank you for your detailed post, and interesting reading. I am not one of your customers, so am not coming from a customer perspective, but rather an interested party.
Whilst I have changed ISP, I have kept an active email with my original ISP, as I have had the same address for a long time and do not want to change it. I would not want to give this up.
As to cost and comparing to overseas - I know it is not your fault - but one simply can not compare to overseas as the pricing is just a whole different league. If I was paying next to nothing for my uncapped, or very high capped account with a HIGH speed connection, I would be happy to stay with the same ISP, but when I am having to take a fair amount of my hard earned salary, and have a basic ADSl with limited usage, it just become another story.
At the end of the day each business has to make certain strategic decisions and live with the good and the bad as a result of them.
Good luck with the hearing.
theVictorian
Active Member
- Joined
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I've been with Cybersmart for a few months with no problems at all.
Cybersmart is A-OK
I can't believe some of the posts about Cybersmart in here. I have been in their offices and have met them more than once, and did not see anything strange at all.
When I got my new 192/3GB account with them recently, my USB modem would not work. A guy at Cybersmart lent me a modem to go try out at home and did everything he could to help me get up and running. The same guy has also given me really good support on the phone.
As for the email thing, I use several email accounts simultaneously with my Cybersmart account, and it has never been a problem.
As for the service, it has been consistently good, their accounts section works like you would expect it to, and I have no reason to complain.
So Cableguy, show us the "threatening" stuff here. Why haven't you put it up yet?
And no, I am not affiliated to Cybersmart in ANY way.
I can't believe some of the posts about Cybersmart in here. I have been in their offices and have met them more than once, and did not see anything strange at all.
When I got my new 192/3GB account with them recently, my USB modem would not work. A guy at Cybersmart lent me a modem to go try out at home and did everything he could to help me get up and running. The same guy has also given me really good support on the phone.
As for the email thing, I use several email accounts simultaneously with my Cybersmart account, and it has never been a problem.
As for the service, it has been consistently good, their accounts section works like you would expect it to, and I have no reason to complain.
So Cableguy, show us the "threatening" stuff here. Why haven't you put it up yet?
And no, I am not affiliated to Cybersmart in ANY way.
To the guys at Cybersmart, don't take what most of the people say here to heart. Most of them are the owners of other ISP's tring to take a bash at you.
It's all just marketing for them. That's why this site is so full of banners etc.
It's all just marketing for them. That's why this site is so full of banners etc.