Dietlof Mare discusses the future of South Africa’s fibre market

[Chris]

Dietlof Mare discusses the future of South Africa’s fibre market

Dietlof Mare is the CEO of Vumatel and the driving force behind South Africa’s leading open-access fibre to the home (FTTH) operator.

Mare previously worked as the executive head of direct expenditure at Vodacom. He quickly rose through the ranks to occupy several senior management positions.

Prior taking the reins at Vumatel, he served as Vodacom Albania CEO, managing director of Vodacom Congo, and Vodacom Tanzania MD.

 

[MEG101]

All good and well as explained in the article the importance of broadband and fiber...just lower your prices to make it more affordable for ISP's to offer services on your network. You are one of the most expensive fiber network operators, Openserve is way cheaper and Frogfoot is doubling speed and reducing prices from 1 May. Vuma fiber is running past my house and I would not touch them, I pay R697 pm for Openserve 40mbps PureDSL uncapped and unshaped with no Fup. 20mbps on Vuma is R900 and 50mbps over R1000 while same speed on Openserve is R600 for 25mbps and R700 for 50mbps.Until they lower prices, I would not even think of using them.

 

[mathebus]

Vuma was kwai. They are still kwai for lots of things but I mean, listen to the people. VumaReach is a hit, while VumaCore needs to wake up to reality

 

[Citixx]

Through my experience with Vumatel, which I still use, they really are becoming like an the old Telcom which really didn't give a rats arse about the consumer and prices. Their service is disappointing to say the least, but hey, why would they care since they have a monopoly in many areas? Telcom thought the same and look where they are now. New opposition is always on the horizon.

 

[jeevadotnet]

Absolutely POS company. My neighborhood ring constantly has issues. Get laughed out hy their helpdesk whom claims I'm not a vumatel client, just because I don't use a rycore fiber switch. I terminate the sfp directly into my cloudcore router. So when I want to "switch it off and on again", I just restart the interface.

My 2nd fiber WAN via OpenServe doesn't give a days issue.

The downtime over the last 25 months, OpenServe sitting at minutes because it was down for a bit during their upgrade the other day.

Vumatel is sitting on 27+ days down over 25 month period.

 

[The_MAC]

If you look quickly at the thumb-nail of this article, he looks like Leon Schuster..

 

[RVFmal]

As VT are now the most expensive of all the FNO's and show little sign of coming to the party in terms of offering better value for their clients, I cancelled my VT fibre and have moved to a WISP. Cheaper and fulfills my requirements.

Might not make a difference to VT's pocket, but made me a feel a lot better that I am no longer supporting a company that uses its monopoly in areas of service to keep its prices high.

 

[MEG101]

As VT are now the most expensive of all the FNO's and show little sign of coming to the party in terms of offering better value for their clients, I cancelled my VT fibre and have moved to a WISP. Cheaper and fulfills my requirements.

Might not make a difference to VT's pocket, but made me a feel a lot better that I am no longer supporting a company that uses its monopoly in areas of service to keep its prices high.

VT network is running past my house, and I would not touch them with a ten foot pole. I have Openserve PureDSL 40mbps uncapped unshaped unthrottled with no FUP for R 697 pm - a whole lot cheaper than VT. I am with you in not supporting a company that has a monopoly in my area and think they can charge the ridiculous high prices.

 

[Corelli]

Drop your prices. Stop trying to rip us off. We moved from DSTV to Netflix, if you dont drop prices we will encourage others to roll out cables in CT and then dump vumatel.