Most expensive telecoms blunders in SA

[Kevin Lancaster]

Most expensive telecoms blunders in South Africa

Poor decisions have cost South African telecommunications and technology companies billions – here are some of the worst of them.

 

[ToxicBunny]

No mention of any of the government cockups like Ivy?

 

[Dlamaqhinga]

Telkom (for both Multi Links and selling Vodacom) takes the crown but the past EXCO pocketed millions in the sale of Vodacom.

 

[Chevron]

I wouldn't call Telkom Media a blunder. They could have done some awesome things with it.

Like wise with Node. Good product, bad marketing and price.

 

[cozinsky]

Was the Vodacom / G-Connect deal not also bad for Vodacom?

 

[znh]

The most expensive mistake was from Telkom that kept on overcharging the South African economy, if they gave us cheap data and telephone calls, the economy could have been 100 times stronger with many IT companies that could have been on par with Silicon Valley. This translates to trilions of Rands lost due to greed and lack of competition.

 

[Kingofmybbknowitalls]

Wonder if Altech ever did something right.

Autopage was a disaster, Netstar absolutely sucks, the Node crashed and burned etc.

 

[LCBXX]

Like wise with Node. Good product, bad marketing and price.

Asking customers to fork out R3500 for a product that is, at the time, niche and not established, and then another R300pm with paywalls for "premium content", was a recipe for disaster.

 

[Chris.Geerdts]

When we launched GPRS, we predicted major growth in mobile data (at the time it was much less than 1% of revenue) and we met with some resistance at senior levels. Fortunately we were passionate enough and did enjoy enough supporters to drive it through and be first to market.

 

[falcon786]

Former Cell C CEO Jeffrey Hedberg said in April 2008 that while they had a 3G-ready core network, 3G was hype and “we won’t fall prey to hype”.

That idiot should be hung by his.....you get the picture.

But seriously he really messed up big time people like me were quite happy with Cell C until there was no 3G,and it was clear Cell C would not deliver 3G...that forced me to change over to MTN for almost 12 years and my bill in that period amounted to thousands per month,basically all revenue Cell C lost because one idiots decision.

He really costed Cell C big time,how do people with no innovation or forward thinking like this ever make it to become CEO's of a tech/telecoms company?Was he an accountant perhaps?