@Osiris
You make some valid points and I can assure you that I don't take anything said personally, but while I do appreciate the compliments regarding my own attempts to provide assistance I think you are selling my colleagues and the brand short. Remember I'm not here in my personal capacity, I'm here representing the business and I do not work in isolation. There are a number of other people who have invested a lot of time and energy in attempting to tackle this issue and come up with a solution.
Gaming and getting gaming to perform well on our network has a lot of attention focused on it right now, more than I could ever have hoped it would get to be honest and while this WoW issue is driving me just as mad as it is you right now, I am really excited about the future of gaming at MWEB.
In terms of the general service deteriorating I really would beg to differ on that score. I keep an extremely close eye on the state of the network and general levels of service and while I certainly can't deny that we've had some big challenges to overcome this year I would say that we are in quite a healthy space right now.. also please understand that I'm not simply putting on customer service blinkers on that statement - I use the product myself extensively. I game and I download on a regular basis and I would be the first to raise a red flag if I felt the product wasn't performing well.
Yes there are a lot of complaints in the customer feedback thread, thats because we have a lot of customers. It's the rare customer who has anything to say when they're happy.
Also I would say that probably 75% of the discussion in that thread centres around P2P and the fact that a portion of customers who purchase a shaped product have an unrealistic expectation about the P2P speeds they should get on it. I just started some torrents now to prove the point and they are running at between 180-200K. Sure it's not line speed, but surely on a shaped product this is actually good enough and will certainly meet the value for money criteria. Consider how much I can pull down in a month if I'm hitting speeds like this in off peak times.
The other factor you have to consider (and I know at least one person is going to call blame shifting for me bringing this up
) is the state of the Telkom network. The fact is that the landing of cheap international bandwidth and the introduction of cheap uncapped services into the market has drastically increased the load on the last mile and backhaul networks and I could cite numerous examples that we see of cases where this is a direct cause of a deteriorated customer experience.
If you think that we are just making assumptions about this, it might interest you to know that we keep statistics of all reported Telkom outages and have tools in place to report on the approximate number of affected MWEB customers on each outage. I spent some time recently looking at growth trends on these numbers over the last year and it tells a very definite story.
On a final and more relevant note to you personally, I'm very concerned that your own problems have still not been addressed to your satisfaction. Please PM me a number I can reach you on tomorrow and I will go through the history with you and see if we can get this put to bed.
Kind Regards
Will
. I know there is still a lot of work being done to the servers to iron out various glitches that the game deployed with and get the servers into their final production state so I'm sure you will see a lot of changes and improvements in this area over the next while.
)