Open Letter to Ed

[diabolus]

Connection that sounds all good and well but what happens if you change the subscribers number to 50 000?

That's probably what they are anticipating. This would explain the "lets wait and see what the market does" mentality.

IBurst is obviously not going in with a
"we want to grow 20% per year, to do this we need to have some kind of strategy to increase our customers like adjusting our product line "

but rather

"we can't afford to lower our prices, we got new shareholders and we have no clue what the want to do with us. If we want to build another tower, lets see if we get 5000 more customers this year before we look at our products" .

I've been watching iburst products for 2+ years now, and basically just waited for a new package deal to sign up. It never came, and juuust when i thought i'm gonna get me a 2nd hand iburst modem then one of the cellphone operators change "something" in their lineup .

So i dunno if Iburst deems themselves in a different category as Vodacom/MTN/Cell-C or what, but surely they are suppose to "respond" to anything those guys do. I think when 3G was rolled out, Sentech + Iburst probably thought themselves in a league of their own [and at that stage they probably were], 2 years later they are being crushed for "watching the market" and not reacting. [Nevermind PROactive, not even REactive]

 

[LandyMan]

[Nevermind PROactive, not even REactive]

Hell, you might as well take the active part out

 

[fishfly]

22 August 2006:


14 September 2006:


23 October 2006:



22 November 2006:


And now, in late February 2007?





Too late, Ed. Your customers are already deeply unhappy.

The time for delivery has come and gone.

Great POST there Gatecrasher... I remeber seeing that promise every month and now 6 months later, I still see the same message. Maybe it's time to move to MTN's 3g packages

 

[Fudzy]

How would you guys do things differently?

 

[Alchemist]

Fudzy, first thing i would do differently is focus on the fact that the bussiness is an internet service provider, and not run my business purely on BEE status.

And I'm going to take a flying guess here, i may be horribly wrong, but i bet that ibursts BEE members actually dont know the first thing about computers, all the see are big $$$$ signs infront of their eyes.

 

[Connection]

Just by the way MrH, I don't work for Iburst. Believe me I agree with the general sentiment that IBurst need to make some changes/introduce new packages and we ARE getting tired of hearing promises and seeing little action. BUT when some posts start to sound like a mob yelling for blood, it actually DETRACTS from a valid argument. So I was simply trying to bring a bit of balance by stating that I don't believe (and it is after all my opinion based on extrapolations so take it at that level) that IBurst are ROLLING in cash. None of the ISP's in SA are - even those like MWEB who have hundreds of thousands of customers and have been around for years. The industry is just too tight with no real margins. Further down the line with Telkom there are some SERIOUS margins.

 

[bumblebee]

I joined IBurst a couple of months ago on a 24 month contract.
The only reason I chose IBurst was because they give you 64kb after you reached your cap.
How about raising the 64kb to say 128kb?

I know you can't do any broadband-browsing with that, but it will make general browsing after your cap a lot better. I also doubt that it would put too much extra load on their infrastructure.

 

[peterleroux]

Great idea Bumblebee- that sounds like something that shouldn't be impossible to do. At the moment the browsing after cap is iburst's biggest selling point in my eyes, so enhancing it wouldn't be a bad idea at all.

 

[hj2k_x]

Still no match for Openweb's Openrouter for browsing after cap, or for having a webafrica prepaid account and using routesentry...

 

[MrH]

Changing the after cap speed from 64kbps to 128kbps has been suggested many times and ignored even though it would be a nice addition and will probably make many users happy at very little or no extra cost to iBurst.

Maybe Ed will take note and try get it done for us.

 

[The_Unbeliever]

None of the ISP's in SA are - even those like MWEB who have hundreds of thousands of customers and have been around for years. The industry is just too tight with no real margins. Further down the line with Telkom there are some SERIOUS margins.

Sickening, isn't it?

I do feel sorry for the ISP's who have to compete against Telkom who can simply undercut them any time... not a good scenario for business...

 

[Jongi]

It's a sad state of affairs that we find ourselves in. The provider we chose for being head and shoulders value for money was only that to lure us into its web. It now has me in a situation where I have to look at whether I am using my cell phone/telkom line usage efficiently to see whether Closer 5 is a reality.

 

[JacquesR]

Fudzy, first thing i would do differently is focus on the fact that the bussiness is an internet service provider, and not run my business purely on BEE status.

And I'm going to take a flying guess here, i may be horribly wrong, but i bet that ibursts BEE members actually dont know the first thing about computers, all the see are big $$$$ signs infront of their eyes.

Nothing like a bit of racism to make your problems seem more understandable, eh?

 

[andrewr]

Its so simple really...

These are the facts:

ADSL is now being offered at 4MB/s
MTN is now offering 2GB of bandwidth at R400

In order for iBurst to remain competitive they need to increase their speed to at least 4MB/s and lower the cost of bandwidth by at least R100/GB, or increase the cap at the same price.

I'm no businessman, but these steps seem pretty obvious to me. Why don't iBurst see this, or do they just not care?

I've been an huge supporter of iBurst and have said many nice things about them in these forums. I have also assisted others in joining up. But I must say that 4MB/s ADSL is looking rather enticing at the moment...

 

[Alchemist]

It wasnt ment to be a racist comment... However, i do see how it could be viewed as one...

What I'm trying to point out is that many BEE companies use the same generic business model for all thier businesses/aquisitions. They don't realise that each business needs its own unique business plan. And secondly, all these BEE companies are just in it for the money, can you, or them for that matter, tell me that they honestly know the first thing about IT or telecoms?

There are a few BEE companies who do actually know what they're doing, but sadly to say, that they are very few and far between.

Even if you look historically at businesses, you'll see they were doing extremely well and growing untill they partnered or were bought out by a BEE consortium. From then on, the company or business slowly leveled off and stayed their, and after a while slowly started to hit a downward curve.

 

[Fudzy]

Even if you look historically at businesses, you'll see they were doing extremely well and growing untill they partnered or were bought out by a BEE consortium. From then on, the company or business slowly leveled off and stayed their, and after a while slowly started to hit a downward curve.

Examples? iBurst has been BEE since the beginning haven't they?

 

[Ed Hall]

Hi all

Just to let you know I am here.....taking everything on board....I'll keep jumping in. As I get answers, I will post.

Regards
Ed

 

[Jongi]

Examples of these business you cite would be interesting Alchemist

 

[who.is.michael]

What happened to Ed’s “promises” posts?

Ed, Did you delete the posts that were reflected above in fishfly's post?

Sorry Ed: Seems Gatecrasher has? Not sure who was the originator of the msg's & Thanks Luke7777 - can view the original post.

EDIT: No fishfly, I thought Ed deleted his original posts which Gatecrasher copied and you subsequently copied but which no longer displays correctly....

 

[Ed Hall]

No, I can't delete anything on this forum....