Pervasive broadband - Neotel's views

Neotel should first give its definition of broadband - so that everybody is clear that they mean 2kb-5kb/s, the barriers to improvement are then quickly broken down
 
“This has given us the agility and flexibility to be a market-led, responsive and customer driven telecoms player that can truly enable South Africans,”
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If only the reality would matched the rhetoric.
 
...issues such as limited or no connectivity need to be addressed
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I have limited to no connectivity with Neotel ???
 
Neotel giving a lecture about pervasive broadband? That's like George Bush giving a lecture about world peace and the English language.

Neotel, weren't you supposed to be the 2nd fixed line operator? So far not a single residential fixed line has been provisioned by you.
 
deweyzeph said:
Neotel giving a lecture about pervasive broadband? That's like George Bush giving a lecture about world peace and the English language.

Neotel, weren't you supposed to be the 2nd fixed line operator? So far not a single residential fixed line has been provisioned by you.
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+1 million
 
Hmm... you guys have already said everything I wanted to say. Nothing more to say, i guess, except:

Angus Hay, please shut your flithy dirty trap, you lying, deceiving, over-promising, under-delivering failure.
 
This is so arb. Every few weeks they wheel out Angus Hay to sprout some rubbish about how they are so cool and everyone else sucks.

I get 1 - 2 mb/s on Vodacom HSDPA and they have coverage everywhere I travel. Neotel only really beat them on price. I have a 4 mb/s ADSL line (Sigh. Upgraded from a 384 line earlier in the month cause I could not take the slowness) and I pay R29 per gig. I get multiple megabits per second off that. Again the only area where they win is price when it comes to their uncapped products. Seriously, they are not better than anyone else...
 
I wanted to write something very long and philosophic but screw it
Until the time where we pay less than R300 for our cap and ADSL connection on one bill and I am talking over 2mb connection these inglorious bastards will rip us of until they choke on their own money belts.
Anyways enough said.
 
Neotel no longer has any standing with me to give "views" on what broadband should be.
 
It does seem to me that the people who post most on these forums read the least. It's also somewhat ironic that the people who complain most about repetition are those who repeat themselves the most. Basically, if you don't have anything new to say, you should probably think twice about posting, because it says more about you than about what you're commenting on.

So, to the substance of the article, which no-one seems actually to have read:

What is really the best way for us to get more broadband? There have been so many suggestions, and so many views on what has worked in other countries, and everyone is expecting some kind of silver bullet. Maybe, just maybe, there isn't one.

Local Loop Unbundling, because we haven't seen yet seen it, is our latest "silver bullet". Neotel's comments are interesting, because they start to question whether this is really the solution we should be chasing. True, LLU has created very competitive (and hence low-priced) secondary broadband markets in many countries, but it has taken very competent regulators, and a lot of work. In contrast, laying new fibre infrastructure is actually easier, even though it may be slow and expensive to do. Similarly, we'd have a lot more competition in the market already if ICASA just got round to handing out some spectrum - as Neotel says.

Anyone interested in debating this seriously, or would you prefer just to flame my first paragraph?
 
ads said:
So, to the substance of the article, which no-one seems actually to have read:

What is really the best way for us to get more broadband?
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Nobody's debating because there isn't really a "debate" here to be had; it's all the same tired old crap --- the "substance" of this article, that you seem to have missed, is (a) that it's a press release designed to make Neotel look like some kind of visionaries working hard to create mass-market broadband in SA and (b) a lobbying piece designed to drive public (and other) opinion towards Neotel getting allocated spectrum. The article is designed to make you sit and 'debate' how we can 'figure out how to get more broadband' (while thinking about the Neotel brand, thereby creating a mental association between their brand and the notion of good broadband) specifically to distract you from the fact that they're really just looking for markets they can monopolize ... do you really think that by debating here we're going to "come up with a solution"? What do you think is going to happen - that Neotel and the government are going to read this forum, read your and our brilliant advice, say "hey we never thought of that - let's do *that*" and then go about creating cheap broadband? We've debated these things to death already; we know what needs to be done, much of it is just not being done. If you want solutions, protest in the streets against the government or something.
 
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Turtle said:
What do you think is going to happen - that Neotel and the government are going to read this forum, read your and our brilliant advice, say "hey we never thought of that - let's do *that*" and then go about creating cheap broadband?
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:( You're probably right. Much of the time, these forums simply bring out the worst in humanity, so it doesn't seem like they would find any good ideas here anyway, even if they bothered to trawl through them.
 
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Neotel does not supply broadband under any definition.

Your laggy, slow intermittent so called internet connections are the worst OF ALL THE ISP's in this country.

@ ads I would be happy to debate the point with you.

We need penetration % to get real growth. This will never happen as the vast majority of our population does not have the income to even afford the most basic of internet connections. This is why we will never have the scale of internet that exists within Europe or the USA. Simple fact of life. 90% of our population is battling to survive. WHy would they want internet ?
 
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Yo, this article was a bunch of cr@p.

At least Neotel were on schedule with their interlink to Seacom for Stellenbosch University - providing them with 600mbps Internet connectivity.

The current penetration %'s are shockingly low, but I don't think improving just that would provide "real growth" as Gary stated? I mean, what's the point of installing new lines capable of 8Mbps when there's already technology out there enabling people to have 100Mbps-1Gbps connections to their homes.

I think the majority would rather want more affordable Internet connectivity than to have more bandwidth.
 
Gary Waterworth said:
@ ads I would be happy to debate the point with you.
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:)

Gary Waterworth said:
We need penetration % to get real growth. This will never happen as the vast majority of our population does not have the income to even afford the most basic of internet connections. This is why we will never have the scale of internet that exists within Europe or the USA. Simple fact of life. 90% of our population is battling to survive. WHy would they want internet ?
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The funny thing is, a few years ago, you'd hear exactly the same thing said in India (where the inequities in society are much the same as South Africa), but it doesn't stop them from thinking of themselves as (and being) the IT leaders in the world, and doing all the right things to get Internet to people. Even today, they have only reached 7% Internet penetration, and broadband is much lower still. Only a very small part of the population is actively engaged in high-tech industries, or even in service industries at all, and income in India goes down to levels way below that of South Africa, so it can't just be about that, even if there are large numbers of people to buy.

I think you'll find, if you do a few comparisons globally, that South Africans, on average, don't get close to "battling to survive" on average. Try looking across the border at Zim, for example. High unemployment and poverty are still better than actually dying of starvation. If there's no income out there at all, who's using all the cell phones? Starving people don't pay even 99c for a starter pack.

I think our problems run deeper than that. Almost any idea that may really make a difference is hijacked by other, supposedly higher priorities. We cannot simply create a model that gives incentives to private investment - it has to be the "right" (left?) private investment, and it has to fit in with particular political logic. Why, for example, does the whole spectrum policy apparently hinge on poor rural consumer needs, and the issuing of spectrum depend on who is applying, rather than the value it would bring? Countries that have got spectrum policy more or less right (and here I exclude India, that has messed up its hopes of growing 3G with bad spectrum policy) actually value the science, technology and associated knowledge that is required over half-baked economics and political favours. The greatest spectrum needs are urban, and one has to understand all the markets, not just poor consumers.

Of course, we also have to get over the insidious tendency to insist that everyone has the same needs. The most successful efforts to extend Internet to larger populations have been through shared models - Internet cafes etc - just as we've seen with community pay phones for voice here. The pay phone model works here because there really is money in it for all concerned, from the shop owner to the network owner, although it was dressed up as a "community service obligation". If there were similar incentives for Internet e.g. you can have all the spectrum you asked for, and do what you like with it, provided you build 1000 Internet cafes, and the government will give you a subsidy for each one you build it's still there after a year. Models like that work in some places, and fail in others, but why not try? In South Africa, they wouldn't get past the starting blocks because there would be so many conditions and vested interests, political twists and incompetent government officials in the way as to make it impossible to start.

Your point about "why would they want it?" is trickier to answer, but maybe, just maybe, it's got more to do with lack of availability than lack of need. We actually have some of the best government and related web sites in this country, and yet they are largely wasted on the few who can access them. Your average non-Internet user (for want of a better term) doesn't actually know what they are missing. Personal Internet may well be beyond people's reach, but it must surely be cheaper to get services at a local Internet cafe than catching a taxi to stand in a queue for a few hours. There's plenty of this kind of small scale entrepreneurship going on in other ways, so what's the real barrier here? Nigeria doesn't have this problem - they have thousands of Internet cafes just like this.
 
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