Poor orphaned Neotel

[AdLo]

There are no customers, no services and few of the promises that were made to entice investors have materialised. The continuing dialogue between Neotel and the various government departments has brought the company no satisfaction, leaving the country without any form of a viable alternative to Telkom.

In short, Neotel has become the poor orphan of the telecommunications sector, eliciting the worst reaction from business: pity. This has left many wondering whether it is worth continuing with the operation.

http://www.itweb.co.za/sections/col...chiatto071003.asp?A=BUS&S=Business&T=News&O=C

 

[Necuno]

gz another sentech in the making then....

 

[Alchemist]

To be very honest, and I know it's not what people want to hear, but I think NeoTel should just cut their loses and pull out. They're more than a year behind schedule, and in any business, or any other environment, that is completely unacceptable. And perhaps, only then, will the sleepy hollows of government wake up and realise twhat their constant medaling has caused.

Perhaps Neotel should also look at taking some form of legal action against the Doc and the Public Enterprises Department for loss of revenue, and maybe go as far as to lay a charge of corporate espionage.

 

[ic]

Ostensibly government's aim was to bring down telecoms prices through the introduction of competition to Telkom. This would take place at a controlled level, allowing the incumbent to transform itself from a stodgy state-owned enterprise to one that can compete. Also, the new entrant had to be protected during its start-up phase to allow it to become a strong rival.

The key to understanding why guavamint's telecommunistications policy has failed, is Poison Ivy herself and her monopoly-protectionism aka [mis]Managed [telecoms] Liberalisation.

Protect a monopoly, and what you end up doing is killing potential competition - it really is that simple.

The same goes for protecting new entrants and providing them with special privileges - rather open up the telecoms market to full-blown competition and strip away all monopoly-protectionisms, this would also attract oodles of foreign investment, and with lots of competing telecoms companies, the result would be that the fittest of them survive, whilst others that are weak potentially get gobbled up if the Competition Commission & Tribunal allow it, or a competent regulator steps in to lend a helping hand - if and only when it is necessary to do so, i.e. not upfront as part of the licensing process and the regulator has a responsibility to due its due diligence and weed out weak licensee applicants.

Guavamint has shown that it will not keep or is incapable of keeping its protectionist promises to NeeTel [think national fibre optic network and then 4 year exclusivity], instead guavamint prefers to protect Telkodemonopolies for eternity - presumably the gravytrain rejected NeeTel as a new fossil fuel supply.

small ICT companies pay millions of rands to have their Web sites hosted overseas, because it is cheaper.

Ummm that is wrong, very wrong & has to be a typo: any South African company paying millions of ZAR for international hosting, has a moron as its financial director.

Anyway, what's the point of being a telecoms company if you do not have control over your own network?

Exactly, just look at the problems that both Vodacom and MTN are experiencing since Telkodemonopolies owns the backhaul network links that Vodacom & MTN rent from Telkodemonopolies, and imagine the parastatal Infraco being 100 times worse than Telkodemonopolies currently is - spells disaster for NeeTel IMO.

 

[sar]

would be a shame if Neotel doesn't work out... we had high hopes...