Sign up with GoogleYou CUG folks have been played liked a violin, and the secrecy and exclusivity you created around the CUG contributed to the problem. You now sit in the situation where many on this forum are pissed off with you for carrying on like a bunch of elite insiders, and Sentech took full advantage of your vanity, naivete and arrogance to create a PR coup of epic proportions.
I'm sorry if this ruffles feathers, but I have to say this - you folks fscked up and the only way to continue now is with openness and honesty. The only decision to be made now is whether it is worth persevering with Sentech, or to cancel and put it behind us all.
I'm guessing that in the background Sentech has retained the services of some very slick PR professionals because they have definitely implemented a very smooth and well targeted operation that is not the work of amateurs. It's light years from their previous public foot in mouth performances. They dangled the bait for an exclusive meeting with the "CUG", took full advantage of your feel-good "we must work together to sort it out" attitude and you guys swallowed the bait hook, line and sinker.
It's all very well to be outraged about this, but in the game of public relations they have won this round as they have already used their channels to get their version of the story into the media. Please don't be naive enough to believe that some journalist at the Business Day just decided to write an article on Sentech and their meeting with some customers - that is not how it works. As a result, the public is not reading about how crap the Sentech service is and how badly they treat their customers - they are instead reading about what a great company Sentech is and how it has worked together with a customer group to fix the problems.
Not the least of the negative outcomes is that this has divided many on this board between the CUG and those not in the CUG loop. This is a result of the way the CUG was created and handled and, I believe, the enmity was subtly nurtured by Sentech. Perhaps if we had all known about this meeting and been allowed to participate in some way from the start, there would have been a bigger group than ten people for Sentech to deal with, and they might have thought twice before trying to manipulate events in this way.
Someone else mentioned that the data service might have just been an excuse for Sentech to roll out an infrastructure as they were anticipating getting a cellular licence. This now makes perfect sense. It would explain why they don't seem to give a damn about the mywireless users, don't seem to have hired any experienced network engineers who can configure things properly, and have support services that are left dangling in the wind. The purported 100's of millions of rands they spent on backoffice systems on establishment was obviously never meant for mywireless, it was for the cellular service - it never made sense anyway. Who would spend R100m+ on a backoffice system for an ISP with 2000 users? I would not be surprised if wireless internet access will ultimately just be an add on GPRS service offered to their cell subscribers and mywireless as we know it will ultimately just be disbanded, or non Sentech cellphone subscribers will not be allowed access to mywireless anymore.
If this is the case then there is no point in continuing. I would love to throw a spanner in their cellular operations by somehow communicating the true colours of this company to the general public, but in my experience revenge is never a worthwhile motive, and the effort involved really wouldn't be worth it. We have all been used and abused, and it is probablt better now to just move on.
But if the consensus is that it is worth persevering, then the only way forward is to create a large user group allowing any sentech subscriber who wants to join. Probably the best plan would be to have a dedicated website for this and to promote it among sentech subscribers. Users could register with their sentech email address in order to prove they are actual subscribers and the website could comprise a forum to debate a course of action and the facility to generate online petitions for sentech and the media that subscribers can add their names to if they so wished. Those that organise it, if they are really sincere in their efforts, should not carry on like a bunch of officious twats with insider knowledge and secret meetings, but instead should operate purely as facilitators, allowing the subscribers themselves achieve consensus on actions.
Just my two cents. Shoot me down in flames if you want, but this is the way I see things.
I'm sorry if this ruffles feathers, but I have to say this - you folks fscked up and the only way to continue now is with openness and honesty. The only decision to be made now is whether it is worth persevering with Sentech, or to cancel and put it behind us all.
I'm guessing that in the background Sentech has retained the services of some very slick PR professionals because they have definitely implemented a very smooth and well targeted operation that is not the work of amateurs. It's light years from their previous public foot in mouth performances. They dangled the bait for an exclusive meeting with the "CUG", took full advantage of your feel-good "we must work together to sort it out" attitude and you guys swallowed the bait hook, line and sinker.
It's all very well to be outraged about this, but in the game of public relations they have won this round as they have already used their channels to get their version of the story into the media. Please don't be naive enough to believe that some journalist at the Business Day just decided to write an article on Sentech and their meeting with some customers - that is not how it works. As a result, the public is not reading about how crap the Sentech service is and how badly they treat their customers - they are instead reading about what a great company Sentech is and how it has worked together with a customer group to fix the problems.
Not the least of the negative outcomes is that this has divided many on this board between the CUG and those not in the CUG loop. This is a result of the way the CUG was created and handled and, I believe, the enmity was subtly nurtured by Sentech. Perhaps if we had all known about this meeting and been allowed to participate in some way from the start, there would have been a bigger group than ten people for Sentech to deal with, and they might have thought twice before trying to manipulate events in this way.
Someone else mentioned that the data service might have just been an excuse for Sentech to roll out an infrastructure as they were anticipating getting a cellular licence. This now makes perfect sense. It would explain why they don't seem to give a damn about the mywireless users, don't seem to have hired any experienced network engineers who can configure things properly, and have support services that are left dangling in the wind. The purported 100's of millions of rands they spent on backoffice systems on establishment was obviously never meant for mywireless, it was for the cellular service - it never made sense anyway. Who would spend R100m+ on a backoffice system for an ISP with 2000 users? I would not be surprised if wireless internet access will ultimately just be an add on GPRS service offered to their cell subscribers and mywireless as we know it will ultimately just be disbanded, or non Sentech cellphone subscribers will not be allowed access to mywireless anymore.
If this is the case then there is no point in continuing. I would love to throw a spanner in their cellular operations by somehow communicating the true colours of this company to the general public, but in my experience revenge is never a worthwhile motive, and the effort involved really wouldn't be worth it. We have all been used and abused, and it is probablt better now to just move on.
But if the consensus is that it is worth persevering, then the only way forward is to create a large user group allowing any sentech subscriber who wants to join. Probably the best plan would be to have a dedicated website for this and to promote it among sentech subscribers. Users could register with their sentech email address in order to prove they are actual subscribers and the website could comprise a forum to debate a course of action and the facility to generate online petitions for sentech and the media that subscribers can add their names to if they so wished. Those that organise it, if they are really sincere in their efforts, should not carry on like a bunch of officious twats with insider knowledge and secret meetings, but instead should operate purely as facilitators, allowing the subscribers themselves achieve consensus on actions.
Just my two cents. Shoot me down in flames if you want, but this is the way I see things.
