SA broadband shooting blanks

[AdLo]

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[justinct]

OMS! ru being serious? What the hell is steve white talking about? they have the whole damn bakery and are eating the damn cakes themselves. I must not meet this man in the street.

 

[rpm]

Great article about the proceedings.

 

[munwaal]

Steve White shoots blanks.

 

[pookfuzz]

It does not surprise me. While getting the current providers to sit down and talk is really good it will not achieve anything if those providers don't actually take the event seriously. My feeling is that most of them are treating this as a PR exercise, the goals of the organisers being conveniently ignored.

Sentech have demonstrated a refreshing candor in answering questions, and while this does not solve the problems it certainly helps everyone understand with better clarity what those problems really are. Telkom’s approach of basically refusing to answer questions they did not like once again demonstrates that their involvement in the discussions completely insincere, which from past behavior is expected.

I was also reasonably happy with the answers from the cell operators, it was obvious they did not really have all the answers but despite this they were willing to admit the weaknesses or areas they had no idea what was going on. I would like to see a bit more

I was not too impressed with iBurst, the answers to questions were vague and did not really increase anyone’s understanding of how they have structured their offering.

I really think much more time should have been allocated to the general questions. Nor do I believe we should expect any useful results from such discussions, everyone has a reasonably good idea where most of the problems reside, and that particular reluctant participant is unlikely to change anything unless forced to. The best we can hope for is that the discussions bring awareness and interest from the greater public which may eventually galvanize our government into taking meaningful action rather than rhetoric without substance.

Once again well done to Sentech - I may hate your product but your attitude is right.

 

[BTTB]

”Having our current cosy little club decide what we want and how much we will pay for it will just continue to fuel the consumer backlash.”

That is an understatement, but true nevertheless.

 

[Gladiator]

“Yes there are some people who it will not appeal to their needs as far as a hard capped cap is concerned. However, we will be selling in a comparable environment to other IP capped offerings out there, services on a usage based. It's important to note that 4% of the customers use 50% of the bandwidth. That is something the large based ISPs will concur with.”

omg if the above statement is true, then why hard cap accounts, why even have a cap if only 4% of the subscribers are gonna need a 30gb account, there is no reason to sell accounts at such high prices if there's soooo much bandwidth available since only 4% actually use more than 50%...

 

[biltonguy]

Its pretty sad that there is so little bandwidth that 4% of users can use 50% total bandwidth . wat poppykok, reminds me of Naked Gun - "he's got a 50% chance of surviving, and only a 10% chance of that"

 

[Haggle]

Some other things he also said:
“Just some changes to the wholesale service ....those are sometime during November going to be a hard capped product where we are going towards a usage based billing model for ISPS that is largely been welcomed by most large ISPs.”
...
“Yes there are some people who it will not appeal to their needs as far as a hard capped cap is concerned. However, we will be selling in a comparable environment to other IP capped offerings out there, services on a usage based. It's important to note that 4% of the customers use 50% of the bandwidth. That is something the large based ISPs will concur with.”

Who are these 4% of the customers use 50% of the bandwidth?

Most likely Telkom’s SMME business customers who thought they were very clever to replace their lease lines with ADSL accounts as well as all those WISPs using their high gig ADSL accounts to supply their customers with connectivity… not forgetting all those innovative residential customers who thought they were going to get away with sharing their ADSL accounts with their neighbours.

And you thought you were going to escape Telscum’s greedy claws !!!