Sentech to Launch New MyWi packages

noone said:
And how does Sentech know that these people are downloading porn and are underage?
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I never said it was sentech???
However it's no secret that ISP's all have (and use) the necessary software to monitor
their excessive and problematic customers.

So the moment anyone gets busted by the police for doing what they want in the privacy of their own home
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Downloading porn is fully legal and within your rights.
However, downloading porn containing underage persons is considered a serious crime.
The law states that an ISP failing to report this is also committing a criminal offence.
 
oh wait, i misunderstood. I thought you said people who are underage are downloading porn and will be prosecuted by whatever ISP.

Say kiddie porn, then we know what ur saying :D
 
Another point which was brought out much to my dissatisfaction is gaming.
Gaming as it stands today in SA is a total loss of revenue.
In the pre-adsl days when dialup/ISDN was the order of the day, ISP's could use gaming servers as a way to attract subscibers, that all changed when only one company hogged the ADSL.
With a "pay as you go" method many game servers will start appearing again.
Noone, I agree that R1/meg is rediculious especially if the cap is gonna be around 300 megs (oops did I say that)
The next 6 months is gonna be interesting for all players in the field.
 
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analogy

let's compare internet access to cellphones:

a few years ago, people had basic cellphones, and they all did the same thing - make phone calls. nowadays, a lot of people have internet access and it basically does all the same thing surfing and browsing, for anything else, it is either too slow or you hit your cap before you can say 'multimedia'.

then cellphones became a commodity, and in order to attract new customers, the had to offer features that other cellphones didn't. enter games, camera's, ringtones, yaddah yaddah yaddah.... People did not buy the latest cellphone b/c it did the same as their old one.

Now back to internet access: Sentech's new offering add no value for most dialup users. Faster? questionable... Always on? what good will that do with a 500 (let's assume) Meg cap? Cheaper? probably not for most dialup users. 5 email addresses? Please...

What makes internet access worthwhile is broadband - in the non SA meaning of the word. Online gaming, streaming audio, streaming video, banking shopping. Show people that with you product, they can look at video reports from bbc online whenever something happens (again without worrying about a cap). Make your product look cool and don't make promises you can't deliver.
Offer 512K, with a 20 gig cap for less then R500 a month and you will take 90% of the market. Your product will be the new cool cellphone that everybody wants to own.

What is it that is holding companies back? is it truly the lack of bandwidth? Internationally i can believe it, but local bandwidth cannot be that scarce...
 
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I have been quietly following Sentech's decision to officially enter the dialup market [I believe that Sentech always was targetting the dialup market], and I have been somewhat amused by it all :D, anyways Sentech can go after dialup customers and I have no problem with that [they are after all taking away some of TelkoDemonopoly's profits - although it still endsup in government's pocket since Sentech is still 100% government owned] - just as long as Sentech drops all references to "broadband", and to potential Sentech MyWireless customers I say: be sure that you don't mind being limited by dialup slownessness and be sure that your kids will never need true broadband access to the Internet...
 
Yes, thats exactly what I've been trying to say Vlad.

300meg cap is ridiculous if you think about it. For R65 (ala my cousin's connection bill) he can stay online for 7.5 hours.

56k running at 80% of the speed is around 5.6kb/s

Meaning, in that 7.5 hours he can download round about 150 meg. With the proposed cap of 300 meg (which no one said on this forum *cough*)

The connectivity for R150 would only be around 15 hours a month. Then it boasts being always on, and who wouldn't want to use an always on connection during the day? You'd soon get the average joe to go above the cap and because he's not cut off or prompted to buy more bandwidth.... no... he automatically then gets billled R1 per meg. You'll soon get the average joe to dump Sentech AGAIN.

This is why their marketing department sucks donkey balls. I can't believe they seriously thought this **** up.

If they geniunely wanted to go after the dialup market, why not make it uncapped, but the person can only connect during 19:00 and 7:00 (they could even make it interchangable, for those people who want some flexibility)

Then, and only then, would I say it would be worthwhile charging them R150 for close to dialup speeds.
 
...and remember, the average joe (checking mail or googling a new recipe online) would not want a service that is supposedly always on and restricted so wildly.

It's like giving a child a whole pack of candy, and telling them they can only have 5 out of the 100 candies, you then leave the room and come back later... they would have eaten alot more than 5 candies, and now you tell them you'll charge them for each candy they took.

I mean come on... I thought that fat b1tch at marketing had children and knew that temptation would ultimately make bandwidth whores out of normal users.
 
noone said:
... temptation would ultimately make bandwidth whores out of normal users.
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That should be their whole idea: get people hooked with a good deal, lot's of bandwidth, and they'll get so 'addicted' they'll be loyal customers for life.

Look at this forum, the only reason people put all this effort in it, is b/c we're all hooked on bandwidth. Once you've tasted it, you can't go back...

Sentech's R1/Meg reminds me of 'a clockwork orange'. Tempt the user with a 24/7 connection (can't bring myself to say 'broadband' anymore), and then slap a several thousand rand bill on them b/c their kids discovered P2P.
They'll never get on the internet again, b/c the mere thought of it will make them sick.

Ideally, after you hit your cap, you should be limited to dialup speeds for the rest of the month (oh wait, that's what they're offering in the first place...)

I would find this ironic if i didn't live here...
 
Without saying as much, I believe that Sentech's real goal is to exit their
current "broadband" strategy, and instead focus on the low intensity entry level market only.
I don't think that they really want any customers who intend downloading more than 2G a month.
Although nothing has been officially released, (so all of this is still pure speculation),
word has it that they intend making a cheap entry level price, and then will punish those who
exceed their pre-determined monthly packages (i.e. 300MB,500MB, 1 G & 2G).
This probably to encourage heavy users to move to ADSL.

However, I have some concerns that are related to the limitations of
most wireless technologies in general (IPW, iBurst & WiMax etc.).
Unless I'm missing something, these technology suppliers appear to have vastly
exaggerated the maximum user capacity of each node.
If a wireless ISP pushes the entry level packages to well below R200, and hopes to attract
thousands of new users, how are the towers going to cope?
I can't see each Node currently being able to cope with more than 300-400 users
per node.... and I can't see how these limitations are going to be effectively managed!

In SA, where a lack of communication between Marketing people and
Technical people is often a real issue, It's going to be interesting to see how 2000
users are gong to be crammed onto a single NodeB!
 
I doubt they'll have any problems. They only have +-5000 subscribers at the moment. If they push most of them away and attract 2000 new subscribers, they'll be earning less but paying the same for the towers and bandwidth. A totally screwed up business plan which will fail pretty quickly.
 
I don't know what the current subscriber base it (thought it was about 4000 though),
but according to what I have heard, the vast majority of their current subscribers are using
just a few Gig per month, and it's that group that they are aiming to focus on and keep.
If true, I figure that about 75% of their existing customers (on the so called "new scheme"),
will be paying less. Sentech will then need to attract rather large numbers
of new customers to make up for this deficit.
I figure only about 20% of their existing customer base will walk!
 
Everyone has forgotten the obvious here, regarding Sentech.

If they DO manage to attact customers with their alternative to Dialup, how are they going to manage them ?

They had problems managing 4000 users - I'm not sure how many they had during their short lived "hey day", but I believe it was around that figure.

Well over 50% of those users were unhappy at all levels of service - the product itself and the customer support, or lack thereof.

The only way Sentech can succeed with their "dialup takeover" would be to throw out their old customer system and spend big bucks on a professional solution, which includes professional staff.

IOW, outsource.

I honestly don't think Sentech are going to succeed anyway.

Too little, too late.

MTN and Vodacom are going to eat them for breakfast and spit out the pips.
 
dbnnet said:
according to what I have heard, the vast majority of their current subscribers are using just a few Gig per month, and it's that group that they are aiming to focus on and keep.
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If the majority of subscribers are within the preferred range of bandwidth, why go and make them all worried by mentioning a new low cap. Thats only going to make them think twice about the service and what they're paying for.

If the cap is around 3GB or less, I can see a lot of the subscribers changing to ADSL just because its more stable and you're basically guarenteed of the bandwidth. The modems are also a hellofalot cheaper
 
JayT, they are looking at 100 times what you mention as new subscribers and that brings us to the problem dbnnet is talking about, again the problem between marketing and technical.

You know if Telscum was like most other countries and just made local calls FREE, even if they are only free after hours (including public holidays) would solve a zillion problems in this country.

bb_matt, I dont think they will go it alone again, but then you never know :D
 
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Good to see companies have dreams too. It would be interesting to see their initial figures they were planning for when they rolled out their current packages. You'd most probably find they are no where near 20% of what they were hoping for.
 
noone said:
Oh and for those folks that think I'm a w@nker and doesn't have any influence, I am a senior consultant, we do outsourcing for people like didata, siebel, massmart, standard bank, absa etc. Even been approached by M$.
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Sorry man, but I still think you're a wanker. :D Not really - only kidding.

You don't by any chance do consulting on the speed of light in a vacuum with specialisation in radio waves? ;) Also kidding.

Do you know Herbie Maree (PM) at ABSA Telephone Call Centre? No really.
 
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Sentech is launching the "new packages" at Montecasino tomorrow (Thursday).
 
dbnnet said:
However, I have some concerns that are related to the limitations of
most wireless technologies in general (IPW, iBurst & WiMax etc.).
Unless I'm missing something, these technology suppliers appear to have vastly
exaggerated the maximum user capacity of each node.
If a wireless ISP pushes the entry level packages to well below R200, and hopes to attract
thousands of new users, how are the towers going to cope?
I can't see each Node currently being able to cope with more than 300-400 users
per node.... and I can't see how these limitations are going to be effectively managed!

In SA, where a lack of communication between Marketing people and
Technical people is often a real issue, It's going to be interesting to see how 2000
users are gong to be crammed onto a single NodeB!
Click to expand...

I think one of the main problems is that management believe that by setting small caps they can load the basestations as most connections will be idle most of the time, however a idle connection is still using basestation resources (timeslots etc) so i cant see how having the whole dial up market of the berea connected to inverness is going to work even with Proasm's wizardry.
 
Unless I'm missing something, irrespective of what package each user is on,
the IPW modem communicates with the NodeB at 3Mb/s.
If there was a way to modify this (reduce the timeslots), to say about 384K,
this could well go some way to increasing the maximum number of users per node.
(This 3mb/s is way in excess of what we are given to use anyway).

Daveogg, I too am on the Berea, but connect to Bay of Plenty.
I drove ProAsm up the wall until he beamed sector 3 right at me :)
Anyone on Musgrave road or below, will get a better signal from Bay of Plenty.
 
dbnnet said:
Sentech is launching the "new packages" at Montecasino tomorrow (Thursday).
Click to expand...

Anybody go to the launch of these new packages and if so what do they consist of?
 
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