Haha, I have basically lost contact with my one supplier. Not really that funny but they are on Neotel as well. Seems that when I am online they are off and visa versa. Plus they are using Neotel's SMTP server. Guess what? I am not getting any emails from them. A while ago the one sales rep drove to my house to discuss things (previously sent in lost emails) and to drop off hardcopies of documents as he could not reach people over email anymore. Between the 2 parties the internet is so disfunctional that I eventually expect them to mail me documents the old fasion way.
My other friend (with a Prime) now mainly uses his old Vodacom 3G on prepaid. He is just to damn busy to find the time to give Neotel back.
My connection has been stable since yesterday, so I have just queued stuff like crazy. I have downloaded a whopping 700MB!!! in about 24 hours. I have done around 1GB per day last month but so far the service was so bad that I just could not utilize Neotel this month. I am sitting at 5GB for the middle of the month. So now I have to decide what to queue for today as I don't want to spend hours deciding and I am not going to be near the PC... but I feel obligated to download something as the service might be down, disconnecting or slower than 20kbytes/s tomorrow. I have a presentation on Friday and I need to download a tonne of YouTube videos for sorting and editing. The damn problem is that YouTube does not support reconnections (obviously) and losing the connection means restarting the entire download. So even if I start the batch now there will still be the probability that a disconnection will happen which makes me wonder if it is worth the effort.
Potential new clients must consider that although Neotel generally works (well sometimes), the speed is OK-ish (if you are used to dial-up), it is semi-portable and the cap is relatively high (when compared to e.g. Vodacom) that this is a funny, awkward, unreliable service that will require endless hours of effort with you restarting connections, moving the modem around for better signal (although it worked perfectly the previous day), probably requiring a bulky yagi antenna, very little support (except Hugo... but he is only one person) and lots of downtime.
I got Neotel because I passionately hate Telkom. I so wanted Neotel to be better but it is not. So if you are thinking of making the same anti-Telkom move then your motives might be pure but it will in no way mean that the service will be better.
BTW, calling the call centre is like calling any random person and talking to them as a form of therapy. They don't really listen. Sometimes they give you a reference number but mostly they just sit there, listening quietly. Eventually you will be told that your request has been escalated. That is the highest level of acknowledgement your call will achieve. If you want to call someone then call you mom, your spouse or the bank manager. One of them will listen and will have exactly the same effect on your connection...nothing. But you will feel better. Also, don't even try and shout, accuse or threaten the call centre personnel. They have all be highly trained in "Ignore the client 101". There is nothing you can say that they have not heard before. You will just upset yourselve. Just remember that at the end of your exhaustive call you will be told:"Your call has been escalated". My one call has even been escalated after a quick shouting session... but the operator did not get any of my details. I just wanted to know something. I actually believe that if I call and start shouting about my Vodacom 3G card that I will be told my call has been escalated. They probably have training classes where they learn the correct pronounciation of big words like..."escalated". And if you really rev them up and asked to be put through to someone higher up in the company then you will get the following response: "Your request will be escalated to one of our supervisors". I never knew you could use the word escalate in all those different ways, but I tell you guys one thing and that is if they say escalate to me one more time I am going to escalate in my pants.
My feeling is if I get uncapped 384kbits/s ADSL that I will still get a faster than average Neotel speed. So far I am just to damn busy to do anything about it. I am going to be "woes" busy until Xmas day, so I will let all this crap slide until then. In January I will make the educated guess to go for ADSL or not.
