Suggestions for Vodacom data network

Interesting discussion.
Like everything else time will tell & the systems will evolve as the need arises. The crux will be how to merge/run the systems side by side with the least interruptions. It is always very difficult to upgrade/change a very live system like this one & several others.:p The technicalities behind all this stuff is great to know & see it being discussed. How did other countries & ISP's handle this IP allocation/change over?
:cool:
 
vodacom3g said:
morkhans, all valid points and nicely put. Just shows that there's never a simple answer....:confused:
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Not tottally true. Things are as complicated as we make them. And rightfully said, somewhere else, if things are thought through carefully then the implementation is easier. Unfortunately in today's life and technology it aint so easy. I want it yesterday and working & no bugs. I know I know. (Practice what you preach) Sometimes we practise sometimes we preach.
:cool:
 
Help us a little more

Firstly, kudos to vodacom for the following: Providing awesomely fast broadband which is available from the nether-realms of space. And to you v3g, the legend, who helps out so many a lost soul. Who is the last human link between us, the consumer, and vodacom, the ever-expanding commercial beast. Who is to many people the savior of online perfection.

However I do have a massive problem with the way vodacom delivers support to their trust customers. I do believe that the lost art of consumer relations can be really helpful to a company's success. Take a look at google for example.

Now this is the problem:
Why is there no website that vodacom administrates that gives its clients good support? Yes, I understand that mybroadband provide an excellent facility to find information. But therein is the problem 'find'. Why cant all of this be under one common area eg. http://www.vodacom.co.za/support? Why do we have to trawl through endless agony to find something which could help us out, or have to post to a forum to get a little help? My time, to me, is just as valueable as, the ceo of vodacom's time, is to him.

My suggestion:
Vodacom buy the domain vodacomhelp.co.za and summarise every bit of information, gliches detected, known issues and nuances found on this website(and others) and put it in one place. In a nice user-friendly environment. And do exactly what the word company means - "an institution to conduct business". And we the the clients can be a super-conductor, if co-ordinated and treated fairly.
 
idalatob said:
Firstly, kudos to vodacom for the following: Providing awesomely fast broadband which is available from the nether-realms of space. And to you v3g, the legend, who helps out so many a lost soul. Who is the last human link between us, the consumer, and vodacom, the ever-expanding commercial beast. Who is to many people the savior of online perfection.

However I do have a massive problem with the way vodacom delivers support to their trust customers. I do believe that the lost art of consumer relations can be really helpful to a company's success. Take a look at google for example.

Now this is the problem:
Why is there no website that vodacom administrates that gives its clients good support? Yes, I understand that mybroadband provide an excellent facility to find information. But therein is the problem 'find'. Why cant all of this be under one common area eg. http://www.vodacom.co.za/support? Why do we have to trawl through endless agony to find something which could help us out, or have to post to a forum to get a little help? My time, to me, is just as valueable as, the ceo of vodacom's time, is to him.

My suggestion:
Vodacom buy the domain vodacomhelp.co.za and summarise every bit of information, gliches detected, known issues and nuances found on this website(and others) and put it in one place. In a nice user-friendly environment. And do exactly what the word company means - "an institution to conduct business". And we the the clients can be a super-conductor, if co-ordinated and treated fairly.
Click to expand...

Have you tried this link?
 
Actually I havent. But It would help a little if:
a- They got it indexed. (no indexing, no search results)--> If you search for "vodacom help" it gets it. but no specific searches come up
b- They told people that it existed. When I phoned 082 155. They said- "look for a button that says help" but I couldnt find any.
.

Thanks for that, I had a look at it. I am bowing my head in shame. Sorry for being a n00b!:D

Btw have you tried that link? See how much it helps with certain topics....
 
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idalatob said:
My suggestion:
Vodacom buy the domain vodacomhelp.co.za and summarise every bit of information, gliches detected, known issues and nuances found on this website(and others) and put it in one place. In a nice user-friendly environment. And do exactly what the word company means - "an institution to conduct business". And we the the clients can be a super-conductor, if co-ordinated and treated fairly.
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Iam3G said:
Have you tried this link?
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Yep, there is help.vodacom.co.za, however that is as much a work-in-progress as this forum is self-documenting and interactive.

The wealth & amount of info that has accumulated in this forum as a direct result of v3g's participation, will take time for Vodacom to replicate to help.vodacom.co.za, I'm sure it will happen, but here one can discuss issues with v3g as well :).

PS: the rest of us have also gained knowledge through osmosis and experience and we know a thing or two and consequently offer up our time to help as a community where possible.
 
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Although the forum contains a wealth of knowledge, it's not easy to find something by searching for it.

This is a good indication of the problem to build a web-site like help.vodacom.co.za. The content itself is not so difficult; trying to structure it so you can find it, is massively complex. Trying to follow any human reasoning in a web-page structure is not easy.

I've been involved in the 'Trinity' project from the beginning and believe me, it's not easy to write the flow diagrams.

But at least it's a start, can't think of any other provider who offers something similar at the moment.

But I could be wrong maybe someone can point us in the right direction?
 
vodacom3g said:
Although the forum contains a wealth of knowledge, it's not easy to find something by searching for it.

This is a good indication of the problem to build a web-site like help.vodacom.co.za. The content itself is not so difficult; trying to structure it so you can find it, is massively complex. Trying to follow any human reasoning in a web-page structure is not easy.

I've been involved in the 'Trinity' project from the beginning and believe me, it's not easy to write the flow diagrams.

But at least it's a start, can't think of any other provider who offers something similar at the moment.

But I could be wrong maybe someone can point us in the right direction?
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Just a question, why is Mobile Technical Support only available on our Intranet? There is alot of usefull information on there that could help fellow forumites.
 
vodacom3g said:
Although the forum contains a wealth of knowledge, it's not easy to find something by searching for it.

This is a good indication of the problem to build a web-site like help.vodacom.co.za. The content itself is not so difficult; trying to structure it so you can find it, is massively complex. Trying to follow any human reasoning in a web-page structure is not easy.

I've been involved in the 'Trinity' project from the beginning and believe me, it's not easy to write the flow diagrams.

But at least it's a start, can't think of any other provider who offers something similar at the moment.

But I could be wrong maybe someone can point us in the right direction?
Click to expand...
I agree that searching for info in the forum can be tricky, especially 3LAs that are not supported due to MySQL limitations, however using Google to search the forum is usually much easier and quicker, although there are times when I also struggle to find threads & posts, this is the main reason why I prefer to merge related threads together as it often means that the info is more searchable and can often be found by sorting the forum threads according to number of views or replies, and I tend to add extra info into thread titles to accommodate alternative search terms that people are likely to use.

While I haven't looked at help.vodacom.co.za for quite a while, it would be nice if a trouble ticketing system could be added there - if it hasn't already been added.

PS: I'm currently getting the following:
The connection was reset

The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading.
  • The site could be temporarily unavailable or too busy. Try again in a few moments.
  • If you are unable to load any pages, check your computer's network connection.
  • If your computer or network is protected by a firewall or proxy, make sure that Firefox is permitted to access the Web.
Click to expand...
 
Im glad that you guys sort of follow me, although I do feel a little daft for not finding that link...

Anyway another example can be trying to play an online game after getting a 3g card... You have absolutely no idea that you're NAT'ed... Took me 4 days just to figure that bit out.
 
idalatob said:
Im glad that you guys sort of follow me, although I do feel a little daft for not finding that link...

Anyway another example can be trying to play an online game after getting a 3g card... You have absolutely no idea that you're NAT'ed... Took me 4 days just to figure that bit out.
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I dont even know what NAT stands for, let alone what it means. But i will someday... :rolleyes:

[EDIT]: NAT = Network Address Translation???
 
Iam3G said:
I dont even know what NAT stands for, let alone what it means. But i will someday... :rolleyes:

[EDIT]: NAT = Network Address Translation???
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Yup.

This is where I'll try to stay off the soap box, BUT...:)....

.....if you're in a high-level technical support role, and you work predominately with a protocol such as the Internet Protocol Suite (commonly, but incorrectly known as TCP/IP), you really (really, really, really) have to educate yourself on how it works.

It just takes all the guesswork out of it....;)

You learned how to speak, read and write and do maths at school. This allows you to perform to some level in your job. In the same way knowledge of communications protocols (such as IP) is essential for your type of job.

And it's actually quite cool!
 
vodacom3g said:
Yup.

This is where I'll try to stay off the soap box, BUT...:)....

.....if you're in a high-level technical support role, and you work predominately with a protocol such as the Internet Protocol Suite (commonly, but incorrectly known as TCP/IP), you really (really, really, really) have to educate yourself on how it works.

It just takes all the guesswork out of it....;)

You learned how to speak, read and write and do maths at school. This allows you to perform to some level in your job. In the same way knowledge of communications protocols (such as IP) is essential for your type of job.

And it's actually quite cool!
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Understood. But remember my signature... ;) I did do N+ on Campus, didnt do too well though, and i am learning with each passing day.

vodacom3g said:
The content is being migrated to help.vodacom.co.za.
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Understood.
 
Iam3G said:
Understood. But remember my signature... ;) I did do N+ on Campus, didnt do too well though, and i am learning with each passing day.
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I think at most institutions N+ (and A+) is not worth the paper they're written on. This is not a reflection on the students but rather the instructors......

Buy yourself a good book on IP (the "TCP/IP for Dummies in 21 days" type) and work through it page by page.

If you're stuck, come and visit me. I'll gladly help you. I can dig up a training course I wrote a few years ago on TCP/IP and we can go through that.
 
vodacom3g said:
I think at most institutions N+ (and A+) is not worth the paper they're written on. This is not a reflection on the students but rather the instructors......

Buy yourself a good book on IP (the "TCP/IP for Dummies in 21 days" type) and work through it page by page.

If you're stuck, come and visit me. I'll gladly help you. I can dig up a training course I wrote a few years ago on TCP/IP and we can go through that.
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Sounds like a plan.

I didnt do A+, i did that growing up :rolleyes:

N+ i had to do in less than 15days, including a practical. It was about 6months+ of work i had to cram in to stick to schedule. The theory for it is really confusing.
 
vodacom3g said:
Although the forum contains a wealth of knowledge, it's not easy to find something by searching for it.
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Perhaps not on the face of it but i regularly hit Google and simply cut-and-paste an error message or whatever and hit the search button. More often than not the results that come up are from forums and mailing list archives and this is quite simply because of the volumes of quality text in these pages. I don't think i'm alone in being a google troubleshooter :cool:
vodacom3g said:
This is a good indication of the problem to build a web-site like help.vodacom.co.za. The content itself is not so difficult; trying to structure it so you can find it, is massively complex. Trying to follow any human reasoning in a web-page structure is not easy.

I've been involved in the 'Trinity' project from the beginning and believe me, it's not easy to write the flow diagrams.

But at least it's a start, can't think of any other provider who offers something similar at the moment.

But I could be wrong maybe someone can point us in the right direction?
Click to expand...
The flow charts thing is good (although it does reek of the Microsoft troubleshooter which has never done anything other than lead me in circles ;) ) Unfortunately the content is completely user triggered and spiders (Googlebot, Yahoo, etc) with have a very difficult time extracting it.

I've found that a simple CMS with a basic tree structure, while being hell for most users to navigate, is the most effective way to get the info noticed by the search engines. Q&A topics with all the relevant keywords included and you'll find that users often land directly on the page with the answer and leave contented. As bizarre as it may sound - perhaps VC should hire a SEO person to the trinity team :D

Just a general comment on all Vodacom's webpages:
Please put the images through an image optimization tool before uploading them to the server. Most of the icons on the homepage of help.vodacom are at least 20KB in size yet someone managed to get the 'email' icon to only be 4.5KB. To put it in perspective... that is (thumbsuck) 3s per image on a good GPRS connection which makes the load time for the page over a flakey GRPS completely unacceptable. Its not inconceivable that people will need to connect to the help site when all their broadband connections are dead ;)
 
All part of the conspiracy to use up your bundle...;)

The problem with a self-help web-site is that it's probably not aimed at someone who knows how to Google myADSL :)

But I agree with your comments and will pass it on. Especially on the heavy graphics. You know about the light-weight page for data usage?
 
vodacom3g said:
The problem with a self-help web-site is that it's probably not aimed at someone who knows how to Google myADSL :)
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Just Google "vodacom" and some description of a problem and you more likely to get hits on the forum than VC's own site :p This site comes up tops on many search terms locally and internationally. I'm sure rpm can show you the details on the site-tracker.
vodacom3g said:
But I agree with your comments and will pass it on. Especially on the heavy graphics. You know about the light-weight page for data usage?
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I do - but I usually use the interactive command menu thing on my phone (*111#)
 
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