WA response to pricing reductions

[Zyzzyva]

Actually, it allows for cheaper cost / GB for those who generally do use their allocation - subsidized by those who don't.

It is a common business practice but that doesn't endear it to me.

The reason its fine is because 80% of people share the burden of providing the subsidy to the other 20%. You see in a few short years the isp industry is going to run into a whole new set of problems. Once a gig costs R5(lets a assume the profit will be R2), and 80% of your users only use 3 gigs, you can't keep your business afloat with R6 profit per customer. A 100 000 customers will then only generate R600 000. The support cost alone would be more.

Isp's will then probably turn to the "uncapped" model to lure the customer into paying R200 for those 3-10 gigs when in fact they only use R20 worth of bandwidth. So once again, for the isp's to stay afloat they will need to charge the lower end customers much more per unit of bandwidth, affectively continuing the lower ends role in subsidizing the other 20%'s bandwidth.

As much as we think people are going to use more, most people just won't. In the absolute extreme you might see the average user increasing their average usage to 10-20 gigs. The only thing which will cause a massive increase in bandwidth per user would be widespread adoption of iptv. Pirating is not iptv. Pirating involves work, and most people prefer to just hit the power button on their tv remotes.

I would think this is what webafrica is seeing, which is why they are moving their emphasis from cheap bandwidth to value adds, because long term the topic of gigs will become moot.

P.s. in the current climate gigs means everything to us, which is why webafrica burnt us so bad when they announced their pricing. Their business model is the future, its just a few years to early based on our current needs. For the average consumer though, they see a nice small drop in pricing which makes them happy.

 

[DefecteD]

The reason its fine is because 80% of people share the burden of providing the subsidy to the other 20%. You see in a few short years the isp industry is going to run into a whole new set of problems. Once a gig costs R5(lets a assume the profit will be R2), and 80% of your users only use 3 gigs, you can't keep your business afloat with R6 profit per customer. A 100 000 customers will then only generate R600 000. The support cost alone would be more.

Isp's will probably turn to the "uncapped" model to lure the customer into paying R200 for those 3-10 gigs when in fact they only used R20 worth of bandwidth. So once again, for the isp's to stay afloat they will need to charge the lower end customers much more per unit of bandwidth, affectively continuing the lower ends role in subsidizing the other 20%'s bandwidth.

As much as we think people are going to use more, most people just won't. In the absolute extreme you might see the average user increasing their average usage to 10-20 gigs. The only thing which will cause a massive increase in bandwidth per user would be widespread adoption of iptv. Pirating is not iptv. Pirating involves work, and most people prefer to just hit the power button on their tv remotes.

I would think this is what webafrica is seeing, which is why they are moving their emphasis from cheap bandwidth to value adds, because long term the topic of gigs will become moot.

Makes sense!

 

[Weasley]

What irritates me about the complete products is that takes Telkom business model with different values, nothing really to write about. They should of made more like you pick you line and then amount you want in gigs and then the more gigs you take the cheaper it gets(it should be less as admin/support cost per gig sold).

Example1
i have 384 line with say 13gigs at R30 a gig

or example 2
a friend wants 4 mbps line with say 4gigs say at R35 at gig
or 4 mbps with 15 gigs at R30 a gig
or 4 mpds with 25 gigs at R27 a gig

that would be innovative and far more useful to people on the street.

With the current structure you are forced to buy a certain amount. How radicals would be if went to a petrol station and can only buy 1,2,3,5,10,20,50,or 100 liters at a time and what doesn't fit in you still pay for.

 

[Abe]

What irritates me about the complete products is that takes Telkom business model with different values, nothing really to write about. They should of made more like you pick you line and then amount you want in gigs and then the more gigs you take the cheaper it gets(it should be less as admin/support cost per gig sold).

I like that idea.

 

[DefecteD]

I like that idea.

+1

 

[|tera|]

Hi Matt.

Let me start by saying thanks for the response thread.

A few points of concern;
Support
Prepaid vs Budgets
Reliabiliy & Performance vs Price

I will type my response according to my concerns. I am using Opera Mini because my budget does not allow for Adsl and my 3G only lasts that much.

Support:
80% of WebAfrica support staff have a no care attitude towards Client problems. This is my perception and I am speaking on my own account with WebAfrica. I am going to be straightforward without being negative towards your company. I believe you have more unskilled staff than skilled. 20%, a handful are men and woman that truly walk the extra mile for clients. I can count these good people on my hands. Your support is lacking. We/I/the team I work with each day are not all knowing. But we Expect and I believe Deserve honest answers to problems we have. A certain courtesy is in order like the fact that a rep should know if Bob logged the ticket, please don't refer to Bob as James even when politely corrected. Most of the issues we've had has been resolved too late and half heartedly. This causes us to lose respect, trust and makes our feet itch for greener pastures.

Prepaid vs Budgets
Matt. You mentioned earlier that you are trying to create packages to fit a family's budget. Than you. But my family can't afford it, yet. With my prepaid account that you want to depreciate as you said I was able to budget. I lived in a normal household before residing on my own and the ADSL line was used and paid for by a SOHO operation. Thus tera had the router half bridge mode and used and paid for his own data with his prepaid account from WA. This I used to do my online courses in IT and to surf mybb. This I used when visiting a friend and had to do a quick download. This I used as a young man to work on the internet teaching myself and learning from other folks. This was a tool which allowed me to start and walk the road I do today. Working in an IT Position as a Senior in a large company, supporting many people at quite a number of locations countrywide with issues ranging from minute to extreme. You allowed a young man in his early 20's to become someone in his mid 20's. Don't depreciate that.

Reliability & Performance vs Price
The reliability of our packages at WA range from a full week of no problems to a full week of only problems.
Let me give you the runaround of last week. smtp.wa.co.za is used as our outgoing mail server. We also host our mail with WA in the US. 3 days pass that our outgoing communication is basically zero. The ticket is logged and the response given to us is that the issue will be escalated. The last person kindly requests us to use Telkom as our ISP and for us to switch to saix for outgoing. Yet we are your client? I closed the ticket. I have received no query if our problem is resolved or any follow up. But that's case closed. I finally attempted to setup a local smtp solution but it did not work as required, so we switched to the hosted SMTP for our domain with WA.

Yet. We pay for a full month's service? Yesterday my call to WA regarding a bandwidth query took 35 minutes for me to reach a consultant? This at 8-9 am? We have had much worse than last week in the past from WA, but we still pay for days we had no service delivery and therefore no performance?

That is all from me for now.
Thank you.

 

[wamatt]

Hi Matt.

Support:
80% of WebAfrica support staff have a no care attitude towards Client problems. This is my perception and I am speaking on my own account with WebAfrica. I am going to be straightforward without being negative towards your company. I believe you have more unskilled staff than skilled. 20%, a handful are men and woman that truly walk the extra mile for clients. I can count these good people on my hands. Your support is lacking. We/I/the team I work with each day are not all knowing. But we Expect and I believe Deserve honest answers to problems we have. A certain courtesy is in order like the fact that a rep should know if Bob logged the ticket, please don't refer to Bob as James even when politely corrected. Most of the issues we've had has been resolved too late and half heartedly. This causes us to lose respect, trust and makes our feet itch for greener pastures.

Please rate tickets. If you give a ticket a 0 it automatically instant messages the manager on duty as well. Secondly about skill levels, this is pretty much standard. There is no sizeable ISP that has highly skilled technicians on the front line. I'd say most our staff are really hardworking and do care, but they are differing skill levels.

Secondly you may qualify for a BSM (Business Support Manager) if you do a lot of work with the call center and have many services with us. It's basically a personalised support agent who can deal with your queries.

Hi Matt.
Prepaid vs Budgets
Matt. You mentioned earlier that you are trying to create packages to fit a family's budget. Than you. But my family can't afford it, yet. With my prepaid account that you want to depreciate as you said I was able to budget. I lived in a normal household before residing on my own and the ADSL line was used and paid for by a SOHO operation. Thus tera had the router half bridge mode and used and paid for his own data with his prepaid account from WA. This I used to do my online courses in IT and to surf mybb. This I used when visiting a friend and had to do a quick download. This I used as a young man to work on the internet teaching myself and learning from other folks. This was a tool which allowed me to start and walk the road I do today. Working in an IT Position as a Senior in a large company, supporting many people at quite a number of locations countrywide with issues ranging from minute to extreme. You allowed a young man in his early 20's to become someone in his mid 20's. Don't depreciate that.

That paragraph of yours left me a bit confused. But you don't need to take a Complete, you welcome to use the Data range as well, these will work out more cost effective than Prepaid. Data 1, Data 2 etc. You can still have multiple accounts for different family members.

Yet. We pay for a full month's service? Yesterday my call to WA regarding a bandwidth query took 35 minutes for me to reach a consultant? This at 8-9 am? We have had much worse than last week in the past from WA, but we still pay for days we had no service delivery and therefore no performance?

Fair enough. The wait time is not normal, I checked the logs and we hit a large spike in calls around this time, once in a while this will happen ie if there is an outage etc. I do apologise for the wait.

On the issue at hand, drop me a PM and I'll have a service manager look at it for you. We've recently picked up some issues with with smtp.wa.co.za blacklisting and are working on a fix. Our ASN is obscure blacklist which can affect some mail systems that are configured too aggressively by sysadmins.

It's caused by having infected DSL clients sending out unauthorised SMTP. It's very tricky to solve because do not want to block outgoing port 25 as some other ISP's have done trying to solve the same problem. It's not easy but our NOC have a solution. It should however not be affecting the majority of outgoing mail.

 

[dominic]

any ISP which can engage with you on this level and with this amount of honesty and professionalism is absolutely and without any doubt worthy of your support

 

[Edunhin]

Matt,

This is response from you is confirming my point of view..

Web Africa has deserted their Resellers....

Once again no communication to your resellers.. it would have been nice to see this in my inbox and not by accident on MYBB....

You still have the misconception that your support is in order... BSM still needs a lot of attention as well..

As per my mail to Simon (my BSM) dated Wed 2010/02/17 11:53 AM and reply Wed 2010/02/17 07:06 PM, I do think BSM is a step in the right direction, but not yet a service to advertise as yet ..

I have been having quite a few issues over that past few days and every morning I phone Simon and every time I have to hear they are working on it.. As I said before it is easy to point and shoot at other guys..

The reality is still..

1. It took WA 10 days to respond to this issue.. Why???
2. WA still tries to pull one over us , saying it won't last...(AYCA - their problem was they were too ahead of the game) You might be vindicated if it does doe belly up, but the damage will be done already.
3. What is the worst that can happen... We might move back to WA, but at least we would have saved our customers a crap load of money.
4. WA will always have an excuse. Our issues is still not priority (I had a customer's webmail not working for 23 days, it got fixed after +- 6 calls to my BSM - that after a planed change...)

As per my mail I do think I have a bit of knowledge on support issues, after almost 9 years at one of the biggest financial institution in South Africa, and I have to agree 100% with teraside on the points that was made, just unfortunate that WA always tries to shift the blame to something / someone ells. Why for the past few months has the message we are experiencing high call volumes been so frequently? And why also recently does your support personel advise that the system is slow, they will get back to me? If it weren't for BSM I would have moved all my business a long time ago. It seems WA is becoming the next Telkom, with no connection to their customers

 

[milomak]

Isp's will then probably turn to the "uncapped" model to lure the customer into paying R200 for those 3-10 gigs when in fact they only use R20 worth of bandwidth. So once again, for the isp's to stay afloat they will need to charge the lower end customers much more per unit of bandwidth, affectively continuing the lower ends role in subsidizing the other 20%'s bandwidth.

would they do that by keeping the right package for the customer at the older prices, to induce them to change? i don't see how you will convince these people who are low usage subscribers to move to uncapped. unless their low usuage is as a result of a fear of hitting, or worse, going over their cap. but then surely more of these people would feel unshackled, decreasing the 20% if you will.

 

[Voicy]

Hi Matthew,

Thank you kindly for playing open cards with everyone. It's reassuring to see.

any ISP which can engage with you on this level and with this amount of honesty and professionalism is absolutely and without any doubt worthy of your support

Dominic, you're spot on there. I met the old WA crew back in '06 (even though I doubt even Matt will remember me) and the guys are a pleasure to deal with. I'll agree, their online instant messaging support line isn't flawless, but once I got through and ticketed my issues with my dsl account, they phoned me back so that the whole procedure of getting the dsl account to work again wouldn't run up my cellphone bill. I'm yet to see that kind of service from another ISP.

 

[Gatecrasher]

Thank you kindly for playing open cards with everyone.

Open cards is all well and good... after the fact. Problem is, it's just a very poor hand they are holding. WA were clearly bluffing right up to the announcement. It is that that pissed everyone off the most.

WA are not passing the huge wholesale savings that have occurred over the past two years onto their customers, except in the most token fashion. The OP in this thread is all patronising, sanctimonious, self justification, and does not actually address any of the questions raised.

One or two products, the least appealing to this tough crowd, are reasonably competitive, but the balance of WA's ADSL products are not. Not even close.

But I think we are all over this by now. There has been enough talk. In the end, consumers will decide. And i'm sure those lucky ones with the 30Gb for R199 deal will remain loyal clients, until such time that 30 gigs for R199 becomes expensive.

At the moment, though, WA reminds me of old King Canute commanding the tide to stop coming in. It's coming in, boys. It ain't stopping.

 

[Chelle]

Interesting to note that Matt only responded to one client's response since he started the thread. Guess it helps to be a grandmaster and mega user. The rest of the plebs get the cold shoulder -- seems to be the way WA does business.

 

[Edunhin]

I met the old WA crew back in '06

No Question that WA was the best ISP from 2006-2008, the problems started when they changed their focus.. from resellers to general public..

 

[|tera|]

Please rate tickets. If you give a ticket a 0 it automatically instant messages the manager on duty as well. Secondly about skill levels, this is pretty much standard. There is no sizeable ISP that has highly skilled technicians on the front line. I'd say most our staff are really hardworking and do care, but they are differing skill levels.

Secondly you may qualify for a BSM (Business Support Manager) if you do a lot of work with the call center and have many services with us. It's basically a personalised support agent who can deal with your queries.

Good to know. Thanks. I think the fact that you have people in positions they are not qualified for is a bit misleading to your clients. Some of your support personnel have really no experience with issues they deal with. Should these people not climb the ladder gradually until they reach the top like most people do? I think it's highly unfair towards them as well as I can guarantee you they feel the pressure and that's not a good feeling to have if you are inexperienced.

That paragraph of yours left me a bit confused. But you don't need to take a Complete, you welcome to use the Data range as well, these will work out more cost effective than Prepaid. Data 1, Data 2 etc. You can still have multiple accounts for different family members.

Please don't let me confuse you. I have no problem with speaking plainly about what I said in that paragraph. I was literally young and unemployed. This means that any income I may have had was used for my own personal needs and the rest I budgeted for things like ADSL. I would have never taken a Data option as that is a fixed amount and set in stone that I have to pay each month. It's not a contract, sure thing, but it still has to be paid in order to have service. Do you understand where I am coming from? If you don't have money, you don't.

Fair enough. The wait time is not normal, I checked the logs and we hit a large spike in calls around this time, once in a while this will happen ie if there is an outage etc. I do apologise for the wait.

On the issue at hand, drop me a PM and I'll have a service manager look at it for you. We've recently picked up some issues with with smtp.wa.co.za blacklisting and are working on a fix. Our ASN is obscure blacklist which can affect some mail systems that are configured too aggressively by sysadmins.

It's caused by having infected DSL clients sending out unauthorised SMTP. It's very tricky to solve because do not want to block outgoing port 25 as some other ISP's have done trying to solve the same problem. It's not easy but our NOC have a solution. It should however not be affecting the majority of outgoing mail.

That is interesting regarding the botnet issue, which is basically what you are saying. Do you guys let these sys admins know of their error? I don't expect WA to be the antimalware rescue ISP. But if these servers cause your client base to experience non working services I would think that is a required step to take?

 

[steve-rsa]

What I would like to see are soft/sliding caps as Telkom used to have. Unguaranteed, but nice to have.

 

[Weasley]

What irritates me about the complete products is that takes Telkom business model with different values, nothing really to write about. They should of made more like you pick you line and then amount you want in gigs and then the more gigs you take the cheaper it gets(it should be less as admin/support cost per gig sold).

Example1
i have 384 line with say 13gigs at R30 a gig

or example 2
a friend wants 4 mbps line with say 4gigs say at R35 at gig
or 4 mbps with 15 gigs at R30 a gig
or 4 mpds with 25 gigs at R27 a gig

that would be innovative and far more useful to people on the street.

With the current structure you are forced to buy a certain amount. How radicals would be if went to a petrol station and can only buy 1,2,3,5,10,20,50,or 100 liters at a time and what doesn't fit in you still pay for.

wondering if WA sow this

 

[Zyzzyva]

would they do that by keeping the right package for the customer at the older prices, to induce them to change? i don't see how you will convince these people who are low usage subscribers to move to uncapped. unless their low usuage is as a result of a fear of hitting, or worse, going over their cap. but then surely more of these people would feel unshackled, decreasing the 20% if you will.

I'm speaking long term. The primary point is not uncapped, but rather that isp's will have to find a way to not charge the majority for each gig they use. When a gig costs R2, you can't only charge people R6 for the 3 gigs they use. It could go the way of upgrading the existing 1 gig users to 10 gigs, and the 10 gig users to 100 gigs. Beyond that though, isps will try "one up" each other, pushing each other to the eventual result which will either be uncapped or something comparable.

Even internationally, where people have lines 100's of times faster than we do, the average user doesn't use all that much. They might use 20 gigs, if that. You can only refresh facebook so many times in a month. 20 gigs x R2 is only R40, with profit being a small percentage of that.

 

[wamatt]

What irritates me about the complete products is that takes Telkom business model with different values, nothing really to write about. They should of made more like you pick you line and then amount you want in gigs and then the more gigs you take the cheaper it gets(it should be less as admin/support cost per gig sold).

Example1
i have 384 line with say 13gigs at R30 a gig

or example 2
a friend wants 4 mbps line with say 4gigs say at R35 at gig
or 4 mbps with 15 gigs at R30 a gig
or 4 mpds with 25 gigs at R27 a gig

that would be innovative and far more useful to people on the street.

With the current structure you are forced to buy a certain amount. How radicals would be if went to a petrol station and can only buy 1,2,3,5,10,20,50,or 100 liters at a time and what doesn't fit in you still pay for.

So let me summarise, I think what you saying is you want variable rate. IE choose your own package, pay-per-gb.

The main reason for not going that route is:

1) That model is flawed economically. To re-iterate the point again, ISP's that choose to sell gig's are not going to be around in the future. Because of the simple fact, how are you going to pay rent, salaries etc, when your revenue dropped 80% because bandwidth dropped (per GB) 80% over 3 years?

2) Mainstream want's simplicity. That is what we are aiming to give them.

You guys we understand you want more flexibility and interesting options etc, that is not where we going. So to make up for it we going to give you lots bandwidth cheaply. Then it doesn't matter if it's served up in a simple package.

 

[wamatt]

Matt,

This is response from you is confirming my point of view..

Web Africa has deserted their Resellers....

Once again no communication to your resellers.. it would have been nice to see this in my inbox and not by accident on MYBB....

Hang on a sec. MyBB is an end user forum. And we were addressing that message. Resellers are a lot more complicated and the conversation is quite different.

We have a private reseller forum where such matters are discussed. Please pop over if you not there already and we can continue addressing the concerns. Drop me a PM as you will need elevated access to view it.

http://forums.webafrica.co.za/_f20.html

And on the charge we've abandoned resellers. Far from it. We've been working on a complete new hosting utility model aimed at streamlining reseller hosting dramatically that allows for great competition with our end user pricing and also a new ADSL allocation model with very agressive pricing. On the charge our communication could be better, absolutely.