Web Africa's service

[ebow3d]

Recently I signed up with WebAfrica. The first month on a 3gb month to month and then quickly switched to pre-paid. Everytime I buy pre-paid bandwidth, I have to first phone them to get it cleared, eventhough I send them payment confirmation immediately - irritating
Then I suddenly could not log onto the client service area. I sent an email to their customer support area on their webpage, but with no reply. After a phonecall to the customer service, it was eventually sorted out, but only after I had to give them my password. Not very secure! Obviously now that my password is public knowledge, I have to change it again, and then hope that the same problem does not occur again... Not very nice WebAfrica. I need to be assured of some kind of security.

 

[dabouncer]

Isolated incident... You are aware they are trying to move premises etc?

 

[ziglet]

Dont think anyone is going to listen to your complains about webafrica... Ive had nothing but amazing service from them. Try paying via credit card, +-5mins for an account, anytime of day or night...

 

[wamatt]

Recently I signed up with WebAfrica. The first month on a 3gb month to month and then quickly switched to pre-paid. Everytime I buy pre-paid bandwidth, I have to first phone them to get it cleared, eventhough I send them payment confirmation immediately - irritating
Then I suddenly could not log onto the client service area. I sent an email to their customer support area on their webpage, but with no reply. After a phonecall to the customer service, it was eventually sorted out, but only after I had to give them my password. Not very secure! Obviously now that my password is public knowledge, I have to change it again, and then hope that the same problem does not occur again... Not very nice WebAfrica. I need to be assured of some kind of security.

Hi ebow3d

Thanks for raising your concerns, honestly we do appreciate any feedback and always looking to improve things. Let me quickly provides some details I hope will put you at ease.

1. If you pay via EFT - phonecall is the quickest, otherwise yes it will be in a queue. No real way around that as far as we can see. However we getting live IM (msn/jabber) going as well which you can use directly on the website (livechat). If you login to your support page you will already see IM accounts.

2. Client Area password is meant to protect against others ordering things on your account and getting access to your address etc. We can already see that information. Your passsword is NEVER public knowledge. If it makes you more comfortable we also have lost pwd facility.

http://www.webafrica.co.za/client/forgotPassword.html

All you CC info is protected even in the client area. We take it very seriously and haven't had *single* incident of client data theft since our inception. Lastly we are the only ADSL provider to offer DSLSecure to lock your account and provide detailed stats of which physical lines that access your account. We also store all IP information on everyone who connects to the client area.
Security and your privacy is a top priority for us.

Hope that addresses your concerns and let me know if you need anything else.

 

[MrG]

Hi ebow3d

Thanks for raising your concerns, honestly we do appreciate any feedback and always looking to improve things. Let me quickly provides some details I hope will put you at ease.

1. If you pay via EFT - phonecall is the quickest, otherwise yes it will be in a queue. No real way around that as far as we can see. However we getting live IM (msn/jabber) going as well which you can use directly on the website (livechat). If you login to your support page you will already see IM accounts.

2. Client Area password is meant to protect against others ordering things on your account and getting access to your address etc. We can already see that information. Your passsword is NEVER public knowledge. If it makes you more comfortable we also have lost pwd facility.

http://www.webafrica.co.za/client/forgotPassword.html

All you CC info is protected even in the client area. We take it very seriously and haven't had *single* incident of client data theft since our inception. Lastly we are the only ADSL provider to offer DSLSecure to lock your account and provide detailed stats of which physical lines that access your account. We also store all IP information on everyone who connects to the client area.
Security and your privacy is a top priority for us.

Hope that addresses your concerns and let me know if you need anything else.

I have a question. Obviously the client area password and individual accounts have different username and passwords.

I have a shaped and unshaped prepaid account with WebAfrica. Now a friend of mine wanted to test unshaped to see if he wanted to get a account for himself for World of Warcraft, I trust him so I gave the username/password for the unshaped account... he tried, so I enabled his port on DSLSecure, fine. Now I like the fact that you are able to logon etc in this manner without him having access to the client area, but he is still able to buy more bandwidth correct?

Since you can still logon to the usage page with the username/password of the unshaped account. I would say the logon details for the client area should be required to do that.

Same principle for kids/other family or staff of company. Dont want them to be able to topup. Please explain how that system works, really appreciated.

 

[ebow3d]

wamatt, thanks for the response, appreciated.
Ziglet, I posted my complaint, simply cause they did not respond to my email. I too am generally happy with WebAfrica, and have already recommended it to others.

 

[warichard]

The reason why we use the ADSL details for DSLConsole is because users who are not necessarily direct clients of ours (such as users of resellers) also need the ability to log in and view their usage. There's no client code or password we can use to provide access other than their actual ADSL account details.

However I see what you mean with regards to someone being able to purchase additional prepaid on your account, we might look into changing the facility a bit so that if DSLSecure is enabled on your account, only DSLSecure lines are capable of accessing the prepaid and e-mail account portion of the interface.

That still won't prevent the possibility of you giving out your username and password to someone and then having them purchase prepaid on your account (should you give them access via DSLSecure) though.