What do you want from your ISP?

As a business, do you think your ISP understands your needs?

  • Yes

    Votes: 58 34.1%

  • No

    Votes: 112 65.9%
  • Total voters
    170
Biggest issue I have is companies like Web Africa who claim they won't offer uncapped as they say they can't keep up their "good" service. However I get far better speeds off my uncapped Mweb accout during the day then my capped Web Africa account. Even at night I would side with my MWeb connection being more stable. Shame on you Web Africa. Spreading propoganda to try keep customers.

So my wishlist:
- Uncapped
- Fast and smart support
- No rediculous shapping
- Good online account manager
 
decent speeds, short-term contract, business services (firewalling, e-mail backup etc)
 
Basically, the same quality of broadband service as overseas. Not loads of different types of packages, where many small and micro businesses have no real clue what they are getting. Any and all businesses need constant and quality up time, excellent turn around on complaints/problems, honesty [think Telkom'soffering of - ta-da, 30 Gig local, and then finding that actually that does not apply until you have clobbered your mix of international & local and are cut off at the knees from the real internet] - one package, not stupid offerings like that - internet is internet is internet, not broken down into local and internet. Might as well call the local something like SA Intranet or something equally ridiculous.

Many of your so-called 'home users' are actually small businesses too, and having reliable service is as important to us as it is to the bigger corporate world, in fact probably more so as we don't have nice tidy IT departments ready to solve problems - we have to get on with it ourselves. My business is virtual, and I earn my living from it - simple reliable ISP services are a MUST. They should not be considered a luxury.
 
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rpm said:
I look for the following from my ISP in a business environment:

--Quality connection and stability
--Good support
--Fair pricing (not looking for the cheapest, but definitely competitive)
Click to expand...

In all fairness I feel my ISP already offers this, so these points are a bit "moot" IMO.

-- From the ISP's point of view it's always stable. They don't really have much control over copper theft (we never had it, luckily) or SEACOM / SAT3 / etc (aka undersea cables) problems
-- all our staff are IT staff due to our nature of business. BUT, if my mom calls vodacom she gets support (using 3G) in a way that the problem gets solved. She doesn't know much about a PC or the internet.
-- how do you actually measure fair pricing? We're not the USA or UK. Their whole economies are different from ours, and where they get one thing cheap (internet in this example) they pay a lot more for something else.
 
--Competitive Pricing - Awesome improvements here, especially thanks to Mweb
--NO unclear AUP's stating "high usage" where for example on Afrihost after 17gb per month u get throttled to 56k with timeouts etc, and with Mweb its more or less 20gb a day (which is way more than enough, but still not stated clearly in any AUP) , some of us actually want to shape our usage patterns around the rules, so that we dont break them, but if they arent clear, we cant do much about it
--Redundancy - If Seacom breaks do my engineers have to test all the fail-over links every time, or does the ISP provide its own fail-over.
--Accountability - This is Africa, things will go down, break, get stolen etc, but atleast the ISP should be able to admit something is broken, we cant keep blaming Telkom/Eskom for everything...
--COMMUNICATION - Customers who know whats going on wont need to go scavenge through forum threads trying to find out why something is broken, if the ISP communicates, this cancels out a lot of speculation and other wasted time
--Clear Shaping Rules - yes, shape the p2p freaks, i need my company to function without any hiccups on the business products, but also be clear on the rules and exactly what is shaped and what not, we dont want to ICMP tunnel our proprietary apps just to get them working...


So far Mweb still holds the winning cup in my books, even if they did drop the ball a bit the last few months
 
What I would prefer is; to log into an ISP's portal choose my backbone, add on's, speed, data amount, support, etc. and exit paying via credit card - simple!
 
I think speed, backup and resilience are the only things people would look for... coupled with good service.
 
At this stage I would like to see:
- Self provisioning: There is no reason why I still have to phone, be placed on hold and then have someone set up services for me. We have digital certificates, electronic payment services and know what we want.
- Uncapped data
- Medium independence. I want to use the same account from my desktop via ADSL, or phone via 3G or from a hotspot via Wifi
- Complete technical information about the service, the ports, the settings and any relevant online available. Why must I go through the helpdesk to get this info? It costs the ISP and it costs me!
 
Fix it when it breaks and don't give me b/s excuses about 7 working days. Running a business it has to be working ALL the time, not when some twit decides he had better have a look. CellC are quite bad at this, and when they eventually fix you get these inane customer surveys asking how the service was, etc.
 
stable
fast service at the call center
ppl that can help you at the call center
and a good price

or just the direct opisit from telkom :P


telkom :

unstable
overpriced
not helpfull
call center,never get to them,and if u do they can't always help you,or they dont know
there stores in the town/mall are useless
etc....



i went to the local telkom store to ask if they know about the exchange...i said it was running horably slow...they said must i upgrade you to 4mbps,i said no....can the exchange "****ed" cuz if the speed upgrades thats gonna happen?,they said what speed upgrades,i told them that telkom confermed the speed upgrades....they at the TELKOM store didnt even know what goes on at Telkom
 
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