Hey guys,
I just got this from IS...
To all our Value Channel Partners,
Thank you for allowing me some time to inform you of what we are trying to do to stabilise our ADSL offering, as well as improve on the service we are offering our customers.
We have experienced a number of outages recently, and I must apologise profusely for this. We at IS have always prided ourselves on our service, or our ability to rectify when we go wrong. Unfortunately in this instance it is taking us a little longer than we had hoped for, but it in no means reduces the importance, nor critical nature of what we are trying to do.
We have always fought Telkom (via Wholesale pricing), to reduce pricing, to deliver cheaper and newer technologies , to continually deliver to the South African market a service and solution that is of a world class nature and affordable.
Unfortunately with the slow liberalisation and deregulation of our telecoms market, no SNO up and running, we have had very little choice but to use Telkom, and pay too much for these services. This has resulted in the costs of telecommunication in South Africa to be overly inflated.
We were also prevented from rolling out our own ADSL offering for nearly 18 months; due to Telkom's solution scoping, as well as the pricing of the local transit bandwidth. We did however finally take the plunge by bypassing Telkom as much as we could, but are still at the mercy of them with regard to the peering debate, costs of the IPC links (linking the IS network to the Telkom ADSL network), the contention of the Telkom last mile (copper wire), and the other network hardware they have provisioned.
As a result of now landing our own Satellite circuits, we have been able to roll out our own ADSL offering, and come up with some innovative solutions such as no fixed caps, 512kb and 1 Meg Business DSL. We have had to provision our own bandwidth so as to try and provide a price competitive solution. In doing this, we have learnt a lot, and realised we need to invest more in our networks to provide the right amount of stability and redundancy. It is this drive of ours to become a Next Generation Telco, procuring and landing our own bandwidth wherever possible, instead of being at the mercy of Telkom, which is causing significant growing and learning pains. I have all the confidence that we will get through this tough period, we have always in the past, and there is no reason why we shouldn't right now and into the future.
As a result, Internet Solutions will be investing in two more Satellite hubs (at the cost of R8 million rand each). Unfortunately, an investment of this nature takes time, and we will only have these additional links up in late February 2006. This will take our total international bandwidth to 1 GIG.
In the interim, we are going to upgrade other links, and source connectivity on a temporary basis. We will also be investing a further R100 million of capital expenditure in our networks over the next 12 months.
So I would like to apologise for the poor service we have been providing lately, but I would like to stress that we are doing alot to rectify the situation. We have been caught off guard by the amount of growth we have seen over the last 12 months (our networks have tripled in capacity over this period), so we are reviewing all of our networks in terms of stability, capacity and redundancy.
I would like to thank you for your support so far, and hope we can prove to you that we are a decent service provider.
We may however still go through a little more pain, but we ask you to stick with us over this period. It is imperative that we continue to receive the feedback, so that we can improve the solution , and improve on the service delivery. If we all give up and give in to Telkom, we will end up with no true competitor to Telkom, and the innovative solutions and drive to reduce costs to the end user will dry up. This will not be in the best interests of the telecommunications landscape in South Africa.
Thank you all for your understanding and commitment to IS.
Kind regards
Angus MacRobert
CEO, Internet Solutions
go on be a tiger.....clog up that IS network
