WASP warns of abuses in the WASP market
Computer Assisted Telephony Systems (CaTS), one of SA’s Wireless Application Service Providers (WASPs), has warned the market that people who subscribe to the wide range of SMS services available, such as ring tones and dating clubs, are generating around 80% of e-mail spam. They are also wasting money, said CaTS.
“This is eating up scarce bandwidth,” said Johan Grobler, MD of CaTS, who said a further problem is that once a user has subscribed it is becoming increasingly difficult to unsubscribe.
“To be frank quite a few of these SMS subscription schemes are nothing but scams. SMS messages can cost as much as R10 and children downloading games often end up paying a large monthly subscription. Getting out of these deals can be hard.”
He said his company is getting an increasing number of users phoning in to complain and to ask for assistance. “This is a massively growing market and, unfortunately, many WASPS often take months to unsubscribe subscribers because that is how they make their money – via their subscribers.
“But it is giving the WASP industry a bad name and it’s costing the economy billions of Rands in lost bandwidth used for non-business purposes – and lost productivity at the workplace. Consumers need to be very aware before signing up for these services. There are a plethora of them out there and they are really just money making schemes.”
CaTS is also one of a number of active business partners for IBM’s Lotus Foundations Start solution – a version of Lotus specifically aimed at the small and medium enterprise business market.
The company recently launched the product at its offices in Tanzania and will soon be launching in Nigeria.
Eighty percent of the company’s revenue currently stems from African countries.
“It is a growing market. Africa is set to grow at 5% this year and SA at around 3%. Europe, if they are lucky, will average a growth of just 0.5%. Investors are now looking at emerging markets to invest their money, rather in the more mature markets.”
Speaking to the press recently Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan said that investment inflows into the emerging markets were expected to rise from $581 million dollars last year to $852 billion dollars this year.
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