Sentech looking for a revival
However, while MyWireless was the first wireless broadband offering to come to market and challenge Telkom’s monopoly on high-speed Internet access, poor customer service and issues concerning speed brought growth to a standstill at a time when competitive broadband solutions are reeling in customers.
While Smith acknowledged the company’s past failings in good humour, he was quite serious about Sentech’s intention to win back customers’ trust and market share. Smith said that by the beginning of 2007 Sentech would have deployed improvements to its service that will bring the speeds up to those that would make it competitive with other offerings, such as MTN, Vodacom and iBurst.
Those improvements would include raising the speeds of the network to 1 024Kbps from its current maximum of 512Kbps and introducing new packages that would allow it to appeal to people currently using dial-up Internet access.
Smith predicted that prices in the broadband space would continue to fall driven by Telkom continuing to cut the cost of its ADSL service.
Sentech faces a number of challenges above and beyond its ability to deliver a reliable and competitive service offering.
Dobek Pater, analyst at Africa Analysis, says that even if Sentech manages to deliver its promised upgrades, it has already fallen far behind the rest of the pack in offering wireless broadband services and it will take both time and a considerable amount of marketing to regain its former market status.
MyADSL founder Rudolph Muller is also sceptical of Sentech’s chances of regaining lost market share. He says that the current MyWireless coverage is substantially smaller than any of SA’s other broadband providers and should Sentech be unable to roll out new coverage areas aggressively in the near future, it would be hard to imagine clients choosing MyWireless over other services.
That’s an issue Smith admits to, and Sentech is currently waiting for Government to obtain funding to roll out a national broadband network intended to cover around 70% of SA. While that network, should it get the go-ahead, might not use the same technology as the current MyWireless service, it would carry its brand and could potentially use the WiMax technology for which Sentech has rights and is currently testing.
Finweek
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