South Africa has had its fair share of failures in the telecommunications market, with Sentech a likely candidate for the ‘mother of all failures’ for its MyWireless and BizNet offerings.<\/p>\n
What started off in 2004 as big plans to challenge Telkom’s ADSL offering with an uncapped MyWireless service ended in 2009 with Sentech discontinuing the service<\/a> for the very few customers they had left at the time.<\/p>\n Sentech tried to put a positive spin on events, explaining that their broadband products “played an important enabling role in bringing multi-media to the South African market” but the millions in wasted taxpayers’ money and the parastatal’s poor performance in the broadband market will not easily be forgotten.<\/p>\n Sentech’s MyWireless’ failure was a high profile event, but many other projects have gone the same route without as much publicity. In November 2007 Vodacom launched Meep<\/a> – a real-time, presence-based Instant Messaging service which was widely seen as an attempt to compete with MXit.<\/p>\n The exact date of Meep’s death was not communicated by the company, but it is believed that a complete lack of uptake ultimately caused Vodacom to pull the plug on this failed project.<\/p>\n In late 2007 MTN also launched its MXit competitor, NokNok<\/a>, but like Meep, NokNok did not become as large a player in the IM market as MTN predicted. The service is however still available.<\/p>\n Vodacom’s entrance into the mobile gaming market with Legends of Echo<\/a> – a location-based multiplayer game that allows players to trade, battle and communicate with other players across South Africa – has also not enjoyed rapid take-up.<\/p>\n The Legends of Echo website contains no ‘standings’ or ‘competitions’, and the official forum is overrun by spam giving a strong indication that there is no moderation and no real activity on the forum. This project may well go the same route as Meep.<\/p>\n The uncapped broadband market has also had its fair share of casualties. <\/p>\n The aforementioned MyWireless service is possibly the most famous one, but Screamer Telecoms<\/a>, DigiChilli<\/a> and Neotel<\/a> have all burned their fingers by offering uncapped Internet access to subscribers.<\/p>\n And then there are the companies with huge promises which simply did not deliver. Goal Technology Solutions (GTS)<\/a> is a good example.<\/p>\n GTS punted their plans to hook up every home this side of the Zambezi with Broadband over Powerline (BPL) connections, but this never transpired.<\/p>\n