What went wrong with Neotel

Expensive, crap service... that is it. Full stop. Not what went wrong... but what is wrong.

This is undoubtedly the most noticeable school fees that the new fixed-line operator Neotel is paying.
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Someone please translate.. wtf ?? You read something like this in the opening paragraph... you then wonder if it is worth reading any further...
 
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tinman said:
Neotel: What went wrong?
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The article's author chides Neotel for bad market timing but fails to mention that it was the crooked government-Telkom alliance that deliberately engineered the massive delay.

For Neotel's part, they are obviously badly run. Management has been arrogant and blatantly dishonest. Their service offerings have simply failed to offer anything compelling in the market at all times (note to management: you can't differentiate on nothing), and their coverage is up to sh-t. Cell C seems to have expanded their coverage more in the past 6 months than Neotel have in their entire existence.
 
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What went wrong? That's easy. Neotel was billed as a competitor to Telkom, the so-called "second fixed line operator". To date Neotel has yet to supply a single copper fixed line to anyone and no fibre-based services to any residential consumers.

What did we get instead? A half-baked wireless operator trying to compete with the big boy cellular companies and getting badly beat down in an over-saturated market with an inferior wireless voice product, customer service that makes Vodacom and MTN look like heroes, and an internet service that you cannot get real-time usage statistics for and that makes dial-up look like a tempting alternative.

Once again, residential consumers got screwed over at the expense of business customers. If Neotel really wanted to change the market they could have started by providing fibre services to residential consumers like they were supposed to and be a proper alternative to Telkom.
 
deweyzeph said:
To date Neotel has yet to supply a single copper fixed line to anyone and no fibre-based services to any residential consumers.
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I'm gonna come to their defence here and say it's virtually impossible for them to roll out fixed lines, the cost involved is just to high. They cannot do overnight what took SAPOS & Telkom many many years to do with tax payer funding.

I do however put the blame for this squarely on the shoulders of government. They should have opened the market many years earlier to more than one entrant at lower license fees. At the same time LLU & co-location should have been done allowing other operators access to the local loop. Problem however is we have a government with shares in Telkom, a finger in ICASA that's supposed to be independent and all this leads to conflict of interest.
 
ponder said:
I'm gonna come to their defence here and say it's virtually impossible for them to roll out fixed lines, the cost involved is just to high. They cannot do overnight what took SAPOS & Telkom many many years to do with tax payer funding.

I do however put the blame for this squarely on the shoulders of government. They should have opened the market many years earlier to more than one entrant at lower license fees. At the same time LLU & co-location should have been done allowing other operators access to the local loop. Problem however is we have a government with shares in Telkom, a finger in ICASA that's supposed to be independent and all this leads to conflict of interest.
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I'll go one step further...

The day that Neotel were awarded the licence they should also have been given full access to the Local Loop. Full LLU could have happened a bit later so as to have given Neotel a chance to consolidate the position.

Instead they were hobbled from day 1 {in the equine sense}.
 
ponder said:
I'm gonna come to their defence here and say it's virtually impossible for them to roll out fixed lines, the cost involved is just to high. They cannot do overnight what took SAPOS & Telkom many many years to do with tax payer funding.

I do however put the blame for this squarely on the shoulders of government. They should have opened the market many years earlier to more than one entrant at lower license fees. At the same time LLU & co-location should have been done allowing other operators access to the local loop. Problem however is we have a government with shares in Telkom, a finger in ICASA that's supposed to be independent and all this leads to conflict of interest.
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But knowing this why didn't Neotel start smaller? Take JHB for example Focus on providing Fiber to the Businesses and Wimax to residential users. Then once you have these services running like a well oiled machine you take the lesson learned and move to another city.
 
TheGuy said:
But knowing this why didn't Neotel start smaller? Take JHB for example Focus on providing Fiber to the Businesses and Wimax to residential users. Then once you have these services running like a well oiled machine you take the lesson learned and move to another city.
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Probably due to their Licence conditions that prevented this?
 
TheGuy said:
But knowing this why didn't Neotel start smaller? Take JHB for example Focus on providing Fiber to the Businesses and Wimax to residential users. Then once you have these services running like a well oiled machine you take the lesson learned and move to another city.
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Been thinking some more on your post... this is almost what they have done. They are yet to roll out residential services to smaller cities (PE, EL, etc) and rural areas. They have focussed on Pta, Jhb, Cpt albeit with CDMA and only lately some WiMax.
 
TheGuy said:
But knowing this why didn't Neotel start smaller? Take JHB for example Focus on providing Fiber to the Businesses and Wimax to residential users. Then once you have these services running like a well oiled machine you take the lesson learned and move to another city.
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They do offer fibre to businesses, we have neotel fibre at a few of our offices. The fibre service is great, low latency, good speeds. The only problem we had was the installation, neotel does not stick to delivery dates. Some of the installations was 6 months late.
 
vangend said:
They do offer fibre to businesses, we have neotel fibre at a few of our offices. The fibre service is great, low latency, good speeds. The only problem we had was the installation, neotel does not stick to delivery dates. Some of the installations was 6 months late.
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I have a freind that works in the industry that does Neotel fiber installations. I've heard stories of waiting up to 5 months for fiber after the trenches have been dug.
 
Neotel's model was pretty silly. Anyone in telecoms knows that the biggest factor in the growth of a network is the perceived quality that the user experiances on the network. If neotel wrote off the first 5 years and slowly but surely rolled out a decent network that provided the advertised speeds the consumer would have taken a much better look at what neotel was offering and thus neotel might have had a better outlook now.
 
Simple, neotel should have put FTTH in place with higher contention than their business service and perhaps 2 year contracts to cover running costs plus installation costs.

The alternative would have been a similar WiMax service but they even failed on that. It's like the ONLY cared about big business, a space that has many many competitors.

When a company the size of Amobia can provide a better product then you know you screwed up somewhere.
 
Neotel decided not to compete against Telkom on price. Mistake nr 1.

Neotel then proceeded to try and tell the customers what they should want, instead of looking at what they wanted. Mistake nr 2.

Neotel's service and coverage let them down numerous times and they burned most of their customers. Mistake nr 3.

3 strikes.
 
Neotel is not operating as a second national operator. The governent needs to take their license away and give it to someone else. Plain and simple
 
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