Cellphone companies to be fined for bad service

News headline after 10 years, 20 investigations and 30 public hearings:

ICASA fines cellphone companies R1 million each for bad service
 
I'm not going to complain about forcing better service, but would like to know how hard it will be to reach those requirements and how they going to check them.
 
Smooth Criminal said:
News headline after 10 years, 20 investigations and 30 public hearings:

ICASA fines cellphone companies R1 million each for bad service
Click to expand...

And it only cost them 10 million Rand to reach that conclusion!

One thing I have noticed.. ICASA aka the ANC has put up the heat against cell companies. Guess the Vodacom deal pissed them off.
 
About blimmmmming time!!!!! Any sort of accountability is good and lord knows mtn and the likes need to held accountable....
 
quovadis said:
lol ridiculous so they can be completely off for +-18 days a year with no ramifications
Click to expand...

Yeah, so thats about an hour a day :)

and in a billion rand industry the max fine is R 500 000 (R0.5 million)

It is however a start ????
 
w1z4rd said:
One thing I have noticed.. ICASA aka the ANC has put up the heat against cell companies. Guess the Vodacom deal pissed them off.
Click to expand...

hehehe

somebody's very upset about losing a lot of fat-cat money :D

(not to mention that little cozy seaside cottage...)
 
Load of kuk for me. ICASA already receives those reports & this move is 2010 hype. CellC & Virgin would suffer most cos of their piggybacking, yet again hurting competition.

Regulate inter-connect fees & the local loop & the allocation of Spectrum effeciently FFS!!!

For those of us that do have issues on cell networks, its surely not 5% of all registered users across MTN or VC. Unless there is some major disruption, that does not happen too often anyway...

This will only hurt the two smaller players, whom I don't use or care for.
 
Have to point out some maths here

According to the regulations, cellphone companies have to ensure that they achieve an average of 95% network service availability, over a period of six months.
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If we assume most months are 31 days, and 24 hours in a day with an allowance of 5% downtime (or unavailability)

6 months * 31 days * 24 hours * 0.05 = 223.20000000000002 hours

Thats right, two hundred and twenty three hours of downtime.

Wow they reach high...
 
bobdihi said:
Why only cellphone companies FFS
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the End-User and Subscriber Service Charter Regulations apply to all licensees, not just those that provide mobile cellular services

cda said:
Have to point out some maths here

If we assume most months are 31 days, and 24 hours in a day with an allowance of 5% downtime (or unavailability)

6 months * 31 days * 24 hours * 0.05 = 223.20000000000002 hours

Thats right, two hundred and twenty three hours of downtime.

Wow they reach high...
Click to expand...
yip - bear in mind these are minimum standards and they apply to everyone, irrespective of the level of maturity of their network so they are trying to cater for this

anyone who offers better can market that

having said that i personally think these will be of little to no assistance to SA consumers and ICASA has got it horribly wrong by trying to force one set of standards onto an entire industry (irrespective of the service provided)

& good luck complaining to them ...
 
Thanks for the feedback Dominic. I agree that it will be difficult to address real poor service: ICASA will still rely mainly on the operators for the data, and it is unlikely that a company will provide a half-yearly or yearly statement indicating that they missed their targets. The exact measurements are always a problem to define accurately, and unless you have access to the actual back-end data you can not really question to operators' own reports.

The exception may be when your installation is not done within 40 days - there is an upper limit. As long as the complaints procedure is done well it may work to complain, but from the anecdotal evidence so far it is unlikely that it will be effective :(

BTW: Article with all the basics coming on Monday.
 
LETS START WITH VODACOM AND THIS BULL**** BIS SERVICE THEY CHARGE FOR!!
 
Can't w8 hv had lots of hustle wit my 64k sim for data sending almost a year now....lets c how long it will take dem to resolve my this issue....
 
This is good news in that it is the beginning of a road toward effective regulation. :) I don't think that the criteria in the regs are tight enough just yet but its a start.

South African companies have been too used to the ability to do as they please. And nobody has had the ability to stop them. :( But it looks like the dawn of a new era.

One thing I would like to see differently in the regs is a bigger sting in the tail :mad: and fines which are more representative of the profits these fat-cats are making out of us. :cool:
 
lol... ras :D

This solution is not very practical now, is it? ICASA taking on the cell companies?
Who's calling who bad here?

Right.
 
Oh and what about Telkom?

This is equivalent to the fining motorists for talking on their cellphones while taxis are passing on the shoulder or off the side of the road.


Then again we can't afford having hell freeze over can we?
 
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