As complaints against the state-owned broadcast signal distributor Sentech gathered steam this week, the company has announced some measures that it hopes will improve the service on its MyWireless product range.
The MyWireless — described as high-speed broadband wireless services — roll-out got under way in January, but since then the distributor has come under fire because of the service’s speed and tariffs.
Winston Smith, portfolio manager for broadband wireless, told the Mail & Guardian Online on Tuesday that Sentech will now be instituting a software bandwidth management system.
Sentech executive of sales and marketing Marcel Raath said earlier in the week that part of the process will involve setting up a platform to monitor “excessive usage and downloading” on the network.
He said there are a small number of customers whose usage could be termed as “network abuse”.
In relation to network abuse he cited an “excess utilisation of network resources” section in Sentech’s acceptable-use policy statement.
Smith said the page of Sentech’s website that details the fair-use policy will now be placed more prominently on its site.
Sentech will not be “capping” the service and will now determine what the average usage is before approaching some of its customers with what he termed a “friendly reminder” that they are using too much bandwidth.
Sentech’s advertising promises high-speed, broadband service up to 128k, 256k or 512k, but some customers say that on the 128k package you cannot expect more than 100k and at peak periods this drops dramatically.
“What we will now do is provide an absolute minimum [speed] per package,” said Smith, adding that other services in South Africa do not provide a guarantee of speed. Smith said Sentech will make this announcement in three weeks’ time.
The company has also been taken to task by users who say the company has ignored all their complaints and never communicates with them. One user even authored a webpage where he aired his woes. (Try typing “Sentech sucks” into Google.)
Smith said Sentech has taken legal action against the user — and “recommended” that the site be closed.
He said the company has discussed the issue with the user and will be meeting with him.
“Hopefully there’ll be a good rapport. He may have valuable info that he can pass on to us. We do benefit by criticism … but the manner [in which it was raised] could have been different.”
He said Sentech has now set up a “customer care centre” that will deal with customers who are “not happy” with the service from the company’s call centre.
“We want to compete in the market and can’t afford negative press relating to our service without defending ourselves,” he said.