Subscribers to the much-vaunted new broadband wireless Internet service in South Africa are disgruntled with slow connection speeds and unfulfilled promises.
Many users have found that the My Wireless Internet service, which was launched with great fanfare by Sentech earlier this year, is even slower than older, landline connection alternatives.
Users in Johannesburg have been inundating Sentech, the commercially operated state-owned enterprise, with complaints about poor service from My Wireless.
The Advertising Standards Authority confirmed that they had received letters this month from users accusing the company of false and misleading advertising.
| Users accusing the company of false and misleading advertising |
Sentech has blamed the problems on a unsuitable bandwidth management system and promised that it will be rectified within four weeks.
Roelf Diedericks of Johannesburg is one of the subscribers who has been vocal on the topic and has even launched a website airing his negative views of the wireless service.
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Sentech did not react to about 1 500 emails posted on its own website by disgruntled subscribers and Diedericks then launched the site to act as a forum for complaints.
"Quite a sizeable community took part in these forums," he said.
After receiving legal letters from the company in May demanding that the site be shut down, Diedericks agreed to do so and to sell the domain if they agreed to sort the problem out.
| 'Some users were getting very fast connection speeds' |
"I like the service and promised to sell if they fixed the program," he said. The domain was sold for R300, the amount that he paid to register the site, but service had still not improved more than two months later.
"The biggest problem I have now with Sentech is that their service has still not improved," he said.
Diedericks believes that one of the main reasons for the slow speed is that the company took on more users than the system could sustain
effectively.
Winston Smith of Sentech said this was not the case and the main problem was a computer management system controlling the distribution of bandwidth among users.
"Some users were getting very fast connection speeds while others were getting extremely slow speeds, which wasn't fair," he said.
Sentech has announced some measures which it claims will improve the service on their broadband My Wireless product range.
Marcel Raath, Sentech's executive of sales and marketing, said part of the process would be setting up a platform to monitor excessive usage of the network.
- This article was originally published on page 4 of Cape Argus on July 25, 2004
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