Challenge to iBurst
by Fred Roed on 27/03/07 at 8:00 pm
6 comments
I have been a paid up member of iBurst since 2005. At first it sounded like a great idea – fastest internet in SA, portable, and best of all, it was NT (Not Telkom).
So, here we are, almost 2 years later. To say that iBurst’s connection has been inconsistent would be to damn it with faint insult. They have been terrible. I phoned last week, after the third month in a row that the connection had been prone to suddenly turning slow.
Every time it happens there is no warning, no indication of a problem on the website, no sign of apology on their happy-times monthly newsletter.
Expecting at least some humility, I was stunned to hear the call centre guy calmly explain, as if it were obvious, that there ‘was a proliferation of users throttling the bandwidth’ or something similar. After listening to him for a while, I asked him: ‘Do you mean there are too many subscribers and too little bandwidth?’
After a short pause, he answered: ‘Yes.’
We had to phone again today to find out why there was (still) no sign of light. Nic, in our studio, got some palooka trying to blame ‘third parties’ for the problem. It’s starting to sound like some kind of government plot.
I hereby state that I want to cancel my subscription. My challenge is now: ‘iBurst, what are you going to do about it?’
Are you going to try resolve the situation (if so I will humbly let you state your case and respond accordingly), or are you going to silently let a customer slip through your fingers? But here’s the thing, iBurst. If you do absolutely nothing, our company will stop using you. I will publicly tell everyone that I have evangelised into using iBurst to cancel immediately (and offer my sincerest apologies for leading them to the Dark Side). I will also burn my own data card, put a video of it onto YouTube, and post the video on Ideate.
Fred Roed is the marketing guy in the Ideate crew. Fred is the CEO of web marketing company World Wide Creative and the co-founder of online learning portal Heavy Chef. Fred loves writing about people out there doing marketing right. Follow Fred on Twitter here. View more articles by Fred Roed.
FeistyFemale
Mar 27th, 2007
You should try Amobia – they get nothing but great reviews!!!
Check out http://www.amobia.com. They are NT (an obvious requirement these days) and they are very innovative. Check out http://www.swimgeek.com/blog for all the super cool stories.
Fred
Mar 27th, 2007
Cheers. Interesting offer – will chat to the guys in the studio and investigate.
Patrick
Mar 28th, 2007
hi, This may simply be due to the fact the the backbone connection to SA is not big enough. It’s a problem all over SA and even worse in rest of Africa.
Andrew
Mar 28th, 2007
Patrick, it sounds like you’ve given in to the Telkom brainwashing. I would estimate that about 50% of my internet surfing does not leave South Africa’s beautiful shores and yet 95% of my browsing through iBurst is slower than it should be. I can be browsing from Plumstead to one of our servers in Newlands, about 8km apart, and it stutters along and drops the connection from time to time (on bad days). This has nothing to do with the undersea cable joining SA to the rest of the world.
Tebogo
May 23rd, 2007
I haven’t experienced iBurst,so I can’t really comment.Also having worked for a parastatal once, where click and wait 30 secs was organizationally accepted as lightening fast,I guess I probably would not complain.My concern is whether your threat, Fred, means anything to iBurst really.I am just generally sick and tired of that apathetic tone on the so-called call centre consultant’s voice and the powerlessness you feel after realizing you are at their mercy.I am on a mission to make it very painful for suppliers and service providers who disregard consumers out there.Watch this space ma brada!
Ideate - Small Business in South Africa » Web 2.0 and Business – Strange Bedfellows
Oct 16th, 2007
[...] you may remember the previous post where I challenged iBurst to provide a solution to our internet woes. Nothing has happened yet, and [...]