Internet Café operators in Tamale are up in arms against Vodafone over what they describe as the telecommunication service provider’s deliberate attempt to cripple their businesses in-connection with poor or no internet services they subscribe for their clients.
They complained that their businesses have been grounded since November 2009 due to poor internet services and have threatened to hit the street if Vodafone fails to rectify the anomaly within a five day ultimatum given.
“By this communication we are giving Vodafone up to 26th April, 2010 to improve the services provided or communicate to us clearly on a reasonable time line within which they will live up to their promises,” the statement emphasized.
Agbenyo John Stephen, spokesperson of the Vodafone Broadband Users Association of Tamale accused the management of the northern regional directorate of milking their pockets to maximize profit for no services rendered due to lack of expertise to manage and deliver the bandwidth.
He said while the local operators were struggling to rejuvenate their almost collapsed cafes, Vodafone established a 24 hour internet centre at the Tamale main office which charges three times of what the local operators take for an hour.
“It is actually surprising that Vodafone, an internet service provider sponsored by the public funds is allowed to compete with small entrepreneurs by setting up its own internet café and providing customers with very good bandwidth,” Agbenyo charged.
According to Agbenyo Stephen, most of them invested in Vodafone’s broadband with the mindset of delivering quality services to their customers however their cafes have turned into white elephants because of the prevailing circumstance.
He explained that Vodafone subscribers previously had access to the online portal that allowed them to access their account and that facility he hinted had been taken off without any assigned reason since Vodafone took over the affairs of then Ghana Telecom.
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Recipe for destroying a broadband service in a country
Acquire the largest broadband service in the country
Don’t extend the service to the remote places and don’t improve the service where there is. To make sure the country would not enjoy the development of ICT.
Pretend you have new packages for the subscribers each month and so increase the prices.
Make sure the packages bear different names but have the same content. For instance convince many subscribers to pay for a download speed of 1000 KB (around 230GHC) and continue to give them the same 20 KB at best or the usual 6 KB as for everybody. And assume they don’t know how to use www.speedtest.net to measure the bandwidth.
Make it very difficult for a subscriber who discovers that there is no difference between the packages to downgrade and pay less for the same service he was paying more for.
When the users complain about the slow speed of the Internet, tell them you are resolving a technical problem and that you are sorry about that and do nothing to change the situation. Teach your employees to be arrogant with customers about it.
In case they insist for a good service, erect an Internet Café in your premises and use in it all the bandwidth you are supposed to give to the subscribers. Remember “No Community Outreach Program”: Concentrate and keep all the speed and stability of the connection in your premises!
Tell them you have the fastest Internet Café in Africa and increase the rate of the browsing time.
Continue to give a very bad service to all subscribers in the offices, homes, Internet Cafés, schools. Be the service Provider who is at the same time the strongest competitor Retailer.
Compel them to go to your “Fastest Internet Café in Africa” to do their works and so you get money from their subscription and also from your “Fast Internet in Africa”. But don’t let them know you are giving them the “slowest Internet subscription in Africa” and the more expensive in Africa. Don’t let them know that other Internet Service Providers (ISP) in other parts of Africa are slashing down half of their subscription rates and improving the broadband service to give more access to the Internet to these communities.
For all the time they don’t have the Internet at all, let them still pay and don’t compensate them.
Make sure the small Internet Cafés and Telecenters have a very bad Internet service so that no one goes there and soon close. And thus you create unemployment and no dissemination of ICT knowledge through these means for poor people and students, at least paralyzing a whole nation.
Continue to enjoy the monopoly and make sure you do whatever you want with subscribers since no other communication company is innovative enough to fill the gap and since the customers don’t have yet a strong association to claim their rights, enjoy and bully them.
Keep your focus on selling mobile phones, accessories and talk time because the profit is bigger there. Advertise a lot your mobile phones to let people buy and think your brand’s mobile phones and forget about the broadband Internet.
From time to time pretend you give a fraction of your profit for social responsibility by running a contest for website developers to advertise yourself. Yes, some peanuts here and there so that you may fearlessly continue to increase the digital divide in/of the country.
Don’t extend the service to the remote places and don’t improve the service where there is. To make sure the country would not enjoy the development of ICT.
Pretend you have new packages for the subscribers each month and so increase the prices.
Make sure the packages bear different names but have the same content. For instance convince many subscribers to pay for a download speed of 1000 KB (around 230GHC) and continue to give them the same 20 KB at best or the usual 6 KB as for everybody. And assume they don’t know how to use www.speedtest.net to measure the bandwidth.
Make it very difficult for a subscriber who discovers that there is no difference between the packages to downgrade and pay less for the same service he was paying more for.
When the users complain about the slow speed of the Internet, tell them you are resolving a technical problem and that you are sorry about that and do nothing to change the situation. Teach your employees to be arrogant with customers about it.
In case they insist for a good service, erect an Internet Café in your premises and use in it all the bandwidth you are supposed to give to the subscribers. Remember “No Community Outreach Program”: Concentrate and keep all the speed and stability of the connection in your premises!
Tell them you have the fastest Internet Café in Africa and increase the rate of the browsing time.
Continue to give a very bad service to all subscribers in the offices, homes, Internet Cafés, schools. Be the service Provider who is at the same time the strongest competitor Retailer.
Compel them to go to your “Fastest Internet Café in Africa” to do their works and so you get money from their subscription and also from your “Fast Internet in Africa”. But don’t let them know you are giving them the “slowest Internet subscription in Africa” and the more expensive in Africa. Don’t let them know that other Internet Service Providers (ISP) in other parts of Africa are slashing down half of their subscription rates and improving the broadband service to give more access to the Internet to these communities.
For all the time they don’t have the Internet at all, let them still pay and don’t compensate them.
Make sure the small Internet Cafés and Telecenters have a very bad Internet service so that no one goes there and soon close. And thus you create unemployment and no dissemination of ICT knowledge through these means for poor people and students, at least paralyzing a whole nation.
Continue to enjoy the monopoly and make sure you do whatever you want with subscribers since no other communication company is innovative enough to fill the gap and since the customers don’t have yet a strong association to claim their rights, enjoy and bully them.
Keep your focus on selling mobile phones, accessories and talk time because the profit is bigger there. Advertise a lot your mobile phones to let people buy and think your brand’s mobile phones and forget about the broadband Internet.
From time to time pretend you give a fraction of your profit for social responsibility by running a contest for website developers to advertise yourself. Yes, some peanuts here and there so that you may fearlessly continue to increase the digital divide in/of the country.
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