It`s quite amazing how different the two sides of the same coin can be, and how those with the most to lose are often the ones prepared to gamble it for higher returns.
An example of this is the various financial institutions in SA that have put a lot of time and effort into driving the concept of Internet banking.
Despite little uptake from the public initially, and even though the banks have had bad publicity from time to time through various online fraud scams, they have persevered, dramatically improved security and customer service and thus won over the majority of users.
Virtually every online banking Web site today has some type of guarantee that if there are problems with your account or if it is defrauded, the bank will reimburse your loss.
Now that is what is called putting your money where your mouth is. Contrast this with the attitude of the country`s resident monopoly, Telkom.
To cap it all
A colleague of mine discovered this week that the 3GB cap on his ADSL line had been reached, a week before the end of the month.
Knowing he had not used that much bandwidth, he complained and discovered that the vast majority of the bandwidth had been used at the weekend, when he and his family were not even at home.
Several calls to Telkom later, it was discovered that the calls which had sapped his bandwidth had not even come from his house, but somehow, had been made from Pretoria.
To me the next step seems simple - work out how much bandwidth was used on Sunday and refund the difference to the user who was 'robbed`, and if you have the number in Pretoria, use it to track down the wrongdoers and have them arrested.
Of course, when it comes to our friends at the monopoly, it is never quite that simple.
It is apparently up to my colleague to open a case with the police and get them to do something, and if he wants more bandwidth he will have to purchase the additional amount that he requires, even though it has been proved that he never used his initial 3GB allocation.
Worse still, he says he was told by a senior member of the TelkomInternet team that this is not the first time this type of bandwidth theft has occurred, but that to refund him his bandwidth would effectively be an admission that there was a problem, and Telkom is not prepared to do that.
Hog-tied
It seems the more things change in this industry, the more they stay the same.
Rodney Weidemann, Telecoms Editor, ITWeb
So what it boils down to is that the organisation is aware there is a problem, is not visibly doing anything about it, is refusing to even refund customers when they know they have been stolen from, and is making it the user`s job to do something about getting the perpetrators arrested.
Quite a far cry from the way the monopoly zealously pursues copper cable thieves - but then I suppose cable theft eats into Telkom`s profits, whereas with the bandwidth theft, it simply charges the robbed customer for an additional 3GB.
It seems the more things change in this industry, the more they stay the same. Roll on the day when we have a truly deregulated, service-based market, where if your customer service is useless, your client will simply move to a different service provider that does look after them.
Oh, but of course you can`t do that today, because you`re always tied into long-term contracts. I guess if you`re tied down, it makes it easier for a monopoly to take advantage of you.
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