Hi Ithernit,

Sorry for taking so long to get back to you with an answer.
Our Prepaid ADSL accounts are FreeZone enabled, so that means you'll be able to game and download FreeZone content without it contributing towards your cap.

Many other packages also have FreeZone enabled, you just need to look out for for FreeZone Icon under the "Key Features" list on our product pages.
http://www.webafrica.co.za/adsl/

I would like to know if i buy preepaid internet form WA will i be able to apply for the WAGE stuff?

I really can't stand these pessimistic posts. This is just purely good news and your negativity frankly isn't contributing anything here.

R519 for uncapped 384k vs R450 for 5gb 384k from Webafrica vs Afrihost at R29 per gb. Hmmm...

Not sure how having a Telkom IPConnect link makes you a tier 1 ISP?

Hello "Obnoxious"

The IPC link is just the connectivity method to the SAIX DSL exchange side, which does not in itself automatically make a provider a Tier1 ISP.
The real difference is that we don't just merely resell SAIX packages anymore. We now have all our own mail-, DNS- caching-servers, routers and traffic management system.

This enables us full control of the quality of service on our own network, instead of just facilitating a connection to the SAIX infrastructure. We will also be able to roll out our own custom packages early in the new year.

You can read more at the FAQ section as indicated below.
http://forums.webafrica.co.za/showthread.php?t=2228

Kind Regards, Christiaan van Schalkwyk
Product Development Manager.

Lol @ the comments.
What the hell is up with this igloonaut?
If people have issues with Web Africa shouldn't they go via some support channel, and not be so off topic on this subject?
Good job Web Africa! Thanks to you, the South African ISP market will become more "interesting"
Hopefully we'll see more websites/services added to your "FreeZone" soon.

LOL.

Obviously a more challenging client. I don't think it was the best route for webafrica to comment on this forum like they did, the fact that they replied so ferociously makes me think there is more to this than meets the eye. I am definitely now more hesitant to fully move to webafrica... Guys you should have taken this offline immediately. ai ai ai.

On a different note I am kinda sick of SA companies in general promising services/changes without giving firm dates. The words "coming soon" or "in the first quarter" annoy the hell out of me. As a consumer I like the idea of choosing so I get the best deal now and in the future, but how can we do that if we only get promises.

Even if you don't have confirmed implementation dates yet at least confirm a date on which an update will be received.

I like the idea of the local steam content server, but when will this materialise? 1 week, 3 months, a year? what is soon in your world? if it is 1 week, I'd definitely move to webafrica, if 3 months maybe, longer than that I probably wouldn't make the effort.

In short it will be nice to see a roadmap of which services will be available by when.

Hi,

The steam content server is already in the DC and we are only waiting on Valve to complete setup from their side. This should hopefully be completed by the end of the week. The paperwork has been signed off and the hardware installed so its literally any day now. As soon as a date can be provided we will post an update

I have been a loyal WA client for sometime now and have considered a few times changing isp for better pricing, but I have stuck it out for the following reasons.

I have found WA support to be of a good standard all queries that I had have been sorted out in a kind and professional manner even when it was not WA PROBLEM.

WA billing has never hassled me about payment and have never messed up any of my accounts.

So to all WA admin and staff from what I see is just a couple of people whining about pricing and service which I am sure WA can handle. Your WAGE gaming service will bring you more clients I know this for a fact and if you reduce your pricing it will be a added bonus to all your clients.

PLZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ do a Battlefield 2 Server Plzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

We are in discussions with EA and Dice with regard to getting ranked servers :) I'll post an update on our forums under the gaming section as soon as possible

Will this work for modern warfare 2 to?

Hi Ithernit,

Modern Warfare 2 does not allow for dedicated hosting in the same way as its predecessor Modern Warfare did. It instead relies on a match making service outside of our network and therefore we are not currently able to FreeZone the traffic used.

That being said however should things change in the future or if a work around is found we will definitely look into it again.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and Call of Duty: World at War have been setup on our servers and FreeZone will be applicable to those titles when playing within our network.

Not sure how it is a "freezone" when you are charging R79 per gig, with no local left over once blended is used up! I mean after all it is local only bandwidth those games use. What concerns me more though, is that this service actually has a Go Live date, yet the pricing restructure promised since Sept has NONE! I have to agree with imel here, WA focus on the REAL issues! And I say this as a hardcore gamer who has racked up over 960 hours with Cod4 on the SGS networks.

FreeZone is not international or local capping - its simply zero bandwdith being used while playing a game on one of our servers . While it is correct that you will need a Web Africa ADSL account to capitalize on the savings provided by FreeZone anyone is able to access the gaming service regardless of which ISP one is using.

Its in the saving - you could play to your hearts content on just a few MB's without needing to top up :)

Johnathan I understand the concept of what it is that you are trying to do, and I would normally have applauded WA for this. But what I fail to understand is that WA still has not yet addressed the issue of price vs product offering, when there are those in the market who have. For example, I recently moved from WA adsl to Afrihost, thus dropping my cost per gb from R70 to R29. If you do the math, I am getting 3gb at Afrihost for R15 more than it cost me at WA for 1gb!!! I was concerned that my ping would sufer by making the move, but there is NO difference whatsoever. Over and above this if we take into consideration the drop in support levels offered by WA I can no longer see value in what you guys do, this freezone does nothing for those customers who continue to overpay you for their ADSL, or continue to use you for hosting, some are even loosing their customers, because of mail delays, and rubbish support levels. The FreeZone press release is clearly an effort in "spin" to try and redeem your tarnished reputation in the consumer market, and yet for those of us in the know it is an epic fail!

The Afrihost deal at R29 per GB is undersold and is known as a loss leader which is not a sustainable long term business model. I'm not saying it wasn't a great deal for those who managed to secure it at that price, just that it has considerable risk having been tried by a previous ISP that went under! I'm glad to see that they're doing well considering that challenge and their late coming in the market and I personally wish them the best of success going forward :)

Support wise though, if anything it should be better than ever with additional staff at hand to assist however if you feel are not getting the support you should be getting I would urge you to contact us so we can address your concerns

FreeZone is a value added service, one amongst many others, which is possible due to the network upgrade to Tier 1 status.

The savings cant be compared and has nothing to do with our current or planned pricing structure. FreeZone is free to WA subscribers thus for example they could actual buy 1Gb and use 10GB for gaming on our servers and still download something later since the bandwidth used from playing on our servers is not charged off their monthly cap, which for some also removes the need for route sentry and similar applications, separate accounts and so forth

And once more you FAIL to address the WA pricing issues? WA have been promising a price restructure from September, And YET, there is still NOTHING! FreeZone is NOT a value-add when you are grossly overpricred! It is also NOT a substitute for a price decrease. Johnathan you can't even answer the WA price issue, and mainly because, where WA used to lead the market, others have stepped in, and in the meanwhile WA has adopted a wait-and-see approach. Telkom even increased the cap in their pricing structures, AND they offer free local-only cap once your blended cap is used up, this has a broader appeal to the market then a gaming service that does not use cap! yet you have not even addressed that on your SAIX ADSL accounts!

With regards to support levels, the old wisdom of "quality vs quantity" has never rung truer, over the past year to year and a half the support levels at WA have dropped from something to praise, down to something that is just below crap. And if you took the time to review my support tickets, you would see that I HAVE tried to address the issue more times than I care to mention here. It has become a frustrating process, the initial responses to support tickets seem to be pro-forma responses, and its hard work to get your people to actually resolve the tickets. And lets just gve a quick mention to the WA billing department, and their unethical approach to billing, and they never seem to be able to stop billing me for products/services that I have cancelled in JULY!!!

In the past I would have gotten very excited about the freezone, but now I can only describe it as a shoddy attempt to get a positive press-release.

Here are 2 more suggestions for you to ignore outright:
1) address your pricing now, or at least improve your product offering with something that has a broad-based appeal!
2) get support levels back up to where they were 2 years ago!

Hi igloonaut,

We appreciate the input being provided by yourself, and would like to address the various concerns you've raised during the course of this conversation:

1) Lack of price announcement/feeling that WA is overpriced/FreeZone is pointless.

We agree that our pricing could be improved, and have been actively investigating revising these prices after launch. As indicated in one of the first e-mails we sent to our clients, as well as via our FAQ on the network trial forums, we have stated that we are aiming for a January/February launch of new pricing.

Unfortunately the kinds of changes we are looking at take time and have to be backed up with concrete data to mitigate any potential risks involved, financial and logistical, not doing so would be irresponsible, however don't mistakenly identify a lack of communication on the issue with us not planning anything, we just don't have anything we wish to announce as of yet.

Additionally, providing a service such as FreeZone has very different business implications compared to reducing prices wholesale across all our products, and as a business we have to balance our goals of increasing customer growth, helping reduce cost to the consumer, increasing quality and increasing profitability. FreeZone is but one step to help us attain those goals, with many more planned for the future.

2) Poor or declining support infrastructure. Unhelpful support personnel.

While we do agree that as we have grown our support infrastructure hasn't improved in-step, we do still believe that we still have one of the higher support levels amongst equivalently sized providers, often beating the larger players as well.

That said we definitely have identified areas of concern and are actively addressing them, including those you've identified yourself. Areas such as the pro-forma and/or highly informal responses have already been addressed and the "foot has been brought down" on these instances, and instances of support personal passing tasks on to others without attempting to address them are also being dealt with as they occur.

3) Billing issues.

This has been an incredibly high priority issue within our business, with new policies and rules being drawn up, as well as ensuring the hiring of the necessary skills up to ensure significantly tighter financial and billing teams.

It's been a long road for the teams responsible as well as our valued customers, and we've made significant improvements over the past couple of months to resolve any issues that have come up, with many additional and significant changes being scheduled for the near future.

Rest assured, there are many changes taking place, with the ultimate goal being to bring the standards back up to the levels we used to maintain, and even now we're seeing gradual improvements.

We can only address these issues when our customers bring them to our attention, and as such we appreciate the input being provided by all involved.

~ Richard

Hi Richard,

This is simply not good enough, you are adding "free" services, whilst other more critical issues are left unaddressed. While I understand that it takes time to look at pricing, it takes you guys too bloody long! Telkom addressed their offering in August. Increased their base caps in some of their packages, they also offer a much bigger local caps once your blended cap is depleted. Yet YOU HAVE NOT, you have simply promised that something it coming, no indication or ball-park of what. Are we supposed to pay almost 3 times what other people are offering while we wait purely because you say that something is coming? I guess if the service, or communication was there we would, but to be perfectly blunt it IS NOT.

As someone who brought customers to WA as both a reseller and an affiliate, you have let me down grossly. Companies that came along with me to WA are leaving because you have not addressed pricing, and with the almost CONSTANT EMAIL ROUTING issues, they are moving their hosting too. So sure you might be in the process of cleaning house, but you guys have let the degradation of your competiveness and services go on for far too long, and it is simply too late.

You have obviously lost key people (like Brad Acar) to other companies or you have re-deloployed them to your Tier 1 project and or the freezone, and what is left behind to deal with the existing customers, is so far off what we are used to its not funny. Your service levels and pricing are shocking, as is your billing department. So while you are bringing your standards back to where they used to be, you'll find me talking about how bad WA have become to anyone who listens. and moving my business elsewhere, and ultimatley I am quite sure that you just don't care.

Richard, I have asked to speak to senior management/directors on numerous occasions, and I am denied everytime, so please don't end off with the glib little cliche about "We can only address these issues when our customers bring them to our attention.." because it is simply NOT TRUE. You are not interested in people like me challenging your status-quo on pricing, or your less than desirable service levels. If you were interesting you would take the effort to pick up the phone and call, instead.

So, as for the clients that used to rave about WA and helped you to grow your business to where it is today, you offer nothing but empty promises! and free gaming coming 10 Dec - woopee and no-thanks.

Hi there

Damn can you moan really WOW breathless !!!
Is a free market we all have choices so right now maybe WA does not have the best pricing and service.

At the moment they are damn well better then most ISPs out there and I say take advantage of the of the reduced pricing offered by the various ISP's at the moment.

If you look at the new bandwidth allocations of their hosting packages its looking pretty sweet and if thats anything what WA is going to be offering with their new DSL packages on their new network I say they are going to blow any other ISP out of the water with their new offerings.

When it comes to support always get a team leader or even better ask for a dedicated support person to help you so you always get the best else JUST LEAVE as nobody else here on this blog seems to care what you say (except WA :) )

Everybody knows about the billing issues of WA ask anybody but at least they are trying ....

Mybe the only way to solve this would be for you to contact Hellkom and get your own IPC and dedicated servers and shows SA hows its done or emigrate far far away that works too :P

Hi igloonaut,

We understand your frustration and have provided an explanation on why we have chosen to go the route we have, as well as accepted that there have been issues and that we are actively looking to resolve them.

Understand that despite your indication that we have been too slow in bringing out new prices that we did in fact reduce pricing on our higher-end packages in September, with the intention being to more extensively revise our pricing post network launch. Although this reduction may or may not target the services you use, to many of our customers this was a welcome improvement and enjoy significant savings.

Launching a new network is not a cheap exercise, it comes at great expensive to ourselves. As such we have not had the opportunity to pass any reductions on to our clients as of yet.

However, our trial has seen us give away close to R8 million of bandwidth, a significant figure in itself, meaning many users, both ours and those of other providers have been able to enjoy incredible value for high quality access, something we are particularly proud of.

Be aware that having concrete facts and figures in hand, instead of assumptions and conjecture, we are in a far better position than yourself to decide on how or when to reduce pricing in a method that is not only healthy for ourselves as a business, but for our clients in the long run. We do not take these decisions lightly, and fully understand the risks involved. This is only cemented by the recent surge of fly-by-night providers and scam-artists wishing to take advantage of uninformed customers who purchase purely on a very limited set of criteria without properly evaluating the risks.

While, you are quite obviously angry and upset as you feel that you have not been getting the service you deserve or at the price you feel you deserve, we still maintain the following:

a) That we are actively working on resolving any and all issues that customers have seen.
b) That we are planning on improving both our pricing and product offering post network rollout, since it is only at this point that we can re-evaluate our business model.
c) That in a highly-competitive environment, if there is a niche or requirement you do not feel can be met by one provider, there should be others out there who can, and it is up to each provider as to what they choose to target.

In conclusion, we will have significantly more financial leeway to reduce prices once we have successfully migrated our users to our new network. Room that we don't have over the current SAIX model, so we ask for patience and understanding while we prepare for the new year pricing.

You have asked that someone in a senior position answer your questions, that has now been done on more than one occasion.

{QOUTE} "This will mean all customers with a Web Africa ADSL account, will not utilize any of their monthly cap whilst gaming within the Web Africa network." {QOUTE}

Will this mean that WA will be hosting their own Dedicated Servers, and If you have a WA account Playing on Only Those servers it will not be using Cap? Or does it count for all Local hosted gaming Servers like The Saix Dedi's,IS Dedis's, IGame dedi's and Vodacom dedi's also?
Wil cap be deducted when playing on the above mentioned Servers?

This is nice, But Will WA be hosting their own Dedicated servers?

{QOUTE} This will mean all customers with a Web Africa ADSL account, will not utilize any of their monthly cap whilst gaming within the Web Africa network. {QOUTE}

And Will you Use cap when joining Lets say IS,SAIX,IGAME,VODACOM hosted servers?

Reason for asking is because of what I understand is that you will have to join WA servers in order not to use cap for gaming, and all other servers will use cap.

This is nice, But Will WA be hosting their own Dedicated servers?

Yes we have our own dedicated servers which provided that you are using a Web Africa ADSL account will allow you to take advantage of the savings provided by FreeZone. We cannot control the bandwidth charges from other ISPs so accessing other servers provisioned by other ISPs would result in cap usage

Kudo's to WA for shaking up the internet environment in South Africa, you will definitely have my support when you launch this service. I really hope that you get the support that you deserve for launching an initiative of this type.

This is fantastic and is sure to be massively popular with gamers from across the country!

My only concern is if it is platform restricted or not meaning would this service apply to PS3/XBox/PC or is it only for PC?

I am a PS3 gamer.

Initially this will only be for the PC as their are some restrictions with getting in local console servers which will need to be looked at further down the line however there are things we can possibly look at doing network wise to enhance the speeds of all games whether local or international :)

please fix your constantly broken network and email service for paying customers before devoting energy into non essential free services

Good day imel, we are in the process of launching our own network. The game service is only one of the features that will be available.

Not entirly sure how you can call it a "FreeZone" when you are charging R79 per gig in the first place. Also its local only bandwidth, which when the blended cap is up other isps over local bandwidth for another 30gb or so.

I'm afriad I have to agree with imel here. Also it amazes me that this has a Go Live date, yet the price reduction that has been promised since September this year still has no Go Live date. I guess this is just more spin to try and counter the Afrihost R29 per gig pricing. Another Epic Fail from WA - oh and nice to see you actually found another use for webfri.

Excellent! Looking forward to it.