Internet Solutions: it's time to put on pants.

Oh god. Someone put Internet Solutions in charge of Seacom.

Seacom, the new undersea cable that links Europe to east and southern Africa, is a desperately-needed lifeline for the people of Africa who were completely ignored when the rest of the world furiously connected itself to the interwebs in the late 90’s.

The 17,000km 1.28 terrabyte/second fibre-optic cable has just been completed and has already gone live in Kenya. This is great news for Kenyans, no doubt, who’ll almost certainly respond by embracing 419 scamming with a style and speed that’ll leave the South African and Nigerian scammers quivering by the side of the information superhighway.

Unfortunately for South Africans, the Seacom landing point in SA is controlled by Internet Solutions. Now, why is this bad news? Because Internet Solutions is quite possibly the worst ISP ever in the history of the world, ever. While IS are only the 2nd biggest ISP in SA (after Telkom, the parastatal Dark Side) they make up for it by being the number 1 douchebag company with regards to technical ability and customer service. Imagine paying £100 a month for internet access that’s slower than dial-up, and then dealing with 3 Mobile r-tards when you call to complain. It’s that bad. Yes, just like 3 Mobile. * shudder *

Below is an extract from a “pants email” that I wrote to IS in 2007, addressed to the head of Value Channel Partnerships (VCP). The pants reference harks back to a long-running joke between Jono and myself. The two of us shared a house in 2006, and because Jono worked from home he’d often lounge around in his undies until I came home in the evening. If he ever had to write a stern letter to someone he’d “put on pants” before he sat down at his computer, just to add a touch of business class to the affair.

Brief background to the letter below: I used to run an IT company in Cape Town called Overbyte, and signed up to the IS VCP program on the off chance that they could help me sell 1st world ISP services to my clients. Clearly I was wrong on this point because IS is a 2-bit company operating in a 3rd world country. After months of waiting around for their sales guys to get back to me I just forgot about them. Lo and behold, several years later I got a shirty fax out the blue from the VCP manager, demanding that I sign some or other bullshit agreement. To make matters worse, the agreement they faxed me was unreadable and contained vast portions of striped out sections.

Herewith my response – enjoy! Sadly, I never did get a reply from Kate. C’est la vie!

Fri, Jun 8, 2007

Dear Kate

Thank you for your correspondence received by facsimile yesterday. Instead of responding to the “why haven’t you signed the agreement yet?” issue that you clearly need to sort out as a matter of urgency, I have several complaints about your company:

Firstly, how about a personal email, asking me how I am? How am I finding the IS service? Am I a happy customer? In this fast-paced world of information technology, facsimile is a pretty out-dated service. As an internet service provider (or Eye Ess Pee for the uninitiated) I’d expect you to have ample records of my online contact details. I have several email addresses and you are welcome to contact me on any. Ignoring the possibility that your correspondence might “inadvertently” end up in my spam folder, I can be reached on the following addresses: originalpete@gmail.com, or peter@overbyte.co.za, or peter@smorgasbord.co.za, or info@reacharound.co.za . Try them!

Secondly, pursuant to your fax dated 13 Feb, I do not agree to the terms and conditions therein, since I could not read it clearly. (Please see attachment.) Obviously your fax machine was on crack that morning, as every page has a blacked-out section that is totally unreadable. While I would verily LIKE to believe that those unreadable regions of text don’t contain paragraphs assigning all sorts of nefarious rights and privileges to your fine company (whereby you swap my personal data and that of my customers to KGB agents in exchange for throttling the internet speed of several high-ranking opposition politicians), I just can’t take the risk. As I mentioned before, fax is a dying technology. Or is that roneostat? I can’t tell anymore. In a nutshell – upgrade.

Blacked-out regions of text aside, I’m fairly sure there’s close to Sweet Fanny Adams in all that legalese specifying my rights as an IS customer. Does the VCP agreement (for example) specify how long I should wait on the phone while your “tech support” fumbles around trying to fix my connectivity problem, akin to a sixteen year old schoolboy trying to unhook a bra in the dark? I can’t even tell you the number of hours of my life wasted while sitting on the phone listening to a tinny, repetitive rendition of Greensleeves while your hopelessly under-staffed call-centre goes on its collective smoke break at 17:00 on the dot. Then there’s always the blame game. Your guys blame Telkom, Telkom blames IS. Round and round we go. Oh, and then the fanciful promise that they’ll call me back as soon as they’ve fixed the problem. Guess what, I’m still waiting.

Legal speak. Yes, this is also a gripe. Please don’t send me long-winded emails, letters, roneostats or otherwise in faux legalese. I quote your letter from 7 June:

“...in order to resolve the outstanding contractual documentation and/or matters referred to in our correspondence referred in our previous correspondence as a matter of urgency.”

Which correspondence are you referring to? Is the documentation outstanding, or are there matters outstanding? Guess what? People don’t want to deal with legal speak any more. Yes! There’s a new dawn! A new age! We’re all speaking a common language now. People for plain text! Amandla!

Haha. While I’m on a roll – the quality of your broadband bandwidth is atrocious. Maybe IS should spend more money on market research and less on fax machines and ridiculous legal fees drawing up complex, binding agreements with small enterprises. If you did, you’d notice that loads of people frequently complain about the low quality of the international broadband. There are literally thousands of forum posts online where users agree that Telkom bandwidth is better than IS bandwidth! TELKOM! For Heaven’s sake. You’re being unfavourably compared to the devil incarnate death-star dark empire itself. If the internet is a series of tubes, then your tubes are very clogged.

And yes, I know what I’m talking about – I have experienced this first hand, being a 1-st tier IT consultant to several enterprises running on your “first world” internet service. Well, the only thing first world about it is the exorbitant expense. Also, perhaps you should look up the true definition of “uncapped broadband” on Wikipedia. I can provide a link if you like, but I’m not sure your fax machine (sorry, roneostat) would handle it.

Lastly, and possibly quite importantly, it may be of interest to you that I have never actually purchased a service from IS in my capacity as an IS VCP. There are many reasons for this, crappy bandwidth aside, most notably because your try-hard (yet utterly hopeless) sales people never returned my calls or came back to me with any solid proposals. Furthermore, as I’ve mentioned, I have had countless run-ins with your tech support team in my capacity as an IT support consultant, and those experiences alone I would liken to having my fingernails torn off one by one and my hands dipped in hydrochloric acid.

To cut a long story short, to this day I have not paid you a single cent of my own baksheesh. And long may this day last.

As an aside, it may interest you that I’m currently out of South Africa. Yes, I’ve joined the brain drain and am currently experiencing first-world customer support and information techonology provision on a level that is unseen in South Africa. Sure, there are problems here too, but honest-to-God, there’s no excuse appalling customer services. And when I come back to sunny SA I’m going to get straight back into IT provisioning. Because there are LOADS of companies and individuals out there who are desperate to deal with responsive, light-weight companies who offer uncompromising service without all the hassle that the “big guys” introduce.

A few examples of what IT users put up with in SA:

So you wanna change your MWEB dial-up password? Please submit a lock of hair and a vial of blood for DNA analysis. (And don’t forget to send the fax on company letterhead!) You wanna add a 5th extension to your Panasonic PBX? Please wait 4 weeks and finally a techie with a cable-crimper and a full-frontal lobotomy will spill hot glue all over your office carpet and give you a bill for R2,000. You wanna try make cheap calls with OpenVOICE (in order to hopefully bypass Telkom and Panasonic) – well please give us a deposit of ten grand, oh, and another thirty please for the fantastically-overpriced rack server.

Do you get my drift?

We’re all a little tired of dealing with boring corporate governance and over-priced, under-performing companies. The consumer is tired of taking a shafting and being told to enjoy it. How about this for an agreement: You give me a service that I can use or resell (and with that, some realistic service guarantees) and I’ll happily pay you what its worth. Well, not you, obviously, another company. But you know what I mean.

Ok, that’s about it. Thanks once again for your request for me to sign something. Here’s what to do: print it out, fill in whatever you like, and shred it :)

Kind regards,

—

Peter MacRobert

Managing Member
Overbyte
Cape Town
(Actually London!)

p.s. I know this cute joke that a friend (from DD!) once told me:
Q: What’s the difference between Dimension Data shares and lice?
A: You can get rid of lice.