FNB Platinum - best in Credit Card in SA for now

After my frustrations with Easypay I paid once for my telephone and electricity at Checkers (my local supermarket) and then realised that I could just add them both to my FNB platinum card via their internet banking list of recipients. Duh! What a pleasure, I must also thank FNB for the time they took to confirm how simple it is to get a platinum card and the benefits of the SLOW lounge at the airports. I also send kudos for a flawless Android App which makes banking (using my credit card account) a cinch.

It really saves to fly Mango (or Kulula) and hang out in better luxury than the SAA lounges. There are a number of other benefits like free card delivery and secondary cards, petrol cards with benefits, and some less useful ones like the platinum support but overall this is IMHO the best credit card in SA today by far.

Paypal integration also good as you may expect as they own Paypal in SA. And their CEO is a young practical approachable guy who spoke at the Silicon Cape event last year.
Much more than that I must also admit that I've owned an FNB credit card since my Bar Mitzvah so it's realy my oldest bank account (even when I was out the country for four years I managed to maintain it thanks to my late fathers help).
This leaves much to be desired for my other bank ABSA. As opposed to eBucks which I consider the premium loyalty banking service in the country (linked to dozens of online and offline services including most notably Engen and Kalahari as well as Woolworths, Makro, Kulula, Dischem, etc.) ABSAs Leisurelink closed down over 2 years ago. At the time we thought it was just ABSA insourcing. 18 months later I was sorry to say that had become the biggest thorn in ABSAs side. The promise was: "If you are an Absa Rewards member, earn Cash Rewards and qualify for great specials and discounts every time you use your Absa debit, cheque or credit card to pay at any of our participating Rewards Partners". Going to www.absarewards.co.za site one got: "The site's security certificate has expired!: and "The Absa Rewards programme has terminated with effect from 1st April 2009 however after paying a nominal fee (of a few hundred rand a year) one got absolutely nothing. Apparently the rules changed at the beginning of this year and the ±1% in 'ABSA rewards' was re-instated for all credit card purchases (for the 18 months prior it was only purchses from 'selected' partners that one earned rewards. I have yet to see what benefits can come about from these rewards and I'm aware ABSA is operating the Woolworths credit card which I considered getting for our domestic recently until I saw something better... see my next post....
Had to slot in an info graphic made by Scott Mooney a connection of a connection old family friend:

Calling Australia's 1-300 numbers

Just a quick note to remind anyone calling an Australian 1-300 number, these are mis-advertised as the same as calling a land-line (they maybe in Australia), but when calling from overseas they are really really expensive. I was put on hold and kept waiting for 7 minutes and the call cost me 2.20 Euros for just over 10 minutes.

Note to Australian companies, these numbers are advertised very widely and agressively with so many benefits. Please keep in mind that they are not telling you the disadvantages, you will lose brand loyalty from any overseas customers - TPP Internet, I hope you're listening.

Rewardco - anothr call centre selling cell phone contracts...

I'm really frustrated at the number of calls I receive from noisy call centres with semi-literate people reading from scripts, trying to sell me a cell phone contract. I just received a call from Jevon at Rewardco who totally lied to me when he claimed he was not trying to sell me a new contract. After 10 minutes of listening to him read his script he admitted that in fact he had lied and he put the phone down on me. I get at least 1 of these per week and it's a complete waste of time. They tell me that they get my number from Vodacom but since this isn't an 'application provider' it doesn't appear to be covered by the WASPA code of conduct. What can we do about this? Is there not something that can protect a consumer from this voice spam (actually much more expensive to me than email spam).

Dabba - Rael hits the Business Report

We've been working with Rael on Dabba for a few years, preparing and looking to setup some communities in the Western Cape. Finally Dabba gets a feature in the press, albeit still a little underground. I guess front page of the Business Report is no longer 'underground'.

The lead says "TALK IS CHEAP: Rael Lissoos, chief executive of Dabba Telecoms, says his latest venture aims to be the Vodacom of the people, with a spiritual slant". Read the interview and make up your own mind, less said the better...

Cape Town - Smart Community - Dark fibre and all that...

Last night the Intelligent Communities Forum announced the list of the Smart21 Communities of 2008. We made it! Cape Town is there, and I'm so proud that it's largely due to great efforts and more than three years of work we've (Radian) done for the City of Cape Town (mostly work by my partners Mark Neville and Raven Naidoo).

We spotted this award - got the appropriate approvals to enter - and wrote the motivation. More importantly in the background, we've been helping the city with a Telecoms strategy since 2004. This year the Dark Fibre project was been accepted by the powers that be.

The dark fibre project is based on the Swedish example where the city of Stockholm provides dark fibre (i.e. not lit, just the cable) between point A and point B. We were amazed at how much the Economic Impact Assessment showed the benefit to our economy with be, see the ITweb article: CT network 'to add R211bn to GDP'

Minister says no international fibre for us

Well almost, she said "no undersea cables will be allowed to land in SA unless they are majority owned by local investors" see mybroadband for the full article.

Some have commented "Calling for major SA ownership will in several camps be interpreted as calling for final business control and looked upon as a big risk by many investors, operators & most parties outside SA" another said "You would have to look to George Orwell to find a higher level of irony in bureaucrat-speak." One person made the considered response, "I have seen so many bad decisions made in the name of African development and until we Africans with the technical expertise align our selves with the decision maker I think we will continue to see the same bad decisions made over and over again."

But basically we're heading for a new era. The information age is coming to South Africa! Government is selling their shares in Telkom which means good things. For example, it seems like by the end of next year we'll have over a dozen Telco's. Yay! Finally we will have affordable broadband. Good Luck!

How SBC (AT&T) Pillaged South Africa's Economy

Interesting thread on Slashdot today. We wrote about this on CTUF back in August 2001...

Related to Telkom profiteering was our president Mbeki's statements on friday "Pushing for fatal blow to Telkom monopoly".

Broadband usage in South Africa - 2006 - not yet a turning point

Oct 3, 2006 Myadsl wrote about South African broadband users number over 300 000. This follows Balancing Act’s report on North Africa Internet Country Market Profiles published early 2006 already noted “Morocco has over 300,000 DSL broadband subscribers (reaching 325,000 lines at the end of June), making it the largest broadband market on the continent . Not surprisingly, Morocco currently has the cheapest DSL connection on the continent, starting at US$17 per month for a 128/64k uncapped broadband connection.” And Balancing Acts followup on Maroc Telecom shows how their revenues are forging ahead with almost 12% growth.

The ITU puts South Africa at 7th place in Africa for Internet density, after Seychelles, Mauritius, La Reunion, Gabon and Sao Tome and Principe. The latter being most interesting because of it's poor economy. Are all the islands here because tourism locations put pressure on the industry, or is it because these have the lowest base (populations), or is it that in the case of Sao Tome and Principe, that the .st domain name has been leveraged to bring great opportunities to those that cannot ordinarily access in the Internet in Africa?

The South African Broadband study we did last year (posted in June) predicts potential for more than 600,000 to 1m broadband users by 2010, but more importantly expresses the benefits to the economy of lower prices. Seems like the the price for broadband is decreasing at a rate greater than expected, but can it be sustained? Digital Pilgram writes about "A 60% drop in price". A 512kbps ADSL service was setting you back from R800 to around R320 today. "Use a dial-up for 30 minutes a day (at less than 56kbps) and you've justified a move to a 512kbps ADSL service."

Seems to be some innovation from the ISP industry plus the demand on Telkom to grow and roll out more adsl, which has brought dome some of the costs. The next issue we need to resolve - as the Pilgrim agrees - is the costs of expensive international bandwidth and access to SAT3. Pilgrim worries if we're bandwidth junkies or I ask, is this all what information society is about? Can Neotel help?

Myadsl writes just 3 weeks after the post about 300,000, how Broadband prices need to be drastically reduced to make it more attractive to a wide portion of the local population". They argue that our local broadband penetration rate of just over 0.7% is completely insufficient to be economically competitive. "The OECD Broadband Penetration rate is currently 15.5%, over 2200% higher than South Africa’s figure". We're not just far behind the rest of the world, we're falling further behind at a rapid rate. This will take more than Neotel, good adsl regulations, good wireless spectrum licensing, good SAT3/international. There are indications of this as Duncan McLeod, indicates in the Financial Mail, 3 November he lists 'the cracks opening up' as: Neotel, iBurst, Vodacom and MTN, Municipalities and ISPs.

South African Broadband study, looking at innovation and economic development

Last year I assisted Prof Dave Kaplan (University of Cape Town), Prof Martin Fransman (University of Edinburgh) and Dr Raven Naidoo (my partner at FPC) to draft an academic broadband study named: "The South African Telecoms Innovation System and the Diffusion of Broadband".

It was initially presented by Dave at a conference last year but only recently publicised (thanks to the GSB PR company) in the Cape Argus. As you can imagine it's all about the harm that our laws relating to Internet access have done irreparable harm to our economy and society. Hopefully now that prices are heading downwards, things will improve. Whilst I wish the process would happen faster, I thank our President for finally making sure that its' happening at all.