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Recipe for destroying a broadband service in a country

Sat, 24 Apr 2010 Source: Agbenyo John Stephen

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.

Cheers!

"The future belongs to the countries whose people make the most productive use of

information,knowledge and technology - these are now the key factors for economic

success,not natural resources"

**********************************

AGBENYO JOHN STEPHEN

TAMALE, GHANA

Website: www.savsign.org

skype: agbedela

CELL: +233 (0) 244 421 532

office: +233 (0)71 25174

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Columnist: Agbenyo John Stephen