Cell C CEO Alan Knott-Craig has blamed the company’s bigger rival, Vodacom, for recent quality of service issues experienced by consumers. He says Vodacom is not living up to the terms of a national service agreement the two parties signed in 2012.
He also pointed a finger of blame at a huge increase in network traffic in the past year.
“The traffic on our network has doubled in the past 12 months, so we’ve had to put in a huge amount of capacity, especially in the Johannesburg area,” Knott-Craig tells TechCentral.
“The other areas around the country, from the measurements that we take, look quite good. It’s the Johannesburg area we have to concentrate on. There’s a huge amount of capacity going in.”
Knott-Craig says network traffic is only one part of the problem, though. “The second part of the problem is we have a national roaming agreement with Vodacom, and part of the poor customer experience occurs when they move between the two networks. The handovers are not seamless, although they’re supposed to be, and that we are taking up with [telecoms regulator] Icasa very aggressively to get that in place.”
Knott-Craig says he expects that complaints about Cell C’s network quality should diminish in coming months. “I expect it will take two or maybe three months to get the whole network, particularly Johannesburg, in much better shape.”
Vodacom was not immediately able to comment. — (c) 2013 NewsCentral Media