oxnsox:

Geektastic: I get it - I just don't much care about it as it is not my problem. If they can afford to sponsor rugby teams, costs obviously are not a concern to them.

Actually it seems it was your problem.... otherwise why would this discussion be happening????
(Your sponsorship tilt is a red herring. You are probably well aware of the differences between marketing of a Brand and providing of a service)

I already pay through the nose for a service and I do not consider my role as a customer extends beyond expecting to get what I am paying for.

At the very least I expect to be advised by VF well in advance that there may be problems and to be compensated financially for the fact that they have failed to deliver. 

I'll stick with my road analogy here.... If you read the right parts of a newspaper you'll see notices advising roadworks and temporary road closures... otherwise you simply find out a few hundred metres before you get to them. They're temporary... drive on thru, there's normal road conditions on the other side!!!


I still think you have unrealistic expectations here and you're trying to make what may have been a personal problem for you, on the day, into somebody elses.

Earlier in this thread an anology was used with an event in London. There you are not adding 100's of percentages of users to (what may well be) a single serving cell. You're increasing the load dramatically across a more compacted network of multiple cells. You may get some issues but they more likely to affect smaller geographical areas and may move within the environment.

I used a road analogy, perhaps wrongly, but my point was that their are many factors that can effect your plans for the day, from Johnr's acts-of-god thru to relying on other people (companies) to provide you with, what for you at any particular instant, may be a vital service. I've attended events where overcrowding has resulted in a poor-experience (parking, access, toilets, seating, other services), the RWC opening in Auckland is the most obvious recent example.  Part of being involved (in an event) is an acceptance that things weren't going to be 'normal'....  Would you have gone if there were 70% less people... or would event organisers have not run a similarly enticing event of a similar size for that number???

You pays you money and makes your choice.  And come away enriched, enlightened and (from an organisers perspective) impoverished... or maybe you come away disappointed. It's your choice whether to learn from that.....   

ajw: Another excuse for a gigantic booze up.

Geektastic: I'm English and lived in London for 37 years, so I spent a reasonable amount of time there and VF always worked fine, as did Orange etc.

lchiu7: This sort of reminds me what happened at CES in Las Vegas last year. The country's largest tech conference with about 150K attendees. My friend and I had access to all three major networks with phones/3G/4G devices on AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile. None of us had Sprint phones to be sure.

The access was horrible. We could barely make calls or getting wireless data anywhere near the Las Vegas Convention centre was an exercise in futility.  The conference is planned a year in advance and is annual and one would think the main carriers would try to provide additional capacity but as has been noted, it's hard to ramp up capacity to that level for a short time.

To be fair I would think the proportion of attendees having and requiring data access would be higher than that the Martinborough event but it does show that even major carriers do have issues with providing additional bandwidth. But then again Las Vegas (unlike Martinborough) is likely to have great existing coverage from all carriers to cater for the large transient populatoin.

I wonder what it's going to be like this time around as once again I plan to attend.

SteveON: It appears that some people have high expectations. What about nye? Do you expect vodafone to have extra capacity at every small dinky town near a beach in preperation for one night?

Get off the grass, it an't gonna happen.

Geektastic: It was a personal problem for every VF user we know who lives here or attended the event so not limited to me by any means.

If VF can afford to market a service (i.e. sponsorship), the should already have ensured that they can deliver it. Marketing a service that cannot be delivered is a fast way to a bad reputation as any marketer will tell you.

It was perfectly possible for VF to make public communications in the local press, by email, on line, by text and by post to customers in the area (they have our addresses for billing us and could have added a message on the bill!) that there might be a problem. Clearly they failed to anticipate.

So far, XT users I have spoken to report no such problems. So as you say, I pay my money and when my contract with VF is up shortly it is likely they will loose my custom as a direct result.

I did not attend the event: I live in Martinborough. 

johnr:

Geektastic: I think the answer must be to allow handsets to roam on all available networks in NZ - so if you cannot use VF, and XT is under capacity, you can use that and vice versa.

Please tell me you are joking?

Would this not overload the other network think about the operating frequency of handsets and everything else that has to be considered,

riahon: There is a limit to EVERY service you pay for. If you want to make improvements with a service then voice your concerns, if they go unheeded then move on. If thousands of people follow then you are a messiah, if they don't, you're the same as everyone else.

Nothing is guaranteed and nothing is 100% perfect. When Utopia arrives let me know.

johnr:

firewire: Seems like we got some armchair radio engineers who think there is some magical solution to a capacity problem. It's a mini cell with a fair number of people concentrated in one area. This is a rather un-natural distribution on a normal cell network.

We have our expert Geektastic that can add capacity on all interfaces from UU to RNC using magic fairy dust,

All very well having the cell site capacity! what about the transmission required from the cell (node B) back to the Core network (RNC)?

You still don't get the cost part do you? Sounds like you think the money gods just deposit $$$$$ into carriers bank accounts over night

mattwnz:

johnr:

firewire: Seems like we got some armchair radio engineers who think there is some magical solution to a capacity problem. It's a mini cell with a fair number of people concentrated in one area. This is a rather un-natural distribution on a normal cell network.

We have our expert Geektastic that can add capacity on all interfaces from UU to RNC using magic fairy dust,

All very well having the cell site capacity! what about the transmission required from the cell (node B) back to the Core network (RNC)?

You still don't get the cost part do you? Sounds like you think the money gods just deposit $$$$$ into carriers bank accounts over night

I think I will bite my tongue a bit on that. But VF did make huge profits from NZ last year, ($151.5 million) . It is not as though it is cheap to call from a mobile phone either...

Zeon: Is it feasible for Vodafone to offer WiFi or the like which is much easier to deploy to supplement their data network? The exchange is fibre fed there so even a temporary HSNS connection should be able to cope?

Geektastic:

Zeon: Is it feasible for Vodafone to offer WiFi or the like which is much easier to deploy to supplement their data network? The exchange is fibre fed there so even a temporary HSNS connection should be able to cope?

It seems feasible to me.

No idea what a cell site costs, but I would say that with annual profits of $150+ million, another one around here somewhere ought not to be unaffordable!!