ZOL says poor WiBroniks speeds a result of people moving outside of coverage areas

Many of the complaints WiBroniks customers have logged over the last few months have been to do with the speed of the network over the last few months.

We reached out to ZOLto understand why this has been the case despite the fact that there have been multiple maintenance updates over the last few months.

ZOL explained that the WiBroniks service is fine but customers have been using it wrong:

Coverage – There is nothing wrong with the WiBroniks service. Due to customers using their own devices, we noticed that a number of them would move from one place to another outside our coverage areas. We  encourage our customers to stay within the coverage areas for optimal service quality and to check for coverage areas on the ZOL website when they move from place to place.

I use Fibroniks and not WiBroniks so I’m not in a position to verify if the issues experienced have been limited to customers using LTE sim cards but as far as I know even some customers using WiBroniks at home were facing challenges. ZOL says those are isolated cases as you’ll see in a moment.

Where did you get the hardware?

Beyond the issue of coverage areas and mobility, ZOL also explained that customers might be experiencing issues due to their choice of hardware;

We recommend that clients experiencing poor service invest in the Customer Premises Equipment that is available from the ZOL shops as this  is most compatible with our network and ensures  good service. There are two major types of CPEs namely the indoor and outdoor types which the sales team can recommend basing on the location of the customer

This suggests that some customers were using hardware they didn’t source from ZOL and that was causing problems as well.

Unexpected overload

In addition to all that, ZOL has also said they have been experiencing capacity issues due to increased use during the lockdown and they hadn’t forecasted that;

The platform enjoyed good uptake at the onset. With the lockdown we witnessed  a shift in the traffic patterns and trends in some areas that had not been envisaged at the time of network planning which has led to competition for resources on the radio access side.

We take the opportunity to thank POTRAZ for granting us additional spectrum which has helped us to upgrade the network to address this challenge. In addition to this there are a raft of other measures that we will deploy in the near future to ensure that there is  good quality service on the network.

Finally, we had asked ZOL when users can expect the service they are paying for to start working as advertised and in addition to reiterating that the service is working as advertised they also noted that they are now taking advantage of the additional spectrum they were granted access to by POTRAZ and customers should be seeing improvements by now;

The deployment  of the additional spectrum granted by POTRAZ has been completed, and we have already recorded significant improvements on the network. We are currently  focusing on isolated cases where  customers need service configuration for compatibility with the network upgrade  

Effectively, ZOL has said they have solved the bulk of the problems consumers where encountering. The proof of the pudding is in the eat so we wait and see.