A change in direction and a new focus

As of 1 August 2008, Frogfoot will no longer be providing consumer internet services. Frogfoot’s consumer division has been sold to Web Africa.

Frogfoot will focus on the medium and large business market and will no longer be providing commodity internet services like, ADSL, Web Hosting and eMail in the consumer market.

Frogfoot’s consumer client base will be migrated to Web Africa in the month of August. Frogfoot will still be providing support and handle billing in August.

Web Africa is most probably the best consumer focused ISP in South Africa and we are confident that our clients will find a happy new home with them.

Frogfoot will retain all its larger, business and enterprise clients.

Tighten up the main sheet

Tighten up the main sheet is a sailing phrase. It generally means you want to go faster but you’re willing to let things get a little more exciting in the process.

Many moons ago, in the story that is Frogfoot Networks, two networking geeks focused on building a company that catered to the very specific needs of other businesses. Years past by and along the way Frogfoot agreed to host some websites for a few friends and sold ADSL to someone’s cousin’s mom. That consumer base grew and grew, partly because Frogfoot was so well respected but also because we were just good at solving problems. We also had a fun name… who doesn’t like frog’s feet?!

Growth and success however does have it’s challenges. Frogfoot has grown into a business that looks after the high-tech networking requirements of some of the top companies in South Africa. We’re very proud of that fact, but as you can imagine it puts a little bit of strain on our ability to keep our regular consumer clients happy.

Providing consumer internet services is a unique challenge. It’s a competitive industry, with low profit margins. We enjoyed the challenges of building automation systems and optimising internal processes in our consumer division, but it placed a strain on our company.

Our staff were being stretched to capacity. We weren’t keeping up and it was starting to affect the quality of our service. We were forced to make a choice.

We have chosen to migrate our consumer base to one of our partner companies. We will however do everything within our power to make sure that your services are not affected.

New adventures in Frogfoot (v3.0)

It some ways we’ve made a full circle return to our initial business model. Back to the days where we pretty much knew every client on a first name basis.

Where to from here? The first step is to regroup, adapt to the changes and then focus on a small number of big and exciting things on the horizon.

In general we’ll have more focus, a better signal to noise ratio in our day to day activities and more time. We’ll aim to build more personal interactions and relationships with our clients.

It’s safe to say we’ll be doing the things we are good at.. building networks. Large scale carrier and core networks. We’ll aim to move up a step in the ISP food chain. We’ll seek opportunities to innovate, solve complex problems, have fun learning about new technologies and play with cool toys.

Thank you and goodbyes

So, on this sentimental day, we have to say goodbye to our consumer clients, wish them well and thank them. This step will give us the focus to provide the best possible service to our remaining clients.

A big thank you to all our clients, partners and staff who have been a part of our journey. Keep an eye on our blog.

Frogspeed!

Looking to end off the week with a bit of mayhem? Look no further than Quentin Tadpole-tino’s KILL BILL GATES!.

I just added a new page and a diagram as a high level overview of the Frogfoot Hotspot business model.

Feel free to post a comment if you have questions.

Our hotspots are pretty cool and people are always asking about details… you know… money!

I figured it would be a good idea to show some of our cards (poker analogy) so that people can get an idea of how much money there is to be made by operating hotspots.

Lets take the modest (but real) example of a hotspot operated by one of our customers in a house with some boarders. In April the boarders used almost 4 gigabytes of data earning the operator of the hotspot R525 commission. Considering the hotspot operator’s total monthly costs were only R199 (Including the ADSL line) he walked away with R326 profit. The particular hotspot operator used about 2 gigabytes of data for his personal use in April which only cost him R138. In the end he got Free Internet and R188 in his back pocket.

This scales quite nicely though. We have another hotspot that in April moved 33 gigabytes… That one hotspot made the operator almost R4,500 and that operator has quite a few hotspots.

The other interesting thing about the hotspot business model is our Hotspot Agents. A Hotspot Agent is an entrepreneurial individual who introduces new Hotspot Operators to the Frogfoot Wifi Network. He identifies new operators, helps them understand the Hotspot business model and gets them to order their Hotspots through him. By simply acting as matchmakers they make 20% of the profits. You can read more about this on the Hotspot Agent page.

There’s lots of other questions that people always seem to ask so I also put together a FAQ (frequently asked questions) list.

Got any more questions? Feel free to leave a comment.

Every Friday we will feature a blockbuster movie that has been produced by Frogfoot Networks. This week we kick off with the Quentin Tadpole-tino festival and the must have movie RESERVOIR FROGS!. It is sure to keep you glued to your seat!

We’d like to give you a quick overview of how the Frogfoot Support Process works. Often clients contact our sales team with support related matters when it would be better to contact our support team directly.

We’d like to share the best way for you, to help us, help you.

Clients have three ways to request support:

1. eMail the Support Team
2. Complete the Website Support Form (the best option)
3. Phone the Support Team: +27 21 689 3867

We use a support ticketing system to make sure all requests get the needed attention. If you email the support team or use the web based support form you will get an email response that contains a ticket number in the subject.

Please keep this ticket number in the subject when you respond and quote it to follow up on the progress of your support request.

The diagram below shows how each contact option enters our support system and how your support ticket flows through the system. This is a simplified overview. There are actually two levels of support: Level 1 and Level 2. Level 2 takes care of more advanced or complex queries.

Note: you can click on the graphic to see a larger version.

Our support team manager is always interested in your feedback and suggestions for improving our support.

There is so much talk about Broadband these days, but few people know what it actually means.

In technical terms, Broadband refers to a telecommunication medium that provides multiple channels of data of a single communication medium, typically using some form of frequency of wave division multiplexing.

What this means is that Broadband refers to any technology which can densely pack information and thereby allow a higher rate of transfer. This is why Broadband is always touted as the new, faster generation of Internet access services.

This is not the whole truth however. See, this faster technology only refers to the last mile, in other words, the link between you and your ISP’s nearest branch or aggregation point.

While this faster technology provides you with a faster link to the ISP, your ISP still needs to buy expensive national and International bandwidth.

So how does your ISP manage to give you more bang for their buck? Simple! They over subscribe!

Not making sense? How about an analogy.

When you buy insurance, your service provider (in this case the insurance company), takes your money and puts it in a big pool. They know that not all cars get stolen, houses burn down, etc. so they can pay out less than they are collecting from their subscribers even though you could potentially claim more than you’ve actually paid.

Broadband (in this case referring to your over subscribed bandwidth) is essentially the same thing. ISPs buy bandwidth in a big pool, give each of their customers a small pool which collectively adds up to much more than they actually buy themselves, but they know this works because only a small portion of their subscribers will use that bandwidth at any given time.

Let me demonstrate with an example. Remember those Vodacom HSDPA advertisements that claim up to 3.6 mbit/s? Well, that’s not a lie! What they don’t tell you is that the advertised speed is for your connection to the nearest cellular tower. Every single customer connecting to that particular tower shares a single 2 mbit/s connection to the Internet. Let’s say there’s 10 customers connecting to that tower sharing the same connection. Should they browse the Internet simultaneously, they will get 2/(3.6*10) or 5.5% of the advertised bandwidth.

This however is not what the marketing department of your ISP would like you to believe. No, they define Broadband as FAST!!! - with those three exclamation marks, capital letters and bold type face.

Not that this is a complete lie.

Broadband does refer to new faster technologies which promise better speeds, but always keep in mind that your service is over subscribed. The amount of over subscription determines how likely your chances are to actually get the speeds you are promised in that advertisement on television.

Over and above the over subscription of bandwidth, your connection will always be limited by the type of technology used. For ADSL this means the quality of your copper telephone line, for Wireless it means coverage, interference, and a host of other factors.

The cool thing about a blog is that once the info is there, it’s there forever. So, it makes sense to do the work right initially. One of the things we’ve done right is put together a great website with some good articles on our blog. Here’s an example of how I used it recently…

I visited a prospective client in Maitland with Freddie ( new salesfrog ). Our plan was to pitch our ADSL VPN solution ( one of Frogfoot’s many cool products - I’ll write more about this later ). Well, we found that this company had in fact already implemented a similar solution , not nearly as funky and smart as ours, but reasonably good nonetheless ( I’ll tell you why ours is better in that same post ).

One of the questions the IT Manager had was how our mail filtering was done. Ha ! Now I had him ! He walked right into it. I asked him to open his browser, took him to the Frogfoot Homepage and pointed out our recent post explaining our mail filtering system.

Boy was he impressed! He was able to read and understand our methodology as a result of the cool flow diagrams created by our graphic artist Vincent ( a living legend ).

Another example I have is me bumping into an ex-colleague a day or so ago. He asked about the ISP industry, and I pointed him to my post. That opened a can of worms which will lead to more business down the line no doubt

I updated the Hotspot page. It’s now a bit shorter, simpler and more to the point.

You’ll notice there are now three Frogspot options:

• Frogspot Access Point
• Frogspot ADSL - 384Kbps
• Frogspot ADSL - 4Mbps

Get a Frogspot today, be a part of Frogtropolis…

We’ve recently received some emails, and phone calls, from our customers about SPAM. We really know how you feel, SPAM wastes a lot of our time. In a general 24hr period the Frogfoot mail servers handle roughly 87000 messages, we reject about 65000 messages of which about 2000 contain viruses. Only about 20000 make it through. That means that more than 75% is unwanted mail. It gets quite technical but we’ve drawn up a really cool diagram that illustrates exactly how our SPAM filtering works. Check it out if you’re looking for a deeper understanding of the process.

You should know that even with statistics like that there is presently no effective way to avoid 100% of all SPAM. It is, unfortunately, a fact of life in the 21st Century a bit like the petrol price and more recently load-shedding.

To avoid it all together we could configure our SPAM scanning systems to be much more aggressive but then the chances of us flagging an important email as spam increase exponentially. This very uptight approach to SPAM is not effective. You see while computers are super intelligent they’re not as perceptive as people. Sometimes the SPAM is so well crafted that they can’t see the difference between it and a real message.

Obviously our primary concern is to make sure you get all your important email so we had to ask ourselves the following questions; is it better to ensure that you receive no SPAM but also end up losing some vital email? Or is it better to get all your mail and occasional receive an inappropriate SPAM message that includes one-liners like “dreaming of a bigger love stick”?

We decided that it was better for you to receive all your emails and deal with the frustration of SPAM than miss out on anything because our filtering methods were too stringent.

You can also help in the battle by using an intelligent email client, like Thunderbird, to flag any SPAM that slips through the woodwork. This method, coupled with our SPAM filtering methods, is the most effective way of dealing with the few last bit of SPAM that find their way into your Inbox.