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W3Z Update
December 21st 2006
 Seasons Greeting to you all from the whole team here at W3Z & Zycomm.
AD 2006 will go down as a memorable year for many reasons. It is now over 3 Years since we launched our W3Z Broadband Service first in Wirksworth. Since then, we have become one of the very few number of Wireless Providers who are not only still in business, but more uniquely continuing to expand in ahealthy manner. We did not open any Champagne the day the Bulldog Broadband ceased to operate, honestly! You just cannot make the claims they and others have made and survive. Someone has to pay the wages and in Bulldog's case Cable & Wireless decided to cut costs and pull the plug. Yes we can also be vulnerable but in a different way! The latter half of the year has been extremely busy here at W3Z (see below) and I myself am just now recovering from a pretty nasty health scare which has been very worrying to me since last February and which knocked me off my, usually active, legs for most of the summer months. The usual Customised Zycomm Christmas Card is just one of the many projects I have failed on this year, due to my impediment and my associated frustration. I hope this Newsletter will serve as a one off substitute for that usual seasonal document. I will now try to make it none the less productive. Our New Year Resolution is to communicate with you more frequently with beneficial new offers and products but RIGHT NOW we need you to do something for us. Many of you appear not to see changes and developments we post on the W3Z website at www.w3z.co.uk despite our best efforts to keep that site fully up to date. If we email you all en-bloc we find a high percentage of the emails returned as not deliverable, because many of you have not told us which is the mail address you use as your regular active default. There is little future in us continuing sending articles to an account which you may never look at.
PLEASE NOW send an email to myemail@w3z.co.uk and tell us there your name, what email address we should use to best communicate with you and any other factors you wish us to notesuch as new mobile numbers etc. It is surprising how many people stick to Yahoo or Hotmail whenthey have a far superior POP3 account available from us FOC. Could it be that some customers have not yet discovered how flexible W3Z email really is? You can access your W3Z email wherever you are in the world. To do this use any other computer which is connected to the Internet (Motorway Service Stations or Hotel Lobby) and enter the URL webmail.w3z.co.uk on the browser or alternatively go to our web-site at www.w3z.co.uk then browse down to the extreme right hand corner of the W3Z front page and you will see WEBMAIL - click on that. You will then see two boxes appear asking for your name and password. Make sure you enter your full email address including the w3z domain an example being that well known ayup.miduck@w3z.co.uk. The password is then the corresponding email password that we have issued with that account. You can then carry out all the main email functions remotely without carrying a laptop. Incidentally you can also use this on your own PC when your bundled Antivirus's latest automatic update has just fouled up the operation of your Outlook or Outlook Express Mail Client. Don't forget that every W3Z customer is entitled to 3 free email addresses of similar format to young Ayup Miduck above.
ANTI VIRUS and ANTI SPYWARE Many people continue to use one of the two (in)famous brands of antivirus software that were inevitably bundled with their PC at Point of Sale. No doubt this was provided 'free', working on the belief that you are a 'True Brit' and as such you recognise a bargain when you see it. 'True Brits' resist change at all costs so you are viewed as a fair catch. That true cost can be up to £70 a year following a message on-line that your subscription is about to expire, but you no doubt feel more secure for the wallet attack? You also likely believe you don't have to do anything with it and that it will just burble away in the background and protect you from all virus’s including Avian Flu (Tamiflu from eBay is best for that). So when your PC gets slower and slower and slower, to the point of being unusable, you then phone up W3Z and tell us our connection speed is rubbish. Only then will we be able to show you the real side-effect of such products. After you have deleted the offending product we will tell you, as a private individual how you can legally download AVG from Grisoft, which is totally free and Ad-Aware from Lavasoft also for free. There are no on-going annual charges and these two products will not slow down your PC when they are updated. As such we get no commission back from these developers but what we do get is another happy customer.
WEBSITE & MAIL HOSTING is a service we offer and probably one of our best kept secrets. Various packages are available and these can be viewed by logging on to our website www.w3z.co.uk and locating OTHER SERVICES in the drop down menu followed by HOSTING ACCOUNTS. We have recently been contacted by one of the World's Top Heavy Metal Bands whose website receives half a million hits a day, to see if we can co-host their web site at Ripley, on a bespoke server, so giving them a very rapid access service. We have not yet ventured into WEB DESIGN as there is a plethora of people offering this. Our own sites are handled by www.just30.com in Ambergate who we are delighted to recommend. If we see sufficient demand we may well look to move into this area in the future in order to provide another arm to W3Z / Zycomm.
W3Z 24/7 365 Day TELEPHONE SUPPORT is our strongest selling point. Please call 01773 570123 if you require our assistance. If you have an urgent need for assistance for a genuine reason then feel free to call this number at any time. However if you have just decided to reformat your Hard Drive at 02:30 in the morning and you wish to remake your W3Z connection then delay calling until after 09:00 in the next working day. At present then dial 01773 570123 then take OPTION 1 (W3Z Broadband ) then OPTION 1 again (24 Hour Support). Leave your name, full telephone number and problem area and we will call you back in just a few minutes.
WHAT DOES 'CONTENTION' REALLY MEAN? Here is another 'secret' that it is now time to expose. It is a very important subject and one that is poorly understood, if indeed it is even considered. In discussing this I will take a fairly 'simplistic approach' as it is a complex subject that will keep the buffs on-line for hours! If you order ADSL which is delivered over any telephone line that service will be provided at a 50:1 Contention Ratio. This means that ADSL is routed via your local telephone exchange and within that delivery process the resource, the resource engine and tools serving you are shared with up to 49 other subscribers. The service speed for which you pay is therefore the best you can ever expect when the other 49 sharers are tucked up in bed with their PC's switched off. You will experience your ADSL speed falling in the daytime as commercial users come on-line and during the School Holidays as my hero at Microsoft takes control of our beloved micro-bratt's. The original 15 choices of speed that we offered on the W3Z Wireless Service were all UNCONTENDED in this respect. Our aim has always been to offer you the near perfect deal, so short of times when we have had technical problems of our own, with W3Z you get entirely what you are contracted with us to receive. Wireless Broadband delivered the W3Z way does not suffer from Contention in the manner I have described here. Some time ago we introduced a single NEW W3Z (deliberately) CONTENDED SEVICE in order to react to the market pricing competition. The one W3Z new CONTENDED service is contended at not more than 20:1 (your available resource is shared with up to19 others) so it is still theoretically more than twice as good as the wired offering at 50:1. Ironically it has taken us real effort to engineer this new contended service, whilst it takes our competitors no real effort to supply their service, which is twice as contended, without trying!
And what of the super new '8M Services' now obtainable down many phone lines? I suspect our competitors will hate me for raising that one! On the old ADSL service agreement the reference to contention was in a very small font. I have not yet found it on the 'high speed' agreement but I am still looking. The sceptic in me suspects it is not mentioned because it is actually worse? Run the recognised speed checker published at www.thinkbroadband.com and you will be amazed what you see being delivered. Run it on any of the W3Z services, after our New Year changes are complete and I will 'rest my case'.
THE CURRENT SITUATION is, as I said at the start of this document, that we are very busy. Early in the year we had satisfied the vacuum of interest in each of the areas we have set out to cover and we were enjoying a steady stream were referrals from existing happy W3Z customers. The situation then was entirely what we had predicted but In March we noticed an increase in enquiries from areas where the local exchanges had been upgraded to 8M. It quickly became evident that once again the telephone providers were turning out to be our best friends! We soon found out that the upgrade to 8M only seemed to benefit people who were within a 1KM radius of the local exchange and outside that radius the result was that often wired customers who had previously enjoyed a satisfactory 512/256 ADSL service were now finding that the new service was proving to be degraded or unworkable at range. For the past 8 months we have spent busy days converting dissatisfied wired Broadband customers over to W3Z in order to return them to the service they require. We are now looking forward to the end of the dark nights in order that we can complete more aerial installations every day as demand is now once again in-line with what we first saw in the early years. "Thank you" again to our competitors here !
Over a year ago we ordered a new 'pipe' (100MB Optical Fibre), for delivery into Ripley, from a different supplier. We have been pretty satisfied with the original 'pipe' but in going to a new supplier for the additional expanded service we are also gaining added integrity in the event of either provider failing either technically or financially. A competitive situation also keeps both suppliers on their toes, price-wise, but we would never force that as an issue as that aspect could end up being prejudicial to the quality of our service. Over 12 months had elapsed since the order for our new ‘pipe’ was placed and in that time a well known telecommunication supplier, who I will not name in this document, has yet again managed to stand in our way. Miraculously after recently threats to advise Ofcom of our situation we have achieved our aims and a few days ago we were visited by guys in a fleet of grey vans who arrived and finally did the honours. We need another two weeks now after Christmas to prove this new circuit before distributing it out to you over the network. Again thanks to 'The Facilitator' for finally getting this commissioned, leaving both our new Supplier and W3Z ourselves delighted with the new enhanced quality of service and the earnings potential it now offers. Early in the New Year we will discontinue free installation of our lowest tier 'Narrowband' services. For some time we have offered a 64K + 64K 'always-on' service at £10.99 per month and a 128K+128K service at £15.99. We have only offered free installation of these services in return for a four year contract. We will be replacing this with a subsidised installation charge which will need to be paid prior to installation. Free installation will continue on all genuine 'Broadband' new applications.
OUR CHURN AND ATTRITION RATE is fantastic. This is determined by one thing only and that is Customer Satisfaction. If we look at the small number of customers who leave W3Z they fall into three main categories:
1. Those who are moving away out of our area.
2. Those who move to a combined Telephone + Broadband Package
3. Those who want to try life on 'The Darkside' with 'Supermarket' Broadband or similar.
In the case of (1) we wish them God Speed and wish them well in progressing their new life. In the case of (2) we wish them well and remind them where we are for the future. Other than offering IP telephony over our Network we cannot compete with this. In the case of (3) we wish them well and offer free reconnection whenever they are ready to return.
It is interesting that with respect to (3) we usually see 30% return within 6 weeks and a further 40% within 3 months. The last 30% are probably finally gaining immortality and meeting with their right provider by unsuspecting parents paying for Premium Rate support calls efficiently answered from Call Centres located on the banks of the Ganges.
On behalf of the team here at Zycomm and W3Z I wish you a very happy and successful 2007.
M I Sneap
Managing Director
email ian.sneap@w3z.co.uk
GSM 07973 111350
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