Network glitches frustrate prepaid power consumers

KEIKANTSE LESEMELA
Correspondent | Friday June 28, 2013 00:00

 

A customer who resides in Tsolamosese told Mmegi Business, 'Most of the times the vendors tell us there is no network and this will cause us to stay overnight, sometimes without electricity. BPC (Botswana Power Corporation) has a serious problem'.Another customer in Ramotswa said 90 percent of the time vendors do not sell prepaid electricity thanks to network problems, while the BPC office does not experience the same.'But when I go to BPC offices I get electricity,' she said.Last November, BPC introduced the super-vendors model, a system that encompasses various software to enable electricity retailers to sell to clients using several systems such as Internet, Automated Teller Machines (ATM), cellphones and scratch cards.

The super vendor model added to the BPC's own network of 128 vendors of prepaid electricity countrywide.The model also meant that BPC could streamline resources put up for pre-paid metering. In addition, super vending provides vendor empowerment.BPC financial controller Thatayaone Ndzinge said several issues could lead to network breakdown - planned maintenance of the system, unplanned server downtime, a particular shop or vendor running out of credit or communication networks downtime.

He explained that the vendors are wont to say that there is no network even when the problem is that of lack of credit because in the old system when prepaid power was only available in villages, the Mascom GPRS that BPC used often had network issues. 'I have had this experience, a man at one filling station told me there is no network when I knew that the network is running because I was from the office. When I told him, he said 'no, I mean that there is no credit,'' said Ndzinge. He said when the BPC prepaid system is not working, it is either because of a problem with the network provided by mobile phone companies or that the BPC server is down.Ndzinge said the BPC had some planned maintenance on its servers in the past few weeks, which affected the system performance during the maintenance. 'We are working round the clock to minimise incidents where this maintenance affects vending to customers,' he said. He said the system is never down for a long time as they operate a service level agreement to ensure minimum downtime of the backend vending system