Improve your web experience with a faster browser

A major factor in the quality of your web experience is the response time between a link being clicked and the result being displayed. This response time is dependent on various factors, the health of your computer, the quality of your link to the Internet and also how "fast" your web browser is.

As a RedButton user you would most likely connect from a Windows based machine, in which case the recent "The fastest Web browser" article published on MyBroadband.co.za may be of particular interest to you. In summary their results show Google Chrome to be the fastest, followed by Apple Safari and with the final podium spot being taken up by Firefox. Using one of these browsers may just improve your web experience.

If want to give any of the winners a test drive, here are the links:

1. Google Chrome
2. Apple Safari
3. Mozilla Firefox
   

Happy surfing,
Nico

New & Improved Hotspot Site Listing

We've been grinding away at various efforts to improve our services over the last few months. Some of these efforts are now coming into fruition and the first of these is the updated and standardized Hotspot Site Listing.

If you point your browser to www.redbutton.co.za and click on the Sites button you'll see something completely different to before.

Some of the enhancements include the following:

• Uniformity in display (e.g. logos have standard dimensions).
• The end user rate & any free wifi allowance is displayed (please see further commentary on this below).
  
• Essentials are displayed, such as the address, including city, province & country.
• Each store in a chain is individually displayed along with its above mentioned essentials.
  
• The status is displayed - this is whether the hotspot is online or not, note hotspots that are offline for longer than 3 days are automatically removed from RedButton Hotspot Site Listing to avoid pointing end users to locations they temporarily cannot use.
• Powered By field - RedButton uses the services of a variety of selected companies to provide you with the quality of service you deserve, in some cases we list some of these companies.
  

Some aspects to note:

• We only list publicly accessible hotspots, that is hotspots where you could realistically access the venue and use the service within the venue. We have many private hotspots but choose only to market their availability to residents that live within these sites.
• We have a limited number of authorized third party companies that use RedButton's services to power their hotspots, such sites are currently not listed.
  

Further commentary on end user rate - average cost per Megabyte

Please note that when a free wifi privilege is enabled at a hotspot, your average cost per Megabyte will never match the advertised end user rate, it will be lower.

Let's consider a particular example, at Constantia Village Mall you get 10MB free per day, so the first 10MB costs you nothing, thereafter you pay 60c per Megabyte. Now let's say on a particular day you use 20MB, given that the first 10MB was free, you would have used a total of 20MB and used up 600c worth of credit, so your effective average rate for that session is 600c / 20MB = 30c per MB. Similarly, if you only used 1MB after your first 10MB, your effective average cost per Megabyte is 60c / 11MB = 5.5c per Megabyte. Naturally your effective cost per Megabyte is a figure that changes over time.

Now all this may be confusing, and it is, so in the near future we will be providing you with a report in the Account Manager that calculates your average cost per Megabyte in real time. If you have ever used one of our hotspots with free wifi privileges, you might be surprised to find that you are paying a lot less than you think.

Thanks for listening,
Nico

Change in Discount Offering

Dear RedButton user,

We would like to inform you that our discount offering for credit card purchases has changed slightly as of Wednesday 15th July. Please note, we have not changed the usage costs at your favourite venue. These rates remain the same. We have however implemented a different range of credit card purchasing options.

The times are a changing and RedButton has had to make some improvements to our system which will be put into effect over the next few weeks, the first of which is the credit card purchasing options. These new changes will provide you with more accurate and up to the minute reporting on your usage in real time which will keep you more informed each time you log-in. Additionally, a new splash page/login window will also be implemented and we are sure that the additional convenience this will provide will make your experience with RedButton even more fulfilling.

Regarding our billing, you will notice that we have included new purchase options. Please remember though that the discount offering is only available through credit card purchases. We would also like to inform you that we are going to begin a series of "1-time discount specials" so please keep an eye on these in the future as we would not want you to miss out on them.

For further information on our new discount purchase offering please visit our website or login to the RedButton Account Manager. The new discount structure and purchase offering is as follows:

5, 000 credits - R 50

10, 000 credits - R 100

25, 000 credits - R 244 (2.5% discount)

50, 000 credits - R 475 (5% discount)

75, 000 credits - R 694 (7.5% discount)

100, 000 credits - R 900 (10% discount)

150, 000 credits - R 1275 (15% discount)

Thank you for the wonderful support. We thank you for your much valued loyalty. Loyalty, which will not go unrewarded (keep an eye on this space).

Kind regards,
RedButton