Troy Kelly

It has been a long time since I have even given a second thought to my run in with Vitelity Communications. A recent comment post to my blog however sparked an email conversation with a person representing themselves as the former CEO of Vitelity - Gregory “Greg” Giagnocavo.

Mr Giagnocavo posted a comment to my original posting asserting that Vitelity is infact doing well, and that the business has in fact doubled in the last year. Mr Giagnocavo also invited me to contact me directly via his email address oneworld@webname.com which has a from name of OneWorld Networks.

In our email conversation, Mr Giagnocavo expressed a desire to remove or at least be able to reply to negative comments about the company he had invested in, and at a time operated as their CEO.

This is obviously a good idea, given the ammount of traffic I get from search engines for the keyword Vitelity.

The contact from the former CEO of a company that not only cost me time and money, but also so blatantly committed fraud prompted me to do a little research on him. I found a few posts from the email address that Mr Giagnocavo used to both post in my blog and conduct the conversation with me. The posts were concerning a company that he is the current CEO of - US National Telecom (formally Yi Wan Group, Inc.).

Highly speculative investment, but this stock is so low at 1/5 of a penny. If it even goes to a 1 cent, that would be 5 X your investment! And if it got back to ten cents, that would be 50X your investment.  Check it out at www.pinksheets.com Symbol USNT.

As you can see from one of his posts above - Mr Giagnocavo is obviously trying to drum up stock interest in his own company. He does not however represent to the reader who he is - and what information he is using to make the statement. This is something that I am sure would be of interest to the SEC.

All this said - this could simply be somebody spoofing themselvs as Mr Giagnocavo. None of his emails have come from official company addresses, they are coming from webname.com. But, as there is no advertised contact address for Mr Giagnocavo - and it would not make sense for somebody to pretend to be him and try and help his company - I am going to suggest it is safe to assume the contact was from him.

All this fits with the prior conduct of Vitelity - underhanded, skating the line of illegal misconduct and very misrepresentative. More then ever now I suggest that a good hard look be given to competiting carriers before any investment of time or money be made in any company associated with Mr Giagnocavo.

Optus no longer accepts complaints via phone. One can only assume that it is because of the sheer volume of complaints that they must be receiving with the ongoing 3G network issues they are experiencing.

Should you need to complain to Optus, I can only strongly suggest that you don’t even bother calling to complain. Ensure that you have previously complained when you have had issues and have called support, and that those details have been received - but when it comes to the official complaint - simply write a letter and post it to the address below.

OPTUS COMPLAINTS
PO BOX 360
Salisbury South
South Australia 5106

Optus CEO Paul O'Sullivan

Today Optus CEO Paul O’Sullivan announced a major upgrade to the Optus coverage network. In light of some recent network features being added that may have affected several customers in a small unpopulated area of the country, Optus has released a new coverage map detailing it’s new improved 3G coverage.

Having committed $AU315 million to upgrade the network to better service their priority markets by December 2009, Mr O’Sullivan said “Decisions were made after a recent major outage to fast track the development of the new network coverage plan that will better service the customers that we feel are critical”.

Fending off claims that there are major issues with the Optus network that have caused over a million customers to have little or no mobile telephone service since Friday last week Mr O’Sullivan said “Obviously with the new coverage target this is no longer an issue”.

The Newly Updated Optus Coverage Map

It is yet to be seen if the ongoing network issues that has been plaging the telco can be resolved with their new solution to adapt their network coverage. After releasing a statement today that they were working closly with the vendor of their 3G network (Nokia Siemens Networks) to resolve issues, when asked why the issues were still ongoing 7 days since detection and after obviously affecting both 2G and 3G customers an Optus spokesperson waved his had in my face and said “There is no network outage… everything is resolved.”

We are happy to report that there is no longer a network outage, and everything is resolved. However, please don’t try and call or txt my mobile phone - for some reason it’s not working.

[UPDATE: Please see response from Trevor Johns in comments]

I decided that seeing as we were shutting down one of our older servers, one that has housed my blog for a few years… I would spend a bit of time upgrading it. Hopefully give my self more motivation to post again.

In that process, I decided to go with blogger.com - initially I thought this was a good idea! Easy to use interface, uses my google account to log in, less server load as it’s all HTML on our server.

The problem that I have though - is I have an existing blog. Not a super prolific one, but I get a couple of hundred uniques a day. I would like to keep my content that, for whatever reason, seems of interested to some people.

Blogger.com currently has no way of importing data. Of course, there is an import in the Draft version of blogger, but that is useless - as it is only intended to import other blogger blogs XML backups.

There are a heap of scripts out there that can help push your posts back in to your blog via the blogger api - again, whilst the work that the coders have done on them is fantastic - bloggers api is… crap.

As part of their measures to fight spam, or whatever… The api allows your code to post about 22 blog entries in any given 24 hour period. It then silently drops the other posts. It responds with an affirmative response code for each call to the api - giving your application the impression that it has posted. The reality however is that the words that you have poured out of your heart and into the keyboard have simply been forwarded to /dev/null.

All of this has essentially prompted me to upgrade properly and move across to the new server. So, here my new blog sits… using a generic template until I have time. On a shiny new hosting slot on our server. And there blogger sits - listed on WhatShitsMe.com.