What constitutes a Formal as opposed to a Consumer Complaint in <b>ICASA's eyes</b>. This needs clarity from ICASA as all the trouble that MyADSL has taken to sort out this matters, hardly deserves to be added to the pile of consumer complaints. We are an organization and we deserve to treated as one. Do they need a constitution etc?
Telkoms answer is vague and generalizing and not in point form which I believe is what ICASA requested from them.
Points in question.
1. Line Rental. Telkom admits again the high cost of bandwidth on this topic. Surely this is an ISP cost and not a line rental cost. This point alone is going to be Telkoms downfall in our complaint as this is cross subsidisation. Considering this, what is the cost then that the ISP charges then? What is that for? Surely it’s for the bandwidth too. So which is it then? An ISP cost or a line rental cost as I am confused. Consider the line rental of ISDN as opposed to ADSL. Surely the costs cannot be so different. We are still using the same wire that ISDN or 56K is using. Only the exchange has a DSLAM on which this is joined. Does the DSLAM cost that much then?
A lot of unanswered questions on this topic.
2. No direct reply to the 3 gig issue. This and point 1 are the 2 main answers all ADSL users want, over and above port shaping and few others.
3. Modem Cost. This is another point that is going to catch Telkom out. Modems are now free apparently. Telkom has to be cross subsidising the Line rental to pay for this. Surely the customers who paid for modems should get a refund and the customers that bought their own modems should get a discount on line rental. I say line rental as I can only assume once again that this is what must be paying for the modems. No business gives anything away for free. It's just a marketing ploy. The cost is spread out over a few months from the line rental. It’s the only logical explanation. Telkom may not cross subsidise. This is a very unfair scenario, not only for the ADSL user who has a modem, but also for the suppliers of these modems.
4. The ADSL service. Telkom should furnish ICASA the Markinor's survey before the hearing so that it can be discussed free and openly. ICASA should request this survey from Telkom and ICASA should CC MyADSL a copy. As Telkom are basically calling us liars. So we need to defend ourselves properly on this point. IMO, I think Markinor gave Telkom the answers they wanted. Also keeping their client happy. BTW also another PSA company.
Anyway as any market survey is flawed as if they are to be true they need to take a bigger block of consumers. Taking 8% of 100% and deducing that 88% of the 100% are happy is hardly a democratic way of or statistically correct way of assuming anything. Also as Telkom stated that their are currently 16000 ADSL customers which is a 60% increase since it was 10000 before, so the survey once again is flawed. As the customer base has increased by 60% that means that the statistics supplied cover less than 8% of the base, but actually closer to 5% or 4%. So saying that 5 out of every 100 people have been interviewed makes a market research valid is ridiculous. Imagine if our politics were run like that. 5% can speak for the other 95%. Very flawed statistics IMO.
Another interesting way of looking at this survey is from the amount of members MyADSL has. I believe it to be about 1300 and growing. This represents about 12 to 13% of the original figure of 10000. So if Markinor interviewed 880 odd people in their survey, which is also less than the amount of people who are members of MyADSL. They deduced from their survey that 88% of the market was "happy", then that leaves about 12% that are not. That means that everyone that has a gripe about ADSL has somehow all “miracly” joined MyADSL. Well that would be impossible for everyone in SA to know that even MyADSL even exists and even to have the inclination to even want to join MyADSL. What I know most SA consumers is they couldn’t be bothered or care. And I’m sure Markinor has some surveys that prove this point clearly.
Were any experts interviewed?
What were the questions asked and the multiple choice answer provided for each question?
Who provided the questions?
<blockquote id="quote"><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">Each card in the DSLAM contains a number of ports. How many I don't recall<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">
I think it is 256.
<b><hr noshade size="1"></b><font size="2"><font color="red"><b>You can take Telkom out of the Post Office but you can't take the Post Office out of Telkom.</b></font id="red"></font id="size2">
