nanonyous
Expert Member
I doubt anyone from Telkom will actually read this, or if they do, I doubt that they will care, but that doesn't mean I can't vent my frustration. This is going to be a long read, so feel free to skip over it; pretty much all of it consists of rage and dissatisfaction with what I consider to be criminal practices on the part of Telkom.
I was 7 when we got our first colour computer at home. It was a 486 and had Windows 95 on it. My mom got it because she needed to be able to use Word, and by the time, Windows 3.1 was outdated. After a few months, Telkom finally began offering dial-up internet in our area, and we signed up with Intekom as our ISP.
Things went great at first - limited as my knowledge surrounding internet was at the time, I more-or-less understood the kilobit to kilobyte conversion system and what the limits of our hardware and our services were. We had a Creative Labs 28.8kbps Modem Blaster! back then. It promised to provide better speeds than any competing brand right there on the box, and I believed them. I'd dial up, singing a duet with the modem as it chimed and buzzed away, and Windows would throw a little popup to say that we were connected at 28.8kbps!
Things were fast. My friends, still on their lowly 14.4kbps modems, were all jealous of the speeds I we were able to achieve, and I, being the self-centered geek I've always been, was proud of this. Eventually the modem died and we replaced it with a 56kbps model. Telkom forewarned us that we mightn't be able to achieve speeds any greater than 48kbps on our line due to the old hardware and poor copper quality, but I didn't care, we just needed to get our connection back.
Lo and behold, we connected at the full 56kbps and were able to get 7.2kb/s downstream.
We had this connection for years on end, beyond when Telkom acquired Intekom, well into their R7-a-call system. I'd connect at 7pm at night, much to the annoyance of my dad, and disconnect the next morning by 7am. I wasn't going to school since I was taken out when I was 11, and spent all night every night awake browsing CG forums, watching in anticipation as some great-yet-unknown artist's 250kb jpeg slowly loaded in, line by line.
Eventually, ADSL came out, and despite knowing how beneficial it would be to us to have this in stead of the dialup, purely from a cost-effectiveness perspective, I couldn't convince my parents to make the change over to it. Our telephone bill ranged anything from R1.2k to R2k at a time when you could still buy a small shopping bag full of Chappies for R10.
Things began slowing down. The glorious 7.2kb/s average download speeds I was used to getting gradually became slower. 7.0kb/s. 6.7kb/s. 6.2kb/s. 5.3kb/s. 4.2kb/s. Eventually, I was fortunate to get 3kb/s average download speeds. The modem was syncing at 56.6kbps just fine, and Telkom assured me I should be achieving full speed on the connection. They'd send out a technician to investigate, and he'd find that the line was providing us with less than 3kb/s speeds and would log a fault, but nothing would ever come of it other than a bill for a call-out that didn't result in a logged problem. I was only a teenager, but that didn't stop me from being passive-aggressive on the phone with the inept tech support staff trying to convince me that there is no problem, and that when my modem is stating it's connecting at 56.6kbps, that actually means I'm supposed to get 3kb/s, because 56.6 divided by 8 is obviously 3, not somewhere around 7.
My dad passed away and I was finally able to convince my mom to believe me and take a careful look at the maths I had worked out years before surrounding a migration to ADSL from Dialup. The internet had left us behind a long time ago and sites became practically unusable at the mere 3kb/s we were working with; most web developers simply didn't care to optimize their sites for those with slow connections. We made the change, paid R500 for a modem-router and the R450 for the installation and connection fee.
This didn't happen a matter of days after I phoned to request the upgrade, of course. Back then, 512kbps was still the best ADSL we could get in the country and Telkom had a supposedly massive backlog of calls to attend to. I knew this was a lie, as Telkom were perfectly happy to barge into our yard and stick a ladder up against the telephone pole planted in our yard that serviced the four homes for that quadrant of the block; their technicians also often parked next to the sidewalk for hours on end not far from our home every other day. I knew this because, not being in school, I occupied large portions of my day cycling, and would pass them every time to get to my route. The driver in the bakkie would be asleep, sometimes with a notebook covering his face, other times with his head against the window.
I was told, phoning in for the upgrade, that there was a lead time of at least 3 months before a technician could be assigned to upgrade our line. I threatened to take photos of the bakkies and to publicize them to demonstrate that they were not being honest. Within the same call, I was told that they'd be able to get a technician out the next week to upgrade the line; I told them this was unacceptable, the technicians are parking in their bakkies at least every two days near my house and are not working for hours on end. They sent someone out a day later.
I watched the technician, I watched what he was doing. We still had the old phone connectors with the big prongs on it, looking like some kind of beige-icecream telephonic trident plugging into a socket on our wall. The technician told us these wouldn't work for ADSL. I knew this to be another lie, but didn't say anything as he mentioned he could replace the wall sockets free of charge and change the heads on all our cables free of charge also. I agreed, he did so and he provided us with two complimentary POTS filters, included in the upgrade fee. By the end of the day, we had ADSL.
Things worked great. The modem synced at the promised 384kbps and I was getting 43kb/s average download speeds, despite being forewarned that the line service level was on a best-effort basis and that there may be daytime shaping. Having just learned of TCP overhead before getting the connection, I was quite pleased with the results.
Our phone bill came down from its R1.2k minimum to just R700 or so a month; my mom was greatly pleased. She now not only had access to the internet whenever she wanted to access it, but things were fast. They were in fact easily 13 times as fast as what we were used to. We did not however come off unscathed, as the technician who had promised the changing of the wall sockets, heads on the cables and the POTS filters would all be free of charge, included in the upgrade fee, had attached an itemized invoice for every thing that was done. R80 per wall socket, of which there were two to replace. R20 per head on the cables, of which there were 6 to replace. R48 per POTS filter, of which we were provided with two.
I phoned, I explained in detail what was done, I informed the accounts department that if they insisted on charging us for what we were assured by the technician was free of charge, I would report them for violations of the CPA, and gave them the option to either come and take back their POTS filters and reverse the changes the technician had made, at their expense, or to declare the invoice null. They opted to do the latter after significant argument.
Years later, some 512kbps users are given a free trial of 1mbps. 1mbps becomes another access level at a significant premium.
Things begin slowing down again.
Where we used to get 43kb/s, we began getting 38kb/s. Then we dropped down to 35kb/s. Seeing a pattern emerging again, I contacted Telkom sooner rather than later and they sent out a technician with a more fancy modem than ours; he showed and explained to me what the SNR, attenuation and such meant. He told me that we were not only able to sync at the full 384kbps, but could in fact sync at 1mbps if we wanted to, the line quality was more than good enough for that and we lived only a few dozen meters from the exchange. He couldn't determine what was wrong and said he would log a fault with Telkom.
We received our case number and the case was almost closed almost immediately thereafter. I awaited the bill for an unnecessary call-out, yet fortunately, one never came.
32kb/s. 28kb/s. 14kb/s.
It had taken no more than half a year, after about two years of having ADSL, for our connection to drop to less than a quarter of the speed we had before. We'd have tech support perform their magically non-magical tests from their side only to determine that we're syncing at 384kbps, so there's quite obviously no problems anywhere.
We'd since changed from using the Intekom branded accounts to Telkom, seeing as Telkom's ADSL data packages were bugged and would more often than not not disconnect you if you exceeded your cap but did not cycle your authed session. 15-25gb a month was not uncommon; I considered this my way of getting back at Telkom for their ineptitude, and so did many others. If they were going to rip us off, we would do what we could to get out of our money what we thought was just.
Eventually Telkom announced they would cycle accounts that had exceeded their cap; this was met with complaints logged with ICASA since it was against regulations for an ISP to 'cut off access' of a user, to which Telkom's 'strategic' response was that they were not cutting off users, they were simply cycling the sessions for maintenance purposes, and that in cases where a user had exceeded their allotted data, they had the option of accessing the Telkom Internet portal to service a topup, so they weren't technically being cut off from the internet.
I was 7 when we got our first colour computer at home. It was a 486 and had Windows 95 on it. My mom got it because she needed to be able to use Word, and by the time, Windows 3.1 was outdated. After a few months, Telkom finally began offering dial-up internet in our area, and we signed up with Intekom as our ISP.
Things went great at first - limited as my knowledge surrounding internet was at the time, I more-or-less understood the kilobit to kilobyte conversion system and what the limits of our hardware and our services were. We had a Creative Labs 28.8kbps Modem Blaster! back then. It promised to provide better speeds than any competing brand right there on the box, and I believed them. I'd dial up, singing a duet with the modem as it chimed and buzzed away, and Windows would throw a little popup to say that we were connected at 28.8kbps!
Things were fast. My friends, still on their lowly 14.4kbps modems, were all jealous of the speeds I we were able to achieve, and I, being the self-centered geek I've always been, was proud of this. Eventually the modem died and we replaced it with a 56kbps model. Telkom forewarned us that we mightn't be able to achieve speeds any greater than 48kbps on our line due to the old hardware and poor copper quality, but I didn't care, we just needed to get our connection back.
Lo and behold, we connected at the full 56kbps and were able to get 7.2kb/s downstream.
We had this connection for years on end, beyond when Telkom acquired Intekom, well into their R7-a-call system. I'd connect at 7pm at night, much to the annoyance of my dad, and disconnect the next morning by 7am. I wasn't going to school since I was taken out when I was 11, and spent all night every night awake browsing CG forums, watching in anticipation as some great-yet-unknown artist's 250kb jpeg slowly loaded in, line by line.
Eventually, ADSL came out, and despite knowing how beneficial it would be to us to have this in stead of the dialup, purely from a cost-effectiveness perspective, I couldn't convince my parents to make the change over to it. Our telephone bill ranged anything from R1.2k to R2k at a time when you could still buy a small shopping bag full of Chappies for R10.
Things began slowing down. The glorious 7.2kb/s average download speeds I was used to getting gradually became slower. 7.0kb/s. 6.7kb/s. 6.2kb/s. 5.3kb/s. 4.2kb/s. Eventually, I was fortunate to get 3kb/s average download speeds. The modem was syncing at 56.6kbps just fine, and Telkom assured me I should be achieving full speed on the connection. They'd send out a technician to investigate, and he'd find that the line was providing us with less than 3kb/s speeds and would log a fault, but nothing would ever come of it other than a bill for a call-out that didn't result in a logged problem. I was only a teenager, but that didn't stop me from being passive-aggressive on the phone with the inept tech support staff trying to convince me that there is no problem, and that when my modem is stating it's connecting at 56.6kbps, that actually means I'm supposed to get 3kb/s, because 56.6 divided by 8 is obviously 3, not somewhere around 7.
My dad passed away and I was finally able to convince my mom to believe me and take a careful look at the maths I had worked out years before surrounding a migration to ADSL from Dialup. The internet had left us behind a long time ago and sites became practically unusable at the mere 3kb/s we were working with; most web developers simply didn't care to optimize their sites for those with slow connections. We made the change, paid R500 for a modem-router and the R450 for the installation and connection fee.
This didn't happen a matter of days after I phoned to request the upgrade, of course. Back then, 512kbps was still the best ADSL we could get in the country and Telkom had a supposedly massive backlog of calls to attend to. I knew this was a lie, as Telkom were perfectly happy to barge into our yard and stick a ladder up against the telephone pole planted in our yard that serviced the four homes for that quadrant of the block; their technicians also often parked next to the sidewalk for hours on end not far from our home every other day. I knew this because, not being in school, I occupied large portions of my day cycling, and would pass them every time to get to my route. The driver in the bakkie would be asleep, sometimes with a notebook covering his face, other times with his head against the window.
I was told, phoning in for the upgrade, that there was a lead time of at least 3 months before a technician could be assigned to upgrade our line. I threatened to take photos of the bakkies and to publicize them to demonstrate that they were not being honest. Within the same call, I was told that they'd be able to get a technician out the next week to upgrade the line; I told them this was unacceptable, the technicians are parking in their bakkies at least every two days near my house and are not working for hours on end. They sent someone out a day later.
I watched the technician, I watched what he was doing. We still had the old phone connectors with the big prongs on it, looking like some kind of beige-icecream telephonic trident plugging into a socket on our wall. The technician told us these wouldn't work for ADSL. I knew this to be another lie, but didn't say anything as he mentioned he could replace the wall sockets free of charge and change the heads on all our cables free of charge also. I agreed, he did so and he provided us with two complimentary POTS filters, included in the upgrade fee. By the end of the day, we had ADSL.
Things worked great. The modem synced at the promised 384kbps and I was getting 43kb/s average download speeds, despite being forewarned that the line service level was on a best-effort basis and that there may be daytime shaping. Having just learned of TCP overhead before getting the connection, I was quite pleased with the results.
Our phone bill came down from its R1.2k minimum to just R700 or so a month; my mom was greatly pleased. She now not only had access to the internet whenever she wanted to access it, but things were fast. They were in fact easily 13 times as fast as what we were used to. We did not however come off unscathed, as the technician who had promised the changing of the wall sockets, heads on the cables and the POTS filters would all be free of charge, included in the upgrade fee, had attached an itemized invoice for every thing that was done. R80 per wall socket, of which there were two to replace. R20 per head on the cables, of which there were 6 to replace. R48 per POTS filter, of which we were provided with two.
I phoned, I explained in detail what was done, I informed the accounts department that if they insisted on charging us for what we were assured by the technician was free of charge, I would report them for violations of the CPA, and gave them the option to either come and take back their POTS filters and reverse the changes the technician had made, at their expense, or to declare the invoice null. They opted to do the latter after significant argument.
Years later, some 512kbps users are given a free trial of 1mbps. 1mbps becomes another access level at a significant premium.
Things begin slowing down again.
Where we used to get 43kb/s, we began getting 38kb/s. Then we dropped down to 35kb/s. Seeing a pattern emerging again, I contacted Telkom sooner rather than later and they sent out a technician with a more fancy modem than ours; he showed and explained to me what the SNR, attenuation and such meant. He told me that we were not only able to sync at the full 384kbps, but could in fact sync at 1mbps if we wanted to, the line quality was more than good enough for that and we lived only a few dozen meters from the exchange. He couldn't determine what was wrong and said he would log a fault with Telkom.
We received our case number and the case was almost closed almost immediately thereafter. I awaited the bill for an unnecessary call-out, yet fortunately, one never came.
32kb/s. 28kb/s. 14kb/s.
It had taken no more than half a year, after about two years of having ADSL, for our connection to drop to less than a quarter of the speed we had before. We'd have tech support perform their magically non-magical tests from their side only to determine that we're syncing at 384kbps, so there's quite obviously no problems anywhere.
We'd since changed from using the Intekom branded accounts to Telkom, seeing as Telkom's ADSL data packages were bugged and would more often than not not disconnect you if you exceeded your cap but did not cycle your authed session. 15-25gb a month was not uncommon; I considered this my way of getting back at Telkom for their ineptitude, and so did many others. If they were going to rip us off, we would do what we could to get out of our money what we thought was just.
Eventually Telkom announced they would cycle accounts that had exceeded their cap; this was met with complaints logged with ICASA since it was against regulations for an ISP to 'cut off access' of a user, to which Telkom's 'strategic' response was that they were not cutting off users, they were simply cycling the sessions for maintenance purposes, and that in cases where a user had exceeded their allotted data, they had the option of accessing the Telkom Internet portal to service a topup, so they weren't technically being cut off from the internet.
at a telephone booth in town, they reconnected our services. At the end of the month we received a bill for the connection fee of the ADSL as well as a cancellation fee for our phone/ADSL services, in addition to our normal bill, for which we were double-billed.
and like, you after much venting, I have been stable for 4 years now (touch wood) line syncs at 10mb down and 1mb up and is only limited by my provider. I wish you luck in getting it sorted, it sounds like a backhaul/overloaded exchange issue to me.
