A message to Telkom

How could you have invoked the CPA in 2004 or whenever ADSL had come out? (refering to being charged for the sockets and such that were replaced)

Let me read further...
 
I think some of the people at Telkom hate you and someone is purposefully throtling you're line, maybe it was someone you were passive aggressive with?

Oh, and another thing, this is a new modem, not the same one from way back? Anyway, I find our modem sometimes slows down (don't know if its a buffer thing or something with the firmware), but a restart normally makes it run fast again.

Regards,

SSB
 
biometrics: tl;dr is "telkom, I mad, reduce costs or at least fix your local infrastructure"


supersunbird: These issues affected our neighbour directly across the street from us who connected to the same exchange, as well as the people that lived next to us that ran a from-home IT business of some sort. These issues have also affected the aforementioned friends that lived here in Napier for some years before us, so they're having to deal with practically no bandwidth during the day on weekdays as well, this where their ISP is Mweb, not Openweb.

It is also a new modem, yes. A few months ago our ADSL just went dead for about a week (many reference numbers, promises of tech support coming out and checking, eventually managed to get ahold of friends and tested the modem-router there only to find it gave the same problems). We replaced it then with a D-Link 2600U (the old router-modem being a Planet ADW-4300 of which the modem component alone 'broke'). I didn't include that because tech support was, at that point, being helpful, even if the technicians only came out after I got nasty towards the fourth day, after they'd lost about four reference numbers.

What I did find kind of baffling, thinking back on it now, is that the technician didn't bring out one of their own modems to test the line with to determine whether it was a modem fault...
 
You sure have a lot of time for all this typing. lol
 
500kpm+
And it's not like I was able to get anything else done online when I typed that up.

*edit so as not to bump unnecessarily* Seeing as it's now Monday and I'm experiencing the same issues as last week, again, after a weekend of flying speeds, I guess it's time to get the aggromobile out of the garage and get her warmed up...
 
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nanonyous said:
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.
Click to expand...

I went through the same sort of evolution from Dial-Up to ADSl, I eventually got fed up with ever slower Dial-Up connection so I migrated to ADSL, now I'm experiencing the same pattern all over again. Thinking of going for a 1MB Mweb uncapped ADSL line
 
To OP: Congratulations on writing this - I hope this gets noticed, and even stickied by the MyBB Forum mods.

To the "QQ - I won't read it - It's too long" people - You will never get anywhere in life. Have you ever heard of something called "A book" ? How about "A magazine" ? "A newspaper" maybe?

All these forms of media contain "words" (These things you're reading now made up of 'letters') that generally inform the reader. Try read something some time that is longer than a single page... I have even split this reply up into several small segments to make it easier for your type to read.

That is all.
 
So shortly after typing this up, I started up a new stink with Telkom.
I was contacted back by phone and mail, and was told that they would look into the issue and that I would be contacted regarding any findings/would be notified once the issue is resolved; this was about two and a half weeks ago. It seems that as of this Monday, things are somewhat back to normal, but I've not been contacted. Giving this till this coming Monday to see if things remain normal and if so, following up on my calls to see what's going on.

Haven't yet contacted our friends to find out if their issues are also resolved.

*edit* Above message is from 31st of Jan, Tuesday. Today, 1st of February, things are worthlessly slow again. Who wants to place bets the congestion tapered off as people on capped accounts got capped, consuming the remainder of their data packages on downloads before month-end?

Latencies, at least, are still within normal ranges. Data simply isn't making its way through, however.
 
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nanonyous said:
So shortly after typing this up, I started up a new stink with Telkom.
I was contacted back by phone and mail, and was told that they would look into the issue and that I would be contacted regarding any findings/would be notified once the issue is resolved; this was about two and a half weeks ago. It seems that as of this Monday, things are somewhat back to normal, but I've not been contacted. Giving this till this coming Monday to see if things remain normal and if so, following up on my calls to see what's going on.

Haven't yet contacted our friends to find out if their issues are also resolved.
Click to expand...

I think I have just found my new best friend :twisted:

I am also currently in "discussions" with Telkom... I had a meeting with head office last week, and another one tomorrow.

interesting times....
 
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