Ask the Telkom CEO your question

rpm

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Hi folks

A nice opportunity has availed itself through a new feature from the business edition of The Times, Sowetan and Daily Dispatch. Users get the chance to ask questions to the CEO directly which they will then answer to be published in these newspapers. This is interestingly enough also something which we started on a few weeks back, but the companies seem a bit scared of us :D By collaborating with these newspapers we spread the net far wider…

To kick it off, can you please post questions you want Telkom’s acting CEO, Reuben September, to answer. The questions will be filtered (not edited), so try to make it as interesting and penetrating as possible.

Regards,

RPM
 
When is Telkom going to give uncapped Internet services, in the same spirit of dialup, at a reasonable, cost effective price, which all ADSL, WiMAX and Satellite subscribers could subscribe too?
 
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What is Telkom's mark-up on a STM-1 line from Johannesburg to London?
 
The landing of the EASSy cable in South Africa and Telkom’s signing of the Alcatel-Lucent supply contract is widely viewed as a point of disagreement between Telkom and the Department of Communications.

--Do you feel that EASSy should be allowed to land in South Africa?
--Have you been asked by the Department of Communications to withdrew (or backtrack) from the suppliers agreement with Alcatel-Lucent?
--Do you think only cables which are majority South African (or African) should be allowed to land in South Africa?
 
and penetrating as possible

Yeah, seems only fair as we have been on the receiving side of severe penetration over the years.

Regret unable to formulate a question to Telkom without swearing.

Besides it would just be sidestepped in the age-old Telkom tradition.
 
How long ago was the sat-3 and LL costs recovered?
 
Q: Dear Mr September, it will soon be November, when will the de facto wired fixed line monopoly, the only ADSL network operator in South Africa, bother to fully comply with !CASA's ADSL Regulations?

Q: Dear Mr September, I am one of your company's prisoners [aka customers], I suppose I should kiss your feet since I am fortunate enough to have HomeDSL313.6kbits/s, and cannot upgrade due to the copper distance being too long, however I would like to know why your company refuses to allow me to replace your pathetic HomeDSL313.6kbits/s service with your company's WiMax service which is supposedly 512kbits/s and allegedly available in my area? - the reason given by your minions is that I am not allowed to have WiMax since ADSL is available in my area, although most of my neighbours cannot get ADSL due to the niggly copper distance issue.

Q: Dear Mr September, do you not agree that your company, the de facto wired fixed line monopoly, is in fact the exact opposite of what a "Proudly South African" company should be, and how do you justify your company's exorbitant pricing, atrocious service levels, and shockingly low copper penetration rate?

Q: Dear Mr September, why are you still acting the part of CEO so many months after the former CEO was forced to """resign"""?

Q: Dear Mr September, is it not a fact that [searchforum]Steve "Chinese Maths" Hayward[/searchforum] is confounded by basic arithmetic, or is there some other reason why you promoted him after he had already resigned?

Q: Dear Mr September, about one of your company's many anti-competitive practices, why is it that your company has a considerably larger backhaul link installation backlog of links for Vodacom compared to the much smaller backlog of links for MTN, surely as customers, both Vodacom and MTN should receive equal priority, so is your company trying to tart itself up for its potential buyer, i.e. MTN?

Q: Dear Mr September, about one of your company's many anti-competitive practices, why are independent ADSL ISPs getting the runaround when placing wholesale ADSL Resell installation orders with your company as reported in the MyBroadband.co.za article "ADSL ISPs suffer at hands of Telkom"?

Q: Dear Mr September, do you realise that your company has the most hated brand and corporate identity of all South African companies and that consumers would rather get tied into iBurst's laughable 40MB per month 2 year contract instead of getting ADSL from your company?

Q: Dear Mr September, why is your company still operating illegally by failing to keep an up-to-date Register of Members, as required by the Companies Act [as amended]?

Q: Dear Mr September, apart from Poison Ivy at the Department of Communistications, who else holds A & B share certificates in an attempt to avoid being identified via the CompuShare list of shareholders that does not list A & B share certificate holders?

Q: Dear Mr September, considering that your company is infamously known for its monopolistic ineptness & incompetence, where your company's customers are charged exorbitant pricing with a business model that is based on the exact opposite of economies of scale, and the fact that your company has impressively positioned itself as the most hated South African company, as well as the fact that your company has so far failed to deliver its empty promises of providing services such as SHDSL [promised on 2005-11-01] and ADSL2+, leaving the majority of your ADSL customer-base with pathetic downlink speeds of considerably less than 384kbits/s, do you really think your company's new IPTV division and Pay-TV licence will be profitable and capable of competing, where IPTV requires considerably more bandwidth for high quality IPTV multicasts using the existing copper Local Loop infrastructure?
 
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Do you not feel ashamed at the way Telkom is exploiting the South African consumer with your high profit making on such a small section of the population.
Are you not Ashamed that less significant countries have proper real high speed broadband with much more or no cap at far less cost to the consumer.
Are you not ashamed that you never realised your mandate for having a telecoms monopoly for such a long time
Are you really proud of our South Africa Telecoms achievements re bringing effective and cheap telecoms to the SA community.

When will Telkom DESIST!
 
When can we expect fair (to the customer) pricing from Telkom?***

*** When pigs fly is not acceptable as an answer
 
Reuben: Surely you are aware of the disadvantage at which you have placed South Africa in the global telecoms arena and how that has filtered through to the rest of the economy stunting the growth of South Africa as a whole in todays digital world, yet you still fly under the " Proudly South African" banner, are you ashamed of Telkom?

And to Lulu:

How much I hate you (lol).
 
Q. What other anti-consumer schemes do you have in the pipeline to ensure your monopoly's strangle hold on the South African telecommunications sector? Oh, and how do you sleep at night?
 
When do you see your exclusive access to the SAT-3 cable coming to an end? Further to this, what steps have Telkom taken to apply open-to-all, cost-based access to the SAT-3 cable as envisioned by the Minister of Communications in her May budget speech?
 
When can we expect to see cost justified reasons for your arguments for the current price structures? In particular charges relating to SAT-3 and local ADSL access?
 
(Q1) Because of the distance from my residence to the exchange, i'm only able to get 512kbps ADSL as a maximum speed. What are you doing to make sure that all Telkom customers are able to get 4mbps connectivity? In other words, have you put in place infrastructure plans that will now accomodate everyone? And please do not tell me ADSL2+ because that does not help us, it will only benefit those close to the exchange and i will still be sitting with my 512kbps.

(Q2) Now that Neotel is almost upon us, what kind of special services and/or price reductions will Telkom offer us to be competitive with Neotel?
 
The enormous profits that Telkom is making every year in the name of shareholder responsibility are largely at the expense of consumers and it is clear that Telkom does not have much of a corporate social conscience. How does Telkom weigh up social responsibility against shareholder responsibility?
 
Mr September, how is TELKOM dealing with the shame that they are possibly the single biggest hurdle along to road to greater economic growth for South Africa and what are TELKOM pro-actively doing to rectify this?

The standard Letlape answer of ' TELKOM is continually reviewing it's pricing, bla bla bla does not cut it. If you answer with that, then you may ****, sir!
 
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