Help! Telkom sim card

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PAYBACK

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Hi guys,

Recently bought an April FREEME R499 deal. A lot of value for R499 but in terms of quality I feel I might have shot myself in the foot.

Bought one card about ten days ago for my son and on this card I have never been able to get more than 1.4Mbps average in fully covered 4 bar TELKOM area. Photo comparison below can attest to this.



Adding insult to injury have been given run around by TELKOM help line over past few days. I was told that store where I bought card from gave me a "non-LTE" sim card and I should go back to store to get sim swap. Yesterday spent an hour in store only to get told that was not true and sales person tried to spin some rubbish and show me that I should connect to the international MTN and VODACOM "roaming partners" which effectively saw my phone not work at all. Reverted back to old settings and when "working" jumping between EDGE (YES EDGE in 2019) mostly 3G and sometimes LTE.

I am beginning to think that all this "value" for R499 is because TELKOM know that current infrastructure will never see the clients ever get close to using this supposed value because there is never signal for customers to consume it.

Kicker is I bought another line on the 29th and canceled my long standing MTN contract.
 
Last edited:
PAYBACK said:
Hi guys,

Recently bought a April FREEME R499 deal. A lot of value for R499 but in terms of quality I feel I might have shot myself in the foot.

Bought one card about ten days ago for my son and on this card I have never been able to get more than 1.4Mbps average in fully covered 4 bar TELKOM area. Photo comparison below can attest to this.



Adding insult to injury have been given run around by TELKOM help line over past few days. I was told that store where I bought card from gave me a "non-LTE" sim card and I should go back to store to get sim swap. Yesterday spent an hour in store only to get told that was not true and sale person tried to spin some rubbish and show me that I should connect to the international MTN and VODACOM "roaming partners" which effectively saw my phone not work at all. Reverted back to old settings and when "working" jumping between EDGE (YES EDGE in 2019) mostly 3G and sometimes LTE.

I am beginning to think that all this "value" for R499 is because TELKOM know that current infrastructure will never see the clients ever get close to using this supposed value because there is never signal for customers to consume it.

Kicker is I bought another line on the 29th and canceled my long standing MTN contract.
Click to expand...
Which phone is your son using? Possibly the hardware is outdated? It does show lte though.
Try set it to 3g, roaming on, Mtn as the network.
 
marioat1 said:
Which phone is your son using? Possibly the hardware is outdated? It does show lte though.
Try set it to 3g, roaming on, Mtn as the network.
Click to expand...

iPhone7+ . Check picture that is phone on left full signal. Have taken it off AUTOMATIC network mode and tried to select MTN and VODACOM. Does not connect to either network.
 
Last edited:
marioat1 said:
Try the roaming settings put up
Click to expand...

If you talking about sticky post updating carrier settings automatically defaults to those. Phone does not allow any other carrier other than TELKOM if I try choose manually. If I force international roaming partners to either MTN or Vodacom it gives me no service.
 
try it again when you have a full battery .
maybe its in battery saving mode which would slow down whole phone ?

try resetting network settings in settings.
try swopping sims to eliminate hardware issues.
 
PAYBACK said:
Hi guys,

Recently bought an April FREEME R499 deal. A lot of value for R499 but in terms of quality I feel I might have shot myself in the foot.

Bought one card about ten days ago for my son and on this card I have never been able to get more than 1.4Mbps average in fully covered 4 bar TELKOM area. Photo comparison below can attest to this.



Adding insult to injury have been given run around by TELKOM help line over past few days. I was told that store where I bought card from gave me a "non-LTE" sim card and I should go back to store to get sim swap. Yesterday spent an hour in store only to get told that was not true and sales person tried to spin some rubbish and show me that I should connect to the international MTN and VODACOM "roaming partners" which effectively saw my phone not work at all. Reverted back to old settings and when "working" jumping between EDGE (YES EDGE in 2019) mostly 3G and sometimes LTE.

I am beginning to think that all this "value" for R499 is because TELKOM know that current infrastructure will never see the clients ever get close to using this supposed value because there is never signal for customers to consume it.

Kicker is I bought another line on the 29th and canceled my long standing MTN contract.
Click to expand...
I recently had a similar issue while roaming the countryside with a FREEME. Countless calls logged with Telkom. Realised that very, very few Telkom employees actually understand what they are supposed to sell and support. Money down the drain / schoolfees paid.
 
PAYBACK said:
If you talking about sticky post updating carrier settings automatically defaults to those. Phone does not allow any other carrier other than TELKOM if I try choose manually. If I force international roaming partners to either MTN or Vodacom it gives me no service.
Click to expand...
Set the phone to 3g only, then select mtn as network, it won't work on lte. That's the current roaming agreement condition.
 
Telkom runs LTE on 2 different bands.
Older phones don't support 2300mhz.
So LTE will fall back to 1800mhz in most cases on older phones.
Basically 2300mhz has 20mhz available spectrum and 2x20mhz for CA.
1800mhz only has 10mhz spectrum available.
The other possibility is the one phone is roaming on Vodacom.
 
Well I see you are using the fast.com Speed test which means you are using Netflix servers and FreeMe 20Gb includes LIT Video and that caps your speed between 1-2 mbps on Telkom’s video partners which Netflix is one of them. So the network is thinking you are streaming so it’s capping the speed.

Try to use the Speedtest.net app
 
William1102 said:
Well I see you are using the fast.com Speed test which means you are using Netflix servers and FreeMe 20Gb includes LIT Video and that caps your speed between 1-2 mbps on Telkom’s video partners which Netflix is one of them. So the network is thinking you are streaming so it’s capping the speed.

Try to use the Speedtest.net app
Click to expand...
So why does the newer phone show 40?
 
This is a issue with the LTE bands. Lets say phone on the left is connected to Band 3 and phone on the right is connected to Band 40. Both devices right next to each other and is probably connected to the exact same tower but Band 3 is congested and band 40 is not congested.

Now lets swap the simcards around and do the same test again. I bet phone on the right will still keep the same speeds even when the sim is swapped. It supports band 40 and the phone preferred to connect to it. You can also get cases where the phone supports Band3,1 and 40 and supports B1+B3 and B40+B40 LTE-A but chooses to use B3 LTE only but tower can do LTE-Advanced. It all depends on the signal and what band the phones LTE radio decided to stick too. It gets complicated and on mobile phones it's hard to force a band but with a router you can use a band tool to force the router to use specific bands or modes which helps.

If you had to put the sim in a B315, B525 or B618 and forced bands at the same location you got 1.4Mbps and then started forcing bands you would see it's not a network, sim or package issue but a device issue.
 
William1102 said:
Well I see you are using the fast.com Speed test which means you are using Netflix servers and FreeMe 20Gb includes LIT Video and that caps your speed between 1-2 mbps on Telkom’s video partners which Netflix is one of them. So the network is thinking you are streaming so it’s capping the speed.

Try to use the Speedtest.net app
Click to expand...

Good point. Hadn’t thought about that. Will try it.
 
Nineteeneightysix said:
How much LIT streaming data did you get with the FreeMe?
Click to expand...

Depends. Contracts is 50gb lit vide and 10gb lit music.

Prepaid bundles 2gb and 3gb freeme bundles get 5gb lit music only I think and 5gb freeme and above bundles get 25gb lit video and 5gb lit music.

Freeme value expires 31 days after purchase and the data bundle expires 61days after purchase.

The data bundle can be transferred or shared.
 
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