How Telkom went from monopoly to second-fiddle

Jan

Jan

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How Telkom lost its mojo

Telkom used to own telecommunications in South Africa — but completely squandered its advantage through a series of poor decisions and by disregarding its customers.

With Vumatel overtaking Openserve as the biggest fibre-to-the-home provider in 2019 and Telkom playing third-fiddle to Vodacom and MTN, it can be easy to forget how utterly dominant it was until as recently as the 2010s.
 
Yeah, this started many, many years ago with very bad decisions, long before SA had things like Fibre or even LTE. A lot of people just could not believe it or wanted to believe it. This was all inevitable.
 
I know the "170,000km of cable in the ground" reference is a generalisation, but it made me think of the cable Openserve actually rushed to put up in our area after Frogfoot had trenched every street - hastily and flimsily strung up on their old poles. The monkeys now run along it, along with the old copper phone cables they never got around to removing. And their old box up on a pole they refused to maintain (or even secure the door which hung open in the rain) for the last few years it was in operation, with their sales teams occasionally calling everyone in the area to tell them to sign up to LTE as the copper was about to be switched off - it never was (until fibre arrived) and those who moved to LTE had endless problems, even worse than on the temperamental copper network.

I remember a Telkom employee laughing when I asked if a fibre rollout was planned, yet when Frogfoot moved in and took almost all their customers they finally scrambled to string fibre everywhere - too late for most people who had had enough of Telkom/Openserve for a lifetime.
 
Monopolies rarely come out on top in a competitive market. Selling Vodacom was the right decision but they didn't take proper advantage of 8.ta and also cancelled some popular products. I blame government interference.

But I also have criticism against the rest of the market. What took them almost 10 years after 2008 to do anything and then halfheartedly while the rest of the world were doing land grabs? They could have rendered Telkom irrelevant but here we are still hoping for them to offer us proper competition. There's only one word to describe our local telecoms industry, PATHETIC!
 
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ShaunSA said:
Nope. Even the white execs were useless
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Actually very, very true.
I remember yelling at, and fighting with, some real idiots back in the day.
Arrogant whities, who we all knew were driving the company into the dirt.
Screwing us with DigiNet.
Giving us grief for attaching routers to their PABX systems, so we could do "free" voice calls over ISDN.
Etc, etc.
Hated them and their piece of crap company. Still do.
 
konfab said:
Press "S" to simultaneously piss and spit on the graves of these retarded communists who put everyone through decades of slow internet for the sake of their ideology.
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SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!
 
Anyone remember the clause where you effectively signed away your right to legal recourse? Then one forumite managed to avoid it because nobody checked that they only gave half the contract.
 
Jan said:
How Telkom lost its mojo

Telkom used to own telecommunications in South Africa — but completely squandered its advantage through a series of poor decisions and by disregarding its customers.

With Vumatel overtaking Openserve as the biggest fibre-to-the-home provider in 2019 and Telkom playing third-fiddle to Vodacom and MTN, it can be easy to forget how utterly dominant it was until as recently as the 2010s.
Click to expand...
From the days of Dail-Up and ISDN, I already started hating Telkom.
I will never use them again. They like a bad nightmare, forevermore.
 
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