Hi RPM.
MaD has been doing some research into the relative costs of ADSL in other 3rd world countries, and his findings show Telkom is definately screwing us. I personally have noted that Senegal and Mauritius offer much better deals as far as ADSL pricing, and these countries have far less infrastructure than here. Would it not be worth compiling a document containing pricing for comparable African, Indian, South America and Australian/NZ ADSL offerings - it would be as simple as surfing the countries' Telco websites and pulling down the pages.
A document like that would prove fairly damning as far as Telkom's pricing goes.
Additionally, I had a long chat with a good friend of mine that works in the Telkom planning department. He was telling me a lot about the general mindset of management internally, as well as about how Telkom determines infrastructure planning.
A quick summary:
The mindset within Telkom is VERY shareholder focussed - everything done is done with the impact on share price in mind.
According to him, Telkom will not install any kind of copper line unless they stand to turn a profit on that line within ONE YEAR!
Being in Durban, he was also telling me that Telkom has a fiber loop running right around Durban that is exceptionally underutilised. The reason is that Telkom is charging such high rates for access to the fiber (ROI again) that only some of the banks can afford to use it. It would appear that Telkom is happier to leave lines underutilised than lower prices.
I also talked to him about what Podo posted a while back about how the PoP infrastructure is not being upgraded to allow broadband facilities. He confirmed this fact - being in planning he has tried several times to get major PoP links upgraded to fiber. However apparently absolutely no work is done by Telkom before picking up a calculator to check ROI. As a result infrastructure is not being upgraded - and this guy is the first to say that Telkom is being incredibly short sighted.
Interestingly his opinion is that the SNO will be good for Telkom as well as the country because it will force Telkom to compete and look at longer term ROI. This is because Eskom and Transtel have newer, faster infrastructure already laid - according to him, Transtel has infrastructure - including their own internal exchanges - that is being used at only 25% capacity...
This friend of mine is a good guy, and he's as sick of Telkom screwing people as we are - however he needs the job, and I have to sympathise with him. I could try to get a written statement from him, but I strongly doubt he will do it due to CP/job insecurity.
What would really help any ICASA hearing is blowing the lid off on how Telkom determines infrastructure upgrades, new servies etc. We need cold hard evidence though...
I know this isn't really along the lines of the 24 month contract stuff that you were looking for, but maybe it will help.
<font color="blue">Telkom needs a leash, ICASA needs some guts, and the </font id="blue"><font color="red">SA consumer</font id="red"><font color="blue"> needs to make it happen</font id="blue">
