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I would be very surprised if they weren't. Keep in mind that since Telkom is now a listed company, it relies on shareholder capital and as such, must turn a profit in order to be able to pay dividends to its shareholders.
If consistant profit growth is not assured, shareholders become restless and either withdraw support, or influence management decisions in ways that sacrifice service levels for profits.
Currently, Telkom is turning very handsome profits for its shareholders and is making very little investment toward infrastructure, so I would definitely say that they are neglecting infrastructure maintenance and improvement for the sake of profits.
This has probably been going on since Telkom were first floated on the stock exchange and is unlikely to stop until another operator is able to provide real competition to Telkom. That's unlikely to happen any time soon, so don't hold your breath. [
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As for the question of the modems, I can assure you that the 24 month contract modem bundle is not a good deal at all. The modem is provided as a loyalty bonus for signing the 24 month contract. This is mainly a ploy designed to make sure that customers will stay with Telkom for some time and not switch to another provider, should one become available, for at least two years.
The Telkom modems provided by Marconi Telecommunications are very overpriced and yield very poor performance when compared to competing products.
A PCI ADSL modem that is more than sufficient for single user applications can be purchased from as little as R300 if you know where to shop. USB modems generally start at R500. For R700 or more, you can get yourself a very respectable ethernet bridge type ADSL modem, very handy if you happen to already have a LAN and router in place and simply wish to take advantage of ADSL.
If you need to service more than one user, but do not have a router or even a LAN, you could also look at modem/router/switch combination solutions with a built in PPPoE client and NAT support, from several vendors, starting from as little as R1000.
If you have some cash to drop, you could even spend around R1500 (the same price as the basic Telkom modem) and get a modem which is also a router, a switch and a wireless network access point, all in one.
I own my own modem, the D-Link DSL300G, an ethernet bridge type, which I bought for R750. The PPPoE link over the bridge is provided by a FreeBSD machine which is configured to act as a router, which was here before we upgraded to ADSL. The DSL300G provides excellent stability with absolutely zero maintenance. It does not crash or hang, does not need to be re-configured after power spikes or failures and is not a security risk.
Buying a Marconi Ethernet POTS modem will get you nothing but grief, the device is reported to crash frequently, causing a loss in connection and requiring manual restart to become available again. Many bugs are reported to exist, even in the latest firmware. In its default configuration, it also poses a security risk, as it can be trivially compromised if not configured properly.
Thus, for almost R1500, Telkom will give you a device which is unreliable, insecure and is still just a modem/router with limited NAT capabilities.
For more or less the same price, other vendors will sell you a modem / router with a powerful firewall and NAT built in, which can also act as an ethernet switch and even a wireless gateway.
You would do much better not signing a 24 month contract tying yourself down to Telkom and just going to your local retailer to buy your own modem. You won't pay less for the service though.
MaD,
The bandwidth they brag about there does seem to be impressive on paper, but it doesn't really help us. Largely, Telkom's ATM infrastructure is accessed via copper of fiber connections of 2MBps or less. These connections are also what connect most of the DSLAM points to the ATM infrastructure.
Even with that kind of bandwidth, Telkom would still have a problem providing continuous service at the full throughput possible with their ADSL product. Consider that at the moment, all South African ADSL connections run at 512kbps and that (according to Telkom) ADSL now serves a customer base of 16 000 users.
512kbps x 16 000 equals 8GBps. This means, if all ADSL users were to go all out, all at once, more than three quarters of the available core bandwidth of 11GBps would be saturated.
Now, also keep in mind that this bandwidth must serve the entire ATM network, not just ADSL users. The Telkom ATM network serves small and large customers, from thousands of 64kbps Diginet connections and thousands of users connected to dial-up PoPs around the country, to hundreds of large frame relay connections, from 34MBps to 155MBps, used by first tier ISPs to connect their PoPs, data centers and backbones together.
From this, it would be evident that the infrastructure they brag about there is badly insufficient to fully service all of the customers on their network, especially if you take into account that large ISPs with frame relay connections and businesses with Diginet connections have service level agreements which guarantee them a certain amount of bandwidth.
ADSL users get what ever is left over and this is not very much. The much hated cap is there to mask the insufficiency of Telkom's infrastructure for providing broadband service on a massive scale. The ATM network can handle quite a number of small Diginet lines and a respectable amount of large frame relay connections relatively well, but adding large scale consumer broadband to the equation puts tremendous stress on the bottlenecked infrastructure.
Willie Viljoen
Web Developer
Adaptive Web Development
I would be very surprised if they weren't. Keep in mind that since Telkom is now a listed company, it relies on shareholder capital and as such, must turn a profit in order to be able to pay dividends to its shareholders.
If consistant profit growth is not assured, shareholders become restless and either withdraw support, or influence management decisions in ways that sacrifice service levels for profits.
Currently, Telkom is turning very handsome profits for its shareholders and is making very little investment toward infrastructure, so I would definitely say that they are neglecting infrastructure maintenance and improvement for the sake of profits.
This has probably been going on since Telkom were first floated on the stock exchange and is unlikely to stop until another operator is able to provide real competition to Telkom. That's unlikely to happen any time soon, so don't hold your breath. [
]As for the question of the modems, I can assure you that the 24 month contract modem bundle is not a good deal at all. The modem is provided as a loyalty bonus for signing the 24 month contract. This is mainly a ploy designed to make sure that customers will stay with Telkom for some time and not switch to another provider, should one become available, for at least two years.
The Telkom modems provided by Marconi Telecommunications are very overpriced and yield very poor performance when compared to competing products.
A PCI ADSL modem that is more than sufficient for single user applications can be purchased from as little as R300 if you know where to shop. USB modems generally start at R500. For R700 or more, you can get yourself a very respectable ethernet bridge type ADSL modem, very handy if you happen to already have a LAN and router in place and simply wish to take advantage of ADSL.
If you need to service more than one user, but do not have a router or even a LAN, you could also look at modem/router/switch combination solutions with a built in PPPoE client and NAT support, from several vendors, starting from as little as R1000.
If you have some cash to drop, you could even spend around R1500 (the same price as the basic Telkom modem) and get a modem which is also a router, a switch and a wireless network access point, all in one.
I own my own modem, the D-Link DSL300G, an ethernet bridge type, which I bought for R750. The PPPoE link over the bridge is provided by a FreeBSD machine which is configured to act as a router, which was here before we upgraded to ADSL. The DSL300G provides excellent stability with absolutely zero maintenance. It does not crash or hang, does not need to be re-configured after power spikes or failures and is not a security risk.
Buying a Marconi Ethernet POTS modem will get you nothing but grief, the device is reported to crash frequently, causing a loss in connection and requiring manual restart to become available again. Many bugs are reported to exist, even in the latest firmware. In its default configuration, it also poses a security risk, as it can be trivially compromised if not configured properly.
Thus, for almost R1500, Telkom will give you a device which is unreliable, insecure and is still just a modem/router with limited NAT capabilities.
For more or less the same price, other vendors will sell you a modem / router with a powerful firewall and NAT built in, which can also act as an ethernet switch and even a wireless gateway.
You would do much better not signing a 24 month contract tying yourself down to Telkom and just going to your local retailer to buy your own modem. You won't pay less for the service though.
MaD,
The bandwidth they brag about there does seem to be impressive on paper, but it doesn't really help us. Largely, Telkom's ATM infrastructure is accessed via copper of fiber connections of 2MBps or less. These connections are also what connect most of the DSLAM points to the ATM infrastructure.
Even with that kind of bandwidth, Telkom would still have a problem providing continuous service at the full throughput possible with their ADSL product. Consider that at the moment, all South African ADSL connections run at 512kbps and that (according to Telkom) ADSL now serves a customer base of 16 000 users.
512kbps x 16 000 equals 8GBps. This means, if all ADSL users were to go all out, all at once, more than three quarters of the available core bandwidth of 11GBps would be saturated.
Now, also keep in mind that this bandwidth must serve the entire ATM network, not just ADSL users. The Telkom ATM network serves small and large customers, from thousands of 64kbps Diginet connections and thousands of users connected to dial-up PoPs around the country, to hundreds of large frame relay connections, from 34MBps to 155MBps, used by first tier ISPs to connect their PoPs, data centers and backbones together.
From this, it would be evident that the infrastructure they brag about there is badly insufficient to fully service all of the customers on their network, especially if you take into account that large ISPs with frame relay connections and businesses with Diginet connections have service level agreements which guarantee them a certain amount of bandwidth.
ADSL users get what ever is left over and this is not very much. The much hated cap is there to mask the insufficiency of Telkom's infrastructure for providing broadband service on a massive scale. The ATM network can handle quite a number of small Diginet lines and a respectable amount of large frame relay connections relatively well, but adding large scale consumer broadband to the equation puts tremendous stress on the bottlenecked infrastructure.
Willie Viljoen
Web Developer
Adaptive Web Development