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For the past few days I've been getting to know MyADSL mainly by reading the forums, up to three o'clock in the morning. It's been very interesting reading your views, ideas and complaints. I'd like to share some of my experiences, views and ideas to find out what you think. First, some of my colourful experiences with Telkom, you can skip this as I'm sure most of you have some interesting stories about your experience with Telkom. I would just like to know if everybody experiences this kind of incompetence ?
I've been using ISDN for the last two years, mainly to correspond and provide services to clients, many of which are outside of South-Africa. This often entails downloading and uploading large amounts of data for, to and from clients. ISDN provided for this need, but at a very high premium. Our service was also continually suspended because of cheques lost in transit by Telkom, which they interpret as the client not paying, extremely frustrating. When I heard that ADSL would finally be available in South-Africa I was delighted.
On the 1st of December last year we moved to new premises and knowing Telkom is slow in processing orders, I applied for the transfer in mid November already. As ADSL was now available in my region I decided to also apply for ADSL. HUGE MISTAKE !! NEVER ask Telkom process two orders simultaneously. The moron, excuse me, "consultant" who handled my querry replaced the first querry(Transfer) with the second(Upgrade). Needless to say, my ISDN was not transferred on the 1st of December.
I tried to correct this, and was told that my order would now be completed on the 17th of December. On the day I got a phone call saying they were ready to install the ADSL at our old premises, after I had explicitly asked that the ISDN be transferred to our new premises.
Anyways... It took three months, probably days on the phone with numerous departments and personel, and four trips to the local Telkom offices to transfer our ISDN, where we had no internet or telephone facilities available. Eventually I ended up at Telkom head office in Pretoria trying to just get some kind of connectivity. At one stage I was even using GPRS which has cost me a fortune as I think they ask something like R50/MB transferred.
I won't even start on the damage all of this has done. Whenever I hear the statement "Welcome to telkom, how may we provide you with excellent service", I want to scream.
On the 1st of March this year we finally had ISDN again and on the 19th of March they arrived to install ADSL. I knew that the 3GB cap would not be sufficient for our purposes as we regularly did up to 7GB per month on the ISDN. I was willing to live with this however as I was under the impression that the 3GB was international and would thus not include e-mail, which is local bandwidth and constitutes a large proportion of usage, leaving the 3GB for our core business transfers.
Today, the Capping was enabled, after only ten days of mostly local transfers. In the ten days, the router has hung three or four times, the service has been down at least three times and I now long for my OLD ISDN.
That's my ADSL experience so far.
I would like to know if there is a facility available from Telkom that checks usage, and maybe reports it online to clients. Wait, sorry, that would entail innovation and cient orientation. Never mind.
I've read about the ICASA complaint, I've also dealt with them numerous times, so I know they are not very efficient or effective when it comes to Telkom. The answer is simple, ICASA answers to the ANC, who in turn have a stake in Telkom, therefore, any complaints etc. directed at Telkom through ICASA would be useless. I am not sure if the complaint or any further action would be effective. Still, it's the correct avenue to take and persuing it has to be tried at least.
I think one sullution would be to force Telkom into change by overwhelming them. If MyADSL grows and could include even half the ADSL population, which seems possible as the community is growing, we could simply flood Telkom with querries, hours of complaining and basically wasting their resources. Taking it to an extreme... This would however require some sacrifice and planning from the MyADSL community.
Question is how badly do we want change ?? This same approach could be taken with ICASA.
This is just one idea, we might need some more perspective and information in order to define all options available.
For the past few days I've been getting to know MyADSL mainly by reading the forums, up to three o'clock in the morning. It's been very interesting reading your views, ideas and complaints. I'd like to share some of my experiences, views and ideas to find out what you think. First, some of my colourful experiences with Telkom, you can skip this as I'm sure most of you have some interesting stories about your experience with Telkom. I would just like to know if everybody experiences this kind of incompetence ?
I've been using ISDN for the last two years, mainly to correspond and provide services to clients, many of which are outside of South-Africa. This often entails downloading and uploading large amounts of data for, to and from clients. ISDN provided for this need, but at a very high premium. Our service was also continually suspended because of cheques lost in transit by Telkom, which they interpret as the client not paying, extremely frustrating. When I heard that ADSL would finally be available in South-Africa I was delighted.
On the 1st of December last year we moved to new premises and knowing Telkom is slow in processing orders, I applied for the transfer in mid November already. As ADSL was now available in my region I decided to also apply for ADSL. HUGE MISTAKE !! NEVER ask Telkom process two orders simultaneously. The moron, excuse me, "consultant" who handled my querry replaced the first querry(Transfer) with the second(Upgrade). Needless to say, my ISDN was not transferred on the 1st of December.
I tried to correct this, and was told that my order would now be completed on the 17th of December. On the day I got a phone call saying they were ready to install the ADSL at our old premises, after I had explicitly asked that the ISDN be transferred to our new premises.
Anyways... It took three months, probably days on the phone with numerous departments and personel, and four trips to the local Telkom offices to transfer our ISDN, where we had no internet or telephone facilities available. Eventually I ended up at Telkom head office in Pretoria trying to just get some kind of connectivity. At one stage I was even using GPRS which has cost me a fortune as I think they ask something like R50/MB transferred.
I won't even start on the damage all of this has done. Whenever I hear the statement "Welcome to telkom, how may we provide you with excellent service", I want to scream.
On the 1st of March this year we finally had ISDN again and on the 19th of March they arrived to install ADSL. I knew that the 3GB cap would not be sufficient for our purposes as we regularly did up to 7GB per month on the ISDN. I was willing to live with this however as I was under the impression that the 3GB was international and would thus not include e-mail, which is local bandwidth and constitutes a large proportion of usage, leaving the 3GB for our core business transfers.
Today, the Capping was enabled, after only ten days of mostly local transfers. In the ten days, the router has hung three or four times, the service has been down at least three times and I now long for my OLD ISDN.
That's my ADSL experience so far.
I would like to know if there is a facility available from Telkom that checks usage, and maybe reports it online to clients. Wait, sorry, that would entail innovation and cient orientation. Never mind.
I've read about the ICASA complaint, I've also dealt with them numerous times, so I know they are not very efficient or effective when it comes to Telkom. The answer is simple, ICASA answers to the ANC, who in turn have a stake in Telkom, therefore, any complaints etc. directed at Telkom through ICASA would be useless. I am not sure if the complaint or any further action would be effective. Still, it's the correct avenue to take and persuing it has to be tried at least.
I think one sullution would be to force Telkom into change by overwhelming them. If MyADSL grows and could include even half the ADSL population, which seems possible as the community is growing, we could simply flood Telkom with querries, hours of complaining and basically wasting their resources. Taking it to an extreme... This would however require some sacrifice and planning from the MyADSL community.
Question is how badly do we want change ?? This same approach could be taken with ICASA.
This is just one idea, we might need some more perspective and information in order to define all options available.