Yup - very nice - wish Megan Knight had put a little more bias on the negative aspects of the service offering, though (but then again, I'm biased too!). In the same edition also, in the Letters section, reproduced here with due and specific acknowledgments to those concerned, no plagiaristic intent, and in the interests of the public good - under the by-line:
<b> A ploy to fatten profits</b>
<i>Mail & Guardian</i> readers should know of a little trick Telkom uses to further fatten its bloated profits.
A Telkom flier invited me to use its Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL) Internet connection, so I went to client services and was told I would get three gigabytes a month Internet access at 10 megabytes[sic] per second. If I used the three gigabytes before month-end, I would be throttled to a server and get Internet access "under 64 kilobytes per second" until the end of the month.
I signed an agreement for two years, because I will spend much of the day communicating with students in France via the Internet.
ADSL was installed. Then I learned an acquaintance had cancelled his ADSL because when he used up his three gigabytes connected to overseas websites, he got access to less than one kilobyte per second - involving a wait of up to 10 minutes to open a site! So this is "under 64 kpbs[sic]"!
I asked client services why I was not told of the slow overseas speed, and they replied they didn't know about it. When I asked to cancel my subscription, I was told I had to pay a penalty of R2000.
Has Telkom heard of the business concept of assessing a client's needs before selling something? Does it say "under 64 kbps" to deliberately mislead and get the subscription? The answer is simple. If you have a monopoly, you don't care about customer satisfaction.
<i>Johann Penning, Universitas, Bloemfontein</i>
Pity the fellow didn't know about MyADSL before he signed up - all the publicity is nevertheless working towards rectifying this shortcoming - great stuff, RPM!
