New Telkom tariffs on way

[BTTB]

http://www.finance24.com/Finance/Companies/0,6778,1518-24_1618267,00.html

New Telkom tariffs on way
09/11/2004 16:34 - (SA)

Donwald Pressly
Cape Town - Telkom, South Africa's partially privatised fixed line telephone company, will announce its proposed tariffs for next year on Monday November 15, says Telkom CEO Sizwe Nxasana.

"With inflation being where it is, we can expect Telkom's tariffs to be even much lower (sic) as we prepare to file for tariffs that will be implemented from January next year."

Addressing the National Assembly communications portfolio committee on Tuesday, Nxasana said the proposed tariffs - to take effect from January 1 - would be lodged with the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa on that day and made public shortly thereafter.

Nxasana said the issue of Telkom tariffs "is always a very topical one especially in the light of profits that Telkom is generating".

However, he said it was important to realise that Telkom had been "rebalancing its tariffs" and it was aware that it needed to be competitive in the market place.

He noted that Tarifica - which monitors international communication company prices for local calls - had found that South Africa was well below the average price for off-peak three minute local calls.

<b><hr noshade size="1"></b><font size="2"><font color="red"><b>You can take Telkom out of the Post Office but you can't take the Post Office out of Telkom.</b></font id="red"></font id="size2">

 

[MaD]

The cheaper the better.. can't wait for Monday.. if it's good enough I may even get a Telkom line again


<font color="navy"><font size="1"><b>Where others have progress, we have Telkom.</b>
Hellkom website - www.hellkom.co.za</font id="size1"></font id="navy">

 

[LethalChicken]

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">I may even get a Telkom line again<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">

MaD .. You Traitor !!!! []


We are Telkom - Resistance is Futile - You will be Assimilated

 

[playkiller no.2]

LOL:

Lower prices indeed,How about 1 cent cheaper is what telkom will give,anything over five cents will cause the Telkom heads heart attacks.

Google is so smart,I typed in Hellkom and guess what google said

Don`t you mean.....&lt;insert evil laugh&gt;
TELKOM!

 

[pat22]

"He noted that Tarifica - which monitors international communication company prices for local calls - had found that South Africa was well below the average price for off-peak three minute local calls."

But has he noted that the other Telkom family products, particulalry data services ,are hundreds of percentage points above average?

Telkom will increase local call costs, because hey they are "below average". All other products should drop considerably to get us to "average" costings.

Telkom also need to factor in the 1st Feb. Monday is going to be very interesting.

 

[antowan]

From http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=13&art_id=vn20041110045704224C607480

Telkom's rates are set to rise again although there is a possibility, according to CEO Sizwe Nxasana, that long-distance call costs will come down.

Addressing the portfolio committee on communications on Tuesday, Nxasana said the increases were necessary because the company was set to extend its Voice-Over Internet Protocol services - which converts long-distance domestic calls and international calls essentially to local calls - inside the country. Voice Over IP is currently only available outside the country's borders.

He assured MPs that with the new increases, set to be announced on Monday, Telkom would remain competitive internationally.

Fending off criticisms from MPs about Telkom's rates, Nxasana said an international comparative study had found the company's rates to be significantly cheaper than the European norm.

### What we need in South Africa is cheap 24/7, always on Internet for under R300 a month. ###

 

[antowan]

Okay, the time for all out war is on our doorstep and all because Telkom is not getting the message from its customers. If we allow Telkom to slip this proposed price hike by us, we deserve to be abused by this giant with a skin so thick, it will make an elephant’s dermatologist smile with pride. We need to be clever and smart about this and find creative (and entertaining) ways of cutting the giant down to size. We need to be more vocal than ever and I also believe it is time to get personal. The management of Telkom must be named and shamed on a daily basis.

They are after all the people with so little conscience that they can lead a whole nation down the garden path on the way to economic slaughter.

This is not a matter of us, the privileged few who can afford to communicate from this Southern most tip of Africa, simply complaining because we want to. We have an obligation to fight the exploitation of our telecommunication industry for excessive and unrestricted profits because those whom it excludes cannot and sometimes doesn’t even know that they are being taken for a ride. There is no excuse for Telkom’s behavior and it must be slapped across the face (never mind the hand) for exploiting the people of this country. There is an ocean of evidence ranging from excessive pricing to the undermining of companies showing a remote inclination of competing with Telkom.

It is a company that has shown a knack for bad service, over pricing, under servicing the poor and outright criminal intent on more than just a few occasions. It is a blood sucking vampire sucking the life out of the people and the economy of this country. Even worse is that it has a license to do so.

Picture a grim and dark castle on a misty hill. In the evenings you can hear screams coming from that castle. Screams filled with terror and then the sudden silence. In that castle live the vampire Nxasana and his evil servants of the undead. They strike fear and dread into the hearts of the townsmen and women who cannot seem to free themselves from the blood thirst that lives in the hearts of those evil creatures!

We need to burn that castle! We need to drive stakes (metaphorically speaking) through the hearts of those monsters!

We need to act, for feeding time is drawing near!

 

[stoke]

Antowan - I concur, but as per usual, there isnt much I can do. When I stopped the ADSL account, Teklom didn't even blink (not surprisingly). Teklom are going to increase local phone costs and drop international costs so that we get skrewed but international prospects look better. They have to do this, because of the looming competition that will wipe them out on the local calls side in about 2 years, but, as long as Teklom keeps control of the international links, they will still rule. Clever Fruckers.

 

[Goobie]

How about flooding ICASA's inbox with complaint mail, in the end they have to decide whether to aprove the Telkom increase.

 

[antowan]

YES! A BIG must! We have to do it. I also think we need the artists among us to make some seriously funny anti Telkom pictures, songs and videos we can send around via email... We need to launch a mass email offensive to attack Telkom in the minds and hearts of people. Telkom needs to be exposed for the villain it is. Nobody should want to work for them while they are doing what they are doing. Their brand vallue should be turned into mud.

More ideas?

Cheers
Antowan

### What we need in South Africa is cheap 24/7, always on Internet for under R300 a month. ###

 

[dorris]

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">The management of Telkom must be named and shamed on a daily basis. <hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">
ummm, everyday for the last few months, telkom has made a headline, excessive retrenchments, hellkom lawsuits, excesive profiteering, Vans court cases, adsl account theft, illegitimate purchase of stocks, noseweek expose... get the point, these people are in bad light on a daily basis without our help, the strange part, THEY JUST COULDN't GIVE ****, they even went out on a limb to say nobody understood IVY's statement over VOIP/wireless provisions correctly.
AS Long as they in a monopoly, they simply say, WE DON't give a flying fsck, lets rape the country for as much as its worth, they even have no fear over ISP provisions, as can be seen by iBursts pricing structure, Telkom simply charge them so much for bandwidth, that iBurst can't afford to give us better deals! We now starting to see the depths of it, how well telkom planned all of wholesale tarrifs and caps to co-incide.

I'm all out for full scale war, but what can we do to tarnish Telkoms image more than they do themselves, and will it bother them??

 

[MaD]

Let's make a website and poke fun at Telkom!


<font color="navy"><font size="1"><b>Where others have progress, we have Telkom.</b>
Hellkom website - www.hellkom.co.za</font id="size1"></font id="navy">

 

[ic]

(not serious) on antowan's theme of personal attack:
if there's a statue of nxasana somewhere, we could all take off our shoes & slap the nxasana statue in the face & then pull it over, dragging it about the streets... altho in the sa context pissing on the statue might b more of an insult, but then danger boy got arrested for wearing fake titties, perhaps we could divert the police to some other riot somewhere else...hmmm what other crazy ideas can i come up with.

i missed the reason y john lennon wasn't rising from the dead 2 testify @ the shaik trial via video link, was it perhaps that telkom rats were not low enuf...

Goobie, sadly the reason y we r all held 2 randsom by telkom is icasa doesn't do anything & mass mailing them will result in no change, u may as well mass mail a homeless person, u would get the same result.

Another idea, some hacker somewhere should write a polymorphic virus that seeks out new rates on telkom intranet & changes them 2 what we all want.

by the way exactly what rates do we all want & what is "reasonable/fair"?

 

[hArTh]

Telkom isnt the bad guy ... they are only doing what the gov lets them. And with the thintana deal you can see why the gov lets telkom get away with it all ...

-Information anarchist-
www.sentechhatesfreespeech.org.za
I support:
www.hellkom.co.za
www.poopband.co.za
Looking for something better than IE?
www.mozilla.org/products/firefox

 

[Strobemeister]

I can not believe these scumbags are going to raise local call rates again this year, this might just be a step too far. Talk about hitting people where it hurts.
This monopoly seems to crave bad publicity. Other contributors to this thread are quite correct, Telkom simply do not give a toss about public opinion. And why on earth would the government intervene? The more money Telkom makes, the more money its 30odd % shareholder makes. The fact that the public once again gets shafted is at most a mild irritation to the cosy relationship between the government & telkom. From a selfish point of view, this government has failed miserably on this issue, they work for us, a fact they seem to forget. We vote them in, entrust them to make policy & decisions with our best interests at heart. They abuse that trust with poorly hidden agendas which seems to be aimed at personal enrichment - join the government and set yourself up for life, just look at Telkom's brand new shareholders if you disagree.
In a true democracy we should be able to "fire" this government for failing on this issue. Unfortunately, the opposition isn't strong enough, so we have to suck it all up.
I cannot see any justification in further raising local call rates.
It might be time to finally don one of Mad's tshirts.

Telkom - South Africa's Handbrake to progress.

 

[onionpeel]

Well all of you are right. The big picture is still greed, corruption and insider trading. It's political, as much as people don't want to go down that route on this forum.

If our government had to completely fix all the things they said they would do before election time, this country would be so far in debt we would have to pay other countries billions to buy South Africa from us, assuming they would even want it!
"So hey, the problems are so big, let's make as though we are fixing them but really, we are all in it for ourselves."
Enrichment of a few, at the expense of the masses.[!]
Government protects Telkom, Telkom protects the government.[8]

The DoC appears to be doing something which is anti Telkom, but only because of public pressure. Everything moves sooo slowly - as slow as a 33.6kbps modem. There is still a long way to go in the SNO and deregulation (VoIP) process.
Too long in fact, which is creating enough opportunity for the political heavyweights to derail the process - yet again.[B)]

 

[antowan]

Onionpeel

I agree, there are a lot of snags in the Telkom saga. Telkom is not the only example of this, but we cannot take it all on in one go, so lets fix the biggest beast of them all. I cannot understand why people feel there is nothing we can do. There are lots of things we can do within the constraints of the law to make our opinions heard. We need to go all out. But we need to get the public to want to listen. We need to make it entertaining, funny and true.

We cannot take it lying down. If a 1000 of us send 10 funny (but true) emails out to friends and they do the same, you can cover a million people in a matter of days if not hours.

Think about the power of the Internet. Sites like MyADSL and Hellkom go a long way! They are towering examples of what can be done if we stand up to exploitation. Telkom does one thing very well and that is advertise itself to stupid people. It uses big money (our money) to pay extremely creative people to make extremely emotional and touching ads. They know what they are doing and what effect it will have on SA. They just don't care. We should turn Telkom into a company that any self respecting ad agency would not touch with a stick because it will reflect badly on them.

Cheers
Antowan

### What we need in South Africa is cheap 24/7, always on Internet for under R300 a month. ###

 

[pat22]

Agreed. But we also have to take on the might of the ANC and it's buddy-buddy system. While that continues to operate like it does today, I fear little will change. The recent 15% sell off deal makes me think Telkom will continue to be protected. FDI is nil because 1st world corps know you must give the buddy club some of the action.

To make Telkom into the enemy is a priority (for example you can put up a good argument that their tariffs have stymied job creation, made communication unaffordable to low income earners etc), but the root problem will remain. The goverment.

 

[MaD]

If the prices do rise all we do is organise mass action.. no big deal.


<font color="navy"><font size="1"><b>Where others have progress, we have Telkom.</b>
Hellkom website - www.hellkom.co.za</font id="size1"></font id="navy">

 

[ic]

Given that everytime telkom put out an advert for one of their products, it's because they want to increase the revenue from that specific product, otherwise how would they ever recover advertising costs unless they expect uptake of that product as a direct result of the advert - right?

So here is what we need to do - COUNTER-ADVERTISING (like counter-espionage), we focus on all the aspects of their add, including the warm cudly ones, and we put out a counter-add via email, websites etc, revealing the bollocks & ****e that telkom r advertising. It would have to be kept simple - like antowan says telkom's adverts generally target the stupid people.

If we managed to keep up the momentum, stay within the law, and always tell it like it is, telkom would start to notice the futility of trying to pull the wool over average joe's eyes.

On a related subject, earlier this week i tried finding any info about sentech & mywireless on the Advertising Standards Authority site www.asasa.org.za - nothing at all, also checked if google had indexed anything - again nothing, then i wanted to check their archives - the buggers want u to pay them ~R800/year for just accessing their archives, i say that's not serving the public at all.

Now in the telkom context, ASA is not really very useful, we will have to do their work for them, and much quicker as well (turnaround on ASA rulings seems to be very slow in my opinion).

On the issue of mass-mailing, if you are mailing stuff out to people who have telkom as their isp, won't telkom just spam block all our stuff, how do we stop them from doing that?