Telkom 20Mbps ADSL network upgrades starting?

They suggested we cancel our Uncapped/Unshaped 4meg line then replace it with 8ta as they can no longer give us the 4meg we have had for the last 5 years. :mad:
 
What about the Clareinche exchange in claremont? that should be upgrading...
 
The Telkom techies you see driving around are not overworked and are largely useless.

link to lengthy post containing a lot of what I'd have said anyway

Hout Bay and the Overberg area currently have terrible technicians. Sure, not all of them are, but many definitely are.

You can often follow a Telkom bakkie for the entire day and find that they stop at only a few places and sit around parked somewhere for the rest of the day, doing nothing. Go over to their windows; don't be surprised if you don't find them filling in reports or checking something work related on their laptops. When we had my mom's friend's telephone line installed, we had to spend a few weeks arguing with them on the phone about getting a landline service to the premises; they told us that the line running on the pole only had capacity for 10 connections and that there was no pole planted to hang the cable from to her flat. When we finally got them to agree to come plant a new pole and run a new line, we waited 3 weeks with nothing happening. Napier is not a large town, nor is Bredasdorp, and there's only one main road going through the former.

During that last week my mom, with nothing better to do, was watching the Telkom bakkies, following them around a bit to see whether they were busy or not; they weren't, they were getting stuff from the shops, parking off next to the road for hours on end and visiting a few buildings here and there. When they finally got fed up and when both of them were in a car together, they spotted one of the bakkies pulled over next to the road, so they stopped behind him and went over. The guy was playing solitaire on his laptop.

them> "Hi, do you have anything you need to do in Napier today?"
him> "Uhhh, let me check... no, nothing for Napier"
them> "Do you have anything else you need to do today, then? We have a problem you might be able to help us with..."
him> "......let me check.... no, I don't have anything else I need to do for today yet either"
them> "Okay great! We need you to come begin the installation of a landline connection to her flat *mom points to her friend*"
him> "......I'm sorry?"
them> "Telkom arranged with us three weeks ago to come and have a pole planted and a line run to get a telephone line to her flat. They said the technicians would be there the following Monday, but nobody's shown up since and we've been at home all day every day."
him> "Okay, I can check, but I haven't seen anything on our assignments recently about new services..."
him> "Oh yes, here's one for a new installation... it says you want ADSL?"
them> "No, why would she want ADSL if she doesn't even have a telephone line yet? Anyway, just follow us and we can show you where the property is so you don't need to look for it"
*they head to the property*
him> "I don't see the telephone cable... I can't check if you can get ADSL if you don't even have a telephone line yet"
them> "That's the point, you're not here to do anything with ADSL, Telkom is supposed to be providing new land-line services to this building!"
him> "Oh well I don't have the cable for that! There isn't even a pole here anyway, so I can't do that installation!"
them> "Well then you get on the phone with Telkom and explain to them that they must arrange for someone to come and plant the pole necessary and provide you with the cable required to get this installation done. We've been waiting for more than a month and Telkom has done nothing to help us with this."
him> "But this wasn't even my job... I'm not assigned to this installation!"
them> "Then you find out who is assigned to it and get them to get their asses here to do this installation, or you get them to assign this to you. We found you playing solitaire on your laptop, we've seen you and the other technicians driving around Napier doing nothing, you cannot tell us you are too busy to do this."

At some point thereafter, on the same day, a truck came by with the wooden pole and equipment necessary to plant it, and by the late afternoon the pole was secured in the ground and the cable run to the property; services were connected by the next day.


I don't care that these are 'contractors' running around for Telkom performing services where Telkom supposedly has a shortage of staff to do so for them, Telkom's own staff are not all doing their work and they are the ones responsible for a large portion of the country getting sub-standard services for unreasonably high prices, and now Telkom wants to trial higher speed services that have long-since been proven elsewhere in the world to workl; and for what? To see if they can skip a few generations of other old technology and (not) roll that out to the areas suffering from poor infrastructure instead?

Pathetic.
 
nanonyous said:
The Telkom techies you see driving around are not overworked and are largely useless.
<snip>
him> "Okay, I can check, but I haven't seen anything on our assignments recently about new services..."
<snip>
At some point thereafter, on the same day, a truck came by with the wooden pole and equipment necessary to plant it, and by the late afternoon the pole was secured in the ground and the cable run to the property; services were connected by the next day.
<snip>
I don't care that these are 'contractors' running around for Telkom performing services where Telkom supposedly has a shortage of staff to do so for them, Telkom's own staff are not all doing their work and they are the ones responsible for a large portion of the country getting sub-standard services for unreasonably high prices, and now Telkom wants to trial higher speed services that have long-since been proven elsewhere in the world to workl; and for what? To see if they can skip a few generations of other old technology and (not) roll that out to the areas suffering from poor infrastructure instead? <snip>
Click to expand...
Spoke to my buddy who resigned from this type of section recently. This is a problem and unfortunately you cannot blame these techies. In the good old days their supervisor would receive all the open tasks for his area (not just for that day but everything) and he would distribute the work amongst his techies and kick their asses if they were slacking. The techies also went out with an assistant and together they could do more work.

When the Americans arrived they looked at ways to cut costs. Step one was to retrench all the assistants. Step two was to introduce a centralised tasking centre, which took the tasking function away from the local supervisor and moved it to a centre in Cape Town or Pretoria. Neither the techie nor the supervisor know what next task will be assigned to them, hence you see Telkom bakkies criss-crossing each other all over town, as the tasking agents don't know the local conditions!!!

All of this tasking is done via the techie's laptop, so when they are parked off somewhere under a tree, they must have the laptop on in order to receive their next task.

In the good old days Telkom had so-called Takkie Gangs. If a pole was required for a new installation, the techie would get hold of the nearest Takkie gang and the pole would be planted pronto, while the techie waited, and the installation would be completed. Those guys were also retrenched to save costs and the work was outsourced to plenty of smaller contractors. If a new pole is required, the techie must input his request and a job card will be forwarded to the contract office and they will source a contractor to install the pole - within a week. Only once the contract office has closed the task can the centralised tasking office re-task it back to the techie.

To make matters even worse the local supervisor is now so tied up in paperwork and admin type functions (his admin assistant was also retrenched to cut costs) that he hardly has time to get out into the field to inspect work done by his staff!

So while your post highlights many issues, the blame needs to be directed to the correct party (Telkom's executive management) and not to the poor techies in their bakkies.
 
MickeyD, the

I don't care that these are 'contractors' running around for Telkom performing services where Telkom supposedly has a shortage of staff to do so for them, Telkom's own staff are not all doing their work and they are the ones responsible for a large portion of the country getting sub-standard services for unreasonably high prices, and now Telkom wants to trial higher speed services that have long-since been proven elsewhere in the world to workl; and for what? To see if they can skip a few generations of other old technology and (not) roll that out to the areas suffering from poor infrastructure instead?
Click to expand...

Part is specifically directed at Telkom as a whole, not the techies. The techies, however, do *argue* with you when it comes to simple tasks that they should be able to perform; when someone's line goes down while a techie is at their premises, what do you think happens? Does the customer say "aw poo, okay, thanks, good bye", then phones in to be put on hold for an hour to log a fault that, if you'll check some of my other recent posts, doesn't even get anyone assigned to it despite services being down for almost a week? Or does the customer ask the techie to try and fix it while they're there, and the techie then logs the fault themselves, assigns themselves to it (and I'm guessing it works on a ticket system), and then tries to resolve it while they're still there?


If Telkom's system works so poorly and has techies criss-crossing then those techies are actually also in part responsible, because those techies are not taking it upon themselves to have a system that actually keeps them busy enacted instead. Thus they get paid to sit around in their bakkies 'waiting for the next task to get assigned to them', knowing that thanks to the poorly functioning system, the chances of that happening are slim enough that they'll be able to continue sitting around for most of the day if they simply do nothing.

If they are *able* to check for assignments available to be done, then why must they be *told* to go check for an assignment that was opened 3 weeks ago, and then get fooled into going to perform that task? If they are not allowed to accept tasks not assigned to them under any circumstances, how is it even possible to fool the techie into going to do an assignment that's not his?


The techies might not be to blame to the same extent as Telkom, but they certainly aren't blameless.
 
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