Telkom 3G - Southern Suburbs, Cape Town

[ITCynic]

What has happened with Telkom 3G in the Southern Suburbs, Diep River, Cape Town?

Previously used to get between 4-5 megs speed on my 3G Telkom dongle.

I am not sure if it is just coincidence that this started steadily getting worse since Telkom changed their Nightsurfer to start at midnight.


This is international

This is the norm now during working hours and evenings. (Its now 21h30)

 

[ITCynic]

View attachment 162609

This was on 11 August 2014



This is now. Down and up speeds are almost synchronous
View attachment 162611

 

[ITCynic]

This is F***** ng crazy.

Now have a upload speed of 1.68 Mbps and and download speed of 1.35 Mbps with a latency of 33800ms

With that latency I might as well use a dial up modem.
WTF. The upload speed is actually higher than the download speed.

Anybody in the Diep River area using one of the other mobile data vendors (MTN, Cell C etc) ?

What are your speeds like ?

 

[kingrob]

Best is to buy prepaid sim cards from all the service providers, load some airtime on it and test where you live.

Just remember that Telkom Mobile offers the best deals in South Africa, so it's just normal that customers will start to move over. In droves.

 

[Ockie]

Best is to buy prepaid sim cards from all the service providers, load some airtime on it and test where you live.

Just remember that Telkom Mobile offers the best deals in South Africa, so it's just normal that customers will start to move over. In droves.

Problem is that your test results will not be the same tomorrow as it is today. That is what happened with me and Cell C. Tested .... was happy and a few months later I was pulling my hair out. A network needs to be able to keep up with network demand as their subscriber base grows, else you are going to get a ver VERY bad reputation very VERY quickly. What happens then is the customers will start leaving as as fast as they signed up, but your reputation will stick like a droe drol aan 'n handoek.

 

[kingrob]

Problem is that your test results will not be the same tomorrow as it is today. That is what happened with me and Cell C. Tested .... was happy and a few months later I was pulling my hair out. A network needs to be able to keep up with network demand as their subscriber base grows, else you are going to get a ver VERY bad reputation very VERY quickly. What happens then is the customers will start leaving as as fast as they signed up, but your reputation will stick like a droe drol aan 'n handoek.

I agree with you to some extent, but from what I've seen, South Africans are not that fussed with reputations, they go for the cheapest prices.

 

[Ockie]

I agree with you to some extent, but from what I've seen, South Africans are not that fussed with reputations, they go for the cheapest prices.

Perhaps, but you want to hang on to your high income spenders, and if your network goes for a ball of sh*t like Cell C has, then that is not going to happen. Or I could be wrong

 

[maxum]

I'm closer to the Norther Suburbs but I noticed a similar trend. Initially (6 months ago) I was getting a constant dl of 1.5 and latency was very stable. International averaging at 230ms . A few months later and it suddenly became unstable in the evenings.

A month later and speeds would fluctuate between 2kb-80kb at all hours of the day. Some time after that, I wasn't able to connect at night (lost a lot of night time data due to this).

Currently, my latency fluctuates between 340ms and 6000ms. I get severe packet loss and disconnect all the time.
A telkom tech came out to my house connected an external antennae, left it in our washing basket and told my brother, to tell me that I should mount outside somewhere. Later that day I received an sms to say my fault was resolved.

It didn't fix anything. I logged a hello peter complaint and got a response that very day, saying that my fault was in hand with the technical department and was given a reference number. This was two weeks ago. To date, I haven't received further comms.

When I call into their call centre, I get transferred around until the "line drops".

Telkom has the worst customer service. The level of incompetence is second to none.