Telkom ADSL speed increase update

[Greg Roberts]

I must be living in the bundu!

Telkom ADSL speed boost update

Telkom’s ADSL speed upgrades are continuing; most ADSL clients already enjoying higher speeds

I live in Pinelands - near Cape Town - and despite leaving my modem on many nights since Oct 1 - I dont normally like having my pc running all night etc - Im still sitting on 384.

Anyone else in Pinelands been upgraded yet or am I a lonely stragler?

Cheers.

 

[Tns]

my modem synch at 2048/512k but i only get 1.7mbps and 0.36mbps and that is using a one meg account using a two meg account is virtually the same speed but cost 150 more.

 

[ChrisB]

Have you tried calling to ask?

And harping on the same old message: Wonder when my 4Mbps I have been paying for for many years will be upgraded from 1.7/386 to at least 4Mbps or better......

Two people I know were running for years at speeds below what they had been paying for... for years. When the speed upgrades started I did an informal audit of all my friends and discovered this - they both called 10210 and within minutes were up at the correct speed.

Explanation: "Someone must have set it at the wrong speed by accident."

Moral: In the absence of evidence to the contrary, never put down to malicious intent what can be put down to incompetence.

 

[ChrisB]

It's nice that so many people are now getting higher speed broadband

And it would be even nicer if I was getting any speed at all. I'd even settle for the speed I had before. Hell, I'd welcome 384 kb right now.

For 5 years I've had a very reliable service, and still think ADSL is the best service available for my money. And some time on or before Sept 8th, I was upgraded from 1 Mb to 2 Mb and I celebrated, and it was good.

Then between Oct 20th and 22nd, I started getting intermittency problems. And on Oct 23rd it went down altogether. Confusing thing was, the modem synched but PPP wouldn't come up. Of course the Telkom call centre insisted that meant I had an ISP problem (One agent even told me that if I couldn't get PPP up using guest@telkomadsl as user name and guest as password it still didn't mean my line was faulty).

And of course my ISP insisted I had a Telkom problem. So after batting that back and forth for a while, The Big T eventually gave me a fault reference.

A week later, I "escalated" it. Now apparently all that means is that a different person phones you back to tell you they are still working on it, because after 2 weeks and still no action I called again only to be told the fault was "cleared" 5 days ago.

No it wasn't, I said...

Oh, they said. Turns out (after who knows how many calls to 10210) that there is an underground fault somewhere between me and the exchange - a distance I can stroll in 5 minutes - but repair is "targeted" for Dec 1st.

Dec 1st! FIVE WEEKS without Internet! And can someone please tell me how I can still have a working phone line through all of this? (For the last three or 4 years I've had an intermittent loud crackle on the line, so bad you could sometimes not hear the other party, but my DSL service never wavered. Now it has gone comprehensively the other way. I swapped instruments, changed microfilters, and reported the line at least 5 times; had Telkom Techies up the pole tightening connections, replacing overhead cables, switching underground pairs - all seemed to work for a while but nothing had a permanent effect).

Meanwhile I have burned through some R 500 worth of high-latency unreliable mobile data. I even took out a new contract for 1 GB a month, thinking there's NO WAY the line is going to be down for more than a week... ha ha ha... well my first month's data was gone in one day, at approx 5 times the cost of DSL data. Out of band top-ups on that contract are a further TEN TIMES more than that! My word these mobile networks charge like a wounded rhino.

So there it is. Me a (former) vociferous champion of the ADSL installation, punished for being loyal to Telkom.

 

[Kevvie]

I cancelled my ADSL line years ago. The 4mbps I was paying for didn't perform even at dialup speeds. I believe the exchanges are still under performing or not upgraded at all. The other problem is Telkom needs to replace most old cables from the exchange to the residents as the wire is too thin to handle the data. Or so I have been told by a Telkom Technician who told me it will take years to upgrade to 10mbps. And I see why, the current exchanges can't even handle 1mbps. This is just my opinion and experience, I'll check my neighbors syncing speeds in the future (years to come) and maybe consider getting ADSL again. But for now, a 4mbps dialup just isn't good enough speed for me.

 

[justing]

Blah blah blah Hellkom. They cannot even get me 4 Mbps line stable and I live 2.5km from the exchange.

 

[ajottoman]

sitting with a 384Line in George, still not upgraded, wondering if they are going to...
Landline also has a crackle, always has, sometimes it just cuts off :/