Telkom fibre nightmare

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Jamie McKane

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Telkom fibre nightmare

A MyBroadband reader recently contacted us regarding their Telkom fibre package, which has caused them severe stress over the past year.

The reader encountered a number of issues as they tried to upgrade the speed of their fibre line, and again when they tried to cancel it.
 
I can understand the frustration very well.

The language barrier - especially when technical terms are being used - is a big issue, as is lack of proper training and a general disinterest in their jobs of Telkom's call centre agents.

To add further complexity Telkom has never been any good at interdepartmental communication, and since Openserve was established it has gotten even worse.
 
My Telkom ADSL story:

I had ADSL, the line was shitty and they did not want to replace/fix it. I canceled my ADSL and Voice line with them, and went 3G.

3 years later, they fixed the copper, so I applied for an ADSL line again. Was told there where no ports available. So it went on for Five Years.

So I walk into Telkom Direct once again, for the umpteenth time.

The lady looks at the system, and says there are no ports, but there is an anomaly on the system. She will check and see, maybe, she can help me. Next morning a Telkom Techie phones and says my line is up, he needs to just come to the premises and test and verify that the system is working.

So he checks it out, and I get my username and password and my phone number.

Guess what, the phone number is the same as the one I had previously. Also the same account number.

Turns out that, when I settled my account with Telkom, when I canceled my line, I over paid them by 27 cents. So apparently they could not re-allocate or recycle the port.

What the lady saw was that there was still a port allocated to me, after all this time, and managed to wake up someone, and re activate it for me.

EISH!!!
 
This issue of ISP's having to release your line is a major pain. I am trying to move from one ISP to another and despite paying what is owed and for cancellation, the current ISP would not release the line early. So i am stuck with subpar performance for a full month (if not longer).

There really needs to be some way to raise this ISPA really need to be able to intervene in these situations
 
Ecco said:
This issue of ISP's having to release your line is a major pain. I am trying to move from one ISP to another and despite paying what is owed and for cancellation, the current ISP would not release the line early. So i am stuck with subpar performance for a full month (if not longer).

There really needs to be some way to raise this ISPA really need to be able to intervene in these situations
Click to expand...

Telkom have never been a easy company to deal with, but lately - sigh ...
 
The wire and poles of my telkom line were stolen (I live on a farm). Telkom refused to replace them, so I cancelled my Telkom account and went to a wireless internet supplier. The wireless internet/voip phone is about 40% cheaper than Telkom, so I expect to recover the installion cost in about 17 months. I had made the mistake years ago of allowing Telkom to put a debit order on my account and Telkom continued to charge me for line rental and internet for 3 months so I went to my bank and put a stop payment on the debit order. I have heard nothing since!
 
I had the same issues with tkommaweer-en weer-en weer etc.
They wiped out my business as I nad NO email for 3 months. 3 months.
So as the option was to move to fibre (with someone else, I cancelled my ADSL and went fibre.
I have kept my telephone line and it is working OK (at present).
Having given the ADSL>fibre a chance to settle down, I will shortly move everything to the fibre line.
 
Hey, I'll add mine since its a little amusing.

In September last year we got fibre, so we decided to port our number instead of cancelling it since there where old people still calling us on it and its cheap to keep the number on voip.

Once the number was ported telkom then charge for an extra 30 days after that (cos.. theft? I duno) after which it was cancelled. Except they didn't cancel it. 3 months later we where still getting bills. My wife eventually gets to someone with a brain goes through the whole process pointing out that they where charging us for a line that had been ported away. They then cancelled the account and refunded all the charges. The next bill we got shows all the fee's refunded and the account ended and a zero balance.

Happy Ending?

No.

A month later we get another bill. The line has been reactivated and we have rental fee's on the bill again. Again my wife phones them again and she gets the run around. At this point she says fsk it and just starts binning the telkom bills.
We start getting these automated calls threatening us with disconnection on our now ported home phone.

Two months ago we get a call from telkom telling us they are about to suspend our line and hand us over. My wife tells the person they cannot suspend the number because they don't have it anymore. He tells her he definitely can.
She shrugs and says "Go ahead".

Last month we get a call from a debt collector regarding the outstanding amount. My wife explains the whole situation to her and says she can take action if she wants, its not going to change the fact that the line was reactivated after the number was ported away.

The debt collector realises this is a fsk up and says she will sort it out. No bill this month, so maybe its sorted? I hope so.

Personally I think that Telkom is reactivating cancelled numbers on their books to hide how badly they're bleeding.
 
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A Telkom contract is like a marriage where divorce is not allowed. They just ignore your cancellation requests in order to milk you dry. I was forced to “upgrade” a contract after it had expired as they carried on billing me as a prepaid customer. Calls/emails to cancel were all ignored for 9months. Upgrade effected after 5days.
 
No pun intended, but why on God's green earth do people still do business with the Great Evil? (Telkom)

I have personally tried them three times and in all three times they f***ed up the service. In all three cases the service was mediocre to say the least, the support was ... jeez, I don;t think they even know what the word means, and cancelling the service was a nightmare. It cost me a sh** load of phone calls, paper work and swearing like a seaman before they understood.

I just draw a line in the ground to never ever use them again and it was the bloody best decision I have ever made!
 
The problem is you speak to an agent in Port Elizabeth who has never heard of your suburb in Johannesburg. Furthermore you can never speak to a supervisor or manager. I signed up to upgrade from ADSL to fiber. They cancelled my ADSL and it took 3 months to get the fiber working. only when I went all over social media on every platform I could find did the fiber start working. Since then it’s been bliss.
 
So what can be learned from the hasty fiasco's of the last 30 years.
1-Senior Management can be centralised. if they know how to behave themselves, you can have an unstressfull workforce, which make it easy for them to actually think. The management should manage, and not tie up the workers in red tape procedures.
2-MIdle management can be centralised.
3-Local area management can be centralised.
4-Core equipment can be centralised.
5-Local Area equipment can be centralised.
6-Copper, Fibre phycical lines.
7-Microwave, Wireless communications.
8-Then you have your subscribers you want to serve and communicate with.

So want happened:
1-Senior management centralised ok.
2-Midle management centralised, maybe ok.
3-Local area management centralised, big problem.
4-Core equipment centralised, ok.
5-Local area equipment centralised, big problem, local techs access and ability to configure and fix problems quickly
done away with. The tech now reacts on ordersright or wrong or misplaced from above.
6-Copper/Fibre are physically in operation all over the country, the call centre has no clue how the area looks, staff capabilites, which is better for certain jobs than other, live and let live, big problem.
7-Microwave, Wireless communications......By making the techs do all the types of jobs which require different understandings and some jobs some people are better at than others, this is thrown out the window, this human practicality is discarded, workers considered flesh robots, you just speak and the robot do, big problem.
8-How do you communicate with your subscribers, those people that literally pay your salary, yes, you the boardmember & CEO right down to the tech.
Previously the subscribers were handled locally, and they could visit somebody in their nearest local town at least, by people that knows the area and everything about it, and only if a problem persists, it's escalated upwards. Now the subscriber is thrown out in the wild, has to explain to a complete stranger at a call centre his complicated problem, again and again and again. If the subscriber is lucky, he has a stable service and no complains, however if he has to complain, anything can happen with an endless endresult.

So you guess at your own time what went wrong with "modern (FastFood alike)bussiness" working with technical practical stuff. Alot of ideas works perfect in theory from behind a desk, but that does not gurantee it will work in practise. The party is over.
 
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From what I've read in the above comments, the best thing to do after you have cancelled your service with Hellkom is to go to your bank and cancel the stop order. Sorted Finished and Klaar. :)
 
Utterly Confused said:
From what I've read in the above comments, the best thing to do after you have cancelled your service with Hellkom is to go to your bank and cancel the stop order. Sorted Finished and Klaar. :)
Click to expand...

Just by a baseball bat to deal with the debt collects afterwards. :) :)

Important not to forget. :)
 
Happened to my friend. He switched from DSL to Fibre. But some technician made a stuffup on his line, and put the max speed as 2mbps and not 20mbps.

It took over 10 hours of calls to Telkom, and about 50 emails and 4 months to resolve.

The refused to refund him, even though they double billed him for both a 20mb line and a 2mb line. because of the technician fault. ie vumatel 20mb, but telkom 2mb. Cost R950 pm for 2mb effective speed which is what he got.
 
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