TL;DR: It works!
Not Sure if this prove to be popular.... But seems like a good idea.....
It took me 10 emails with 30+ phone calls to 10217 and a number of visits to a Telkom Shop just to get number hunting activated on my lines.
Good Luck getting this activated
Odd. Number hunting is handled by a dedicated team and you have to phone another number from what I was told. Maar janee - took me the seemingly requisite 10 emails and 30+ phone calls to get this
Single Number service activated. That and a few weeks of patience and begging.
Also not that popular if my
spidey senses are to be believed. Roughly 62 users that are signed up for this. But the signup process has a big part to play with the slow uptake (lots of paperwork: you need to sign a quote, a month-to-month contract and a sometimes an instruction letter on a business letterhead) - that and the fact that this service is top secret and only a select few within telkom knows about this service. An even smaller amount of telkom employees have had hands-on experience with this product. I personally went through two gate-keeper-ish types before landing the number of the big boss that seemed to know what she was talking about.
There is also somewhat of a disconnect between the marketing department and the product department. The marketing of the product led me to believe that if you phone the single number, all the lines connected to the product will start ringing at the same time.
Your business can link multiple phones (landline & mobile) to a landline number. The service can be self-configured to allow incoming calls to ring simultaneously across linked phones.
This is not the case. You set the amount of rings/seconds on the main line before the other lines start to ring. Minimum amount you can set it at is 5? according to telkom. Not that I have had any success with getting this setting to work. But I have to spend some time reading the guide again to check what I am doing wrong. Was just easier for me to bypass this requirement by engaging the line (*cough* shorting the wires
). Now all the lines ring at the same time as needed
Marketing also claims there are no limits to the amount of numbers you can link to your single number. The big boss, with her hands-on experience, claims a limit of ~30 odd.
There are two options/products under the Single Number banner. A R99/month value added service add-on and then the R169/month service that is a virtual service that does not require a physical line. In both instances you have a R30 activation charge and do not get charged extra for calls forwarded from the landline number to another landline number or a telkom mobile cellphone number. You do get charged for calls forwarded to a non-telkom mobile number though. After activation of this service you can assign multiple endpoint numbers via an online (hosted-pbx-type?) interface located at
www.hbt.telkom.co.za under an option called 'BroadWorksAnywhere'. A quick google indicates that this is existing tech that telkom is using and I must still see if they decided to disable some functionality or not. Any changes made to the endpoint numbers are immediate. There are also mention of a scheduling system and some basic functionality to route/block certain or private numbers, but I have yet to test it.
Here is the updated info/cheat sheet for those that might want to have a look-see:
View attachment Single Number Cheat Sheet_Updated 29012015.doc
Edit: I forgot to mention why we wanted this product...
Our business is moving and we could not keep our number as we were moving to a new exchange. Our options was to port the numbers to a voip/neotel/vodacom setup. That meant dedicated adsl and costly hardware costs etc etc. This service lets us, in effect, keep our number
