Telkom slams broadband report

[AdLo]

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[alchamy]

Looks like the hard work is only beginning for us, we will need to continue the good work and apply more pressure to keep things in our favour, ICASA is fickle and will be easily swayed by Telkom unless we continue to remind them of their civic duty.

 

[Highflyer_GP]

aaaargh i just get so pissed off when vapi opens his trap. he's singing the same damn tune over and over about maintenance.

Telkom does not believe that public hearings are the most appropriate way to get information. Using public platforms for information results in misunderstandings.”

what the f@ck?? has he ever heard of customer feedback??

 

[Sneeky]

Well, Telkom did submit their pricing structure to Icasa already did they not? I seem to recall the public questioning the pricing at the hearings (the transcripts),and Telkom saying that they have submitted it to ICASA but it was not for public scrutiny.
Thing is though if it was shieet then, why will it not be shieet now, unless you start doing some financial gymnastics.

Im eager to hear Telkoms full response and explanations, thats why they were at the hearing in the first place, but they chose not to elaborate. Maybe they thought it was a lunch invite and didnt have to do any work except eating the chow and going to the crapper.

Seriousley though. I am looking forward to it, what is the next step, how are the public kept involved with this 'justification' process.

 

[Dastrix]

If we do away with access charges we may have to revisit our broadband rollout strategy, which may hinder development in the long run

Bollocks! This is all about money, everything about this ADSL service has been designed at the beginning to keep the cash rolling in and protect Telkoms Diginet service. Resets, dynamic IP, cap.

This could discourage Telkom from investing further

Utter rubbish, if Telkom stopped maintaining or rolling out it would mean that iBurst, Sentech and co would be able to steal their market. Telkom are preparing for the SNO and (as I have been told) are deliberately making access to their infrastructure "full and unavailable" - there is no way that they are ever going to let go that easily.

This is a tactic to scare ICASA and the DOC and I for one am not buying a single word of it.

 

[Dastrix]

Vapi says Telkom intends to “engage Icasa with facts about network design, its pricing strategy and what customers get billed for, and correct some misunderstandings of issues"

I think we must demand third party at this "engagement", if they lied about the cap they will lie more.

 

[The_Right_Honourable_Brit]

Vapi says Telkom operates in a competitive environment, and that it was unfair for the regulator to investigate its services.

Competing with exactly who?

 

[Sneeky]

Liberate the cables, unbundle the loop and bring in 2 other big independant operators, then lets see Telkom whine about what costs. Biatches

 

[TMoose]

Telkom does not believe that public hearings are the most appropriate way to get information. Using public platforms for information results in misunderstandings.

I can't believe this. They are such arrogant whores. What they actually mean is that if they engage ICASA privately they can twist its arm and misinform it as much as they want without anybody interupting. They couldn't do that at the hearings because people were pissing all over their idiotic explanations. Die Telkom, die you scumbag piece of **** organization. I don't even care if the SNO is cheaper anymore, I'll switch to them just because they're not Telkom.

 

[Sneeky]

Competing with exactly who?

Eish, I dont know, the rest of South Africa doesnt know either. Maybe Vapi needs to explain this to us and the rest of the South African public, in front of ICASA.

 

[Highflyer_GP]

LOL Tmoose i was thinking the same thing - i'll switch purely for my hatred over telkom.
this quote is a bit suspicious too:

Icasa has displayed a fundamental misunderstanding in network design. It appears the findings are based on reports by parties at the hearings, and Icasa did not apply its mind on how broadband is offered worldwide

it looks suspiciously a lot like the post "ICASA report has huge technical flaws !!!" as posted by ayanda under the general adsl section - and the way ayanda seems to be defending telkom.

 

[BTTB]

Vapi, White, Sizwe. They will all sing the same tune.
It doesn't matter.
The fact is the truth hurts. Telkom are in denial of the facts.
And the last thing Mr Vapi should say is,
"We understand this is a complicated issue for the regulator to understand".
Does he think the people that work for ICASA are fools? From what I have read from their 46 page Report, they understand what the problems are.
Telkom if they had any sense should start listening to ICASA and start taking the people of South Africa seriously. We are not cows that can be milked at will. We work hard for our money and when we know we are being ripped off we will make a stand.
This all could have been avoided long ago had Mr White and Co actually taken the time out to speak to the Representative of MyADSL.
Now to turn around and say that ICASA are basically fools and don’t understand is a smack in the face to the people of South Africa that are working hard to improve the broadband situation.
Telkom brought the situation on themselves.

 

[munwaal]

The sheer arrogance of this company astounds me.. As stated by TMoose earlier, I too will switch to the SNO, even if they are more expensive, just to get away from these manwhores.

Hey telkom - RAPE IS ILLEGAL!

 

[bb_matt]

We only need to look at how the Teleco's operate overseas to understand what is possible.

How can this company be so arrogant to assume that ICASA are stupid ?

Much of what ICASA's findings are based on, are success stories from overseas, yet this arrogant evil company disputes this ?

I'm afraid that Telkom is rotten to its very core - the government needs to wade in now through ICASA wielding a big stick to knock some sense into these greedy fools.

 

[The_Unbeliever]

SNO, here I come.

Telkom's digging a nice and deep hole for itself. Instead of having smaller slices of the cake, and for a longer period of time, they're greedily grabbing the biggest slices, which won't last very long, as most people will be getting fed up and going "to the dark side" just to make a stand. Which means that their revenue will dry up, leading to them jacking up their prices to sustain their $alaries et al... which will lead to more customers getting p** off and leaving, a vicious circle.

Even if the SNO's ADSL will take a month or two to have its basic infrasctructure put up, I'm willing to wait, and use the SNO's 56k dial-up in the meantime.

Should the clever guys at Telkom decide to charge an arm and a leg for calls originating from the SNO's network to any numbers on the Telkom network, people will start to use cheaper alternatives, like skype, vodacom, or walkie-talkies.

Hope Icasa's got a nice pair to stand up to Telkom.

Typical. Icasa cheered up my Friday last week with their annoucement, and Telkom fsck up my Monday with their announcement.

 

[Highflyer_GP]

vapi is just a spokesman, he's not an engineer or anything, so who the f@ck is he to say who knows what about networking.

 

[Fire0ne]

Telkom does not believe that public hearings are the most appropriate way to get information. Using public platforms for information results in misunderstandings

That is a good one, seing as the public is the ones who use the service and knows how it is. Most of us chat on irc, msn , icq and a few others out there. To get to my point now. We all chat with people from other countries and from my little chats i leanred a bit of how their dsl is. I even gave the addy to the myadsl site to one of my friends, and well my friend was shocked at how our dsl is compared to theirs. In the end we the public deserve the right to know how the changes in the dsl sector is gonna affect us.

my 5 cents to this

 

[TheRoDent]

I can't say I totally disagree with Vapi on this one. The report as it stands now, proposes a lot of regulations, without understanding the full impact of these regulations. It's quite apparent that ICASA has as much insight into the network and it's operation as us, the MyADSL users have. I got surprised by Pedantic (from saol.com) yesterday about the entire 30G capping thing, and how it's all supposedly a loophole in SAIX that allows them to offer these packages.

Regulating something like voice calls, and interconnects is much easier than attempting to regulate a complex IP network over an ATM backbone, with authentication dished out to third parties, and what not.

I'm of the firm belief that what this country does NOT NEED is more regulation. Rather, ICASA should address the MACRO issues, instead of trying to micro regulate Telkom. Granted, our only choice for DSL at the moment lies with Telkom, and we have been screwed over by them -- but let's say these regulations get passed -- and suddenly Sentech, and WBS now also have to comply to these regulations because they supply a "broadband" service...

Is that really what we want to stimulate competition? I'd rather see more ISP's offering more creative packages, and more access providers providing better service, than attempts to micro-manage Telkom, which they will just stonewall as far as they can. Putting DSL into the "regulated basket" of services is a step in the right direction, in the short term. The basket needs to be controlled due to the monopolistic environment.

In future, I hope that all ICASA may need to do is manage interconnect, peering, customer rights, and frequencies, rather than be bothered with micro-managing every aspect of Telkom's network, for which they're obviously not qualified. If they were, it wouldn't have taken 400 MyADSL users to stir up a storm about the state of broadband. Cheaper access will only happen if they address the larger issues, and stimulate competition.

 

[ayanda]

Rodent, I raised a similar concern in the General adsl thread to create informed debate,, got shot down pretty fast.

 

[Highflyer_GP]

the common denominator thats responsible for every provider of broadband charging excessive rates is without question telkom. they have exclusive control of bandwidth, and sell it at prices of their discretion. sentech wbs etc have no option of providing something more affordable simply because of the rates that they themselves are charged. THIS is the reason that competition cannot be fully realised. telkom are unwilling to make access more affordable, therefore the price cuts that icasa suggest are fully justifiable. force them to reduce their bandwidth rates to isp's, do away with the adsl rental, and maybe then will we finally see some competition.

the situation is at a point where telkom will not do anything under their own power, they are more interested in keeping shareholders happy while screwing over the public. this sort of action neccessitates regulation in order to protect the interest of consumers. once the convergence bill becomes law, and more competition is allowed into the market, then the regulations might very well be released to a large degree. but until then, in the short term, something has to be done to prevent consumers from being exploited