Telkom telephone line on Telkom ISP on Openserve

[ebendl]

So my father in law ran out of his 20GB Rain LTE and my mother in law convinced him to get fibre.

Now he has a telephone line that he uses for business purposes and thus is very concerned that moving to fibre will null-and-void the analog line.

Telkom told him that if he gets the Uncapped Telkom Fibre then he gets the analog line connection and retains his 012 number. But I was wondering if anybody knows if this is only possible on the Uncapped packages? According to the Telkom shop, it is not available on the softcapped option, but he's not a heavy internet user and I'd much rather save him some money and get the softcapped option.

THey also told him additional analog points in his house is charge at R600 per meter, which I think is BS.

I know an alternative is a VOIP service such as Freshphone with a ATA to plug in his old fax machine and cordless phones, but I'm hesitant to get him this as it seems "too technical" and too much of a hassle with little direct benefit for him (and then instead of one service provider he sits with 3 -- OpenServe, ISP and the VOIP).

 

[Ben B]

Here's my 2 cents. I have Rain on a Huawei B618 and I think cost wise it is a better deal than Telkom if your father is not a heavy user because you can increase your data allocation in 1GB chunks at R10 per GB (Afrihost prices). I also took the Telkom 10Mbps FTTH special for R799 per month when they had that beginning of 2017 - it is uncapped, includes the analogue telephone line and 2GB per month mobile data on a Telkom sim. Calls to Telkom numbers are supposed to be free. The downside of this deal is that the Huawei ONT only has one of the four Ethernet ports enabled and only one of the two analogue telephone ports enabled - that means one Ethernet cable to your router and one telephone connection - you can (I think) daisy chain other devices such as fax machines, but I don't have a fax machine so I don't know for sure. The other issue is that a normal analogue line gets it's power from the exchange and continues to work when your municipal power goes down - very regularly with us due to cable theft. So if you need the telehone when the power is down you have to rely on a generator or a powerful UPS. Lastly, in my opinion the call quality on the FTTH connection is not as good as on the ordinary analogue line. Hope that helps