Telkom and DA square off about broadband
The Democratic Alliance (DA) yesterday slammed Telkom after their electronic communications were down for over 26 hours due to a fault with Telkom's broadband connection.
The opposition party said that despite numerous phone calls to Telkom to establish the extent and duration of the problem, Telkom had been unable to fix the problem.
According to the DA, the poor service is aggravated by the fact that Telkom has no report back system in place to deal with these situations and that there is no automatic refund policy where customers can be compensated for prolonged downtimes.
The current Telkom system requires customers to pay their monthly bill while the responsibility remains on the customer’s shoulders to contact the relevant Telkom department to claim a refund for the downtime experienced.
DA spokesman Gareth van Onselen further said that Telkom was inflexible and arrogant in their dealings with them, something which will not go down well with a customer struggling with a broken Internet service.
Repaired
The DA’s connection was repaired soon after the political party’s media release was published by the press. Van Onselen however said that while the DA has a well established media channel to address such issues, most Telkom clients do not have the same luxury.
Van Onselen further said that while the damage caused by the downtime is difficult to measure, it definitely cost the party a great deal of exposure in the media because they could not communicate their press releases in the normal fashion.
With many small businesses relying heavily on Telkom’s ADSL or WiMax services, fault resolution times can be critical to ensure that these businesses function properly.
Telkom responds
Telkom was quizzed about their failure to provide a report back system, why the responsibility for downtime refunds is placed on the shoulders of customers and about Telkom’s apparent arrogant and inflexible attitude, but none of these questions were answered directly.
Telkom did however say that the fault in question was reported on 3 October and was cleared on 4 October.
“Essentially there was downtime for 24 hours and 45 minutes. Telkom always endeavors to restore interrupted services as expeditiously as possible,” said Lulu Letlape, Telkom’s Group Executive for Corporate Communication.
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