Triple whammy knocks ADSL for six
The service has been hit by the triple whammy of Eskom’s power outages, thunderstorms and the severing of two of the three submarine cables that link South Africa to the world, said a Telkom spokesman who asked not to be named.
ADSL customers are advised on the Telkom website’s “report a fault” page: “Please note that this facility is only for normal telephone line faults (voice faults).
“ADSL faults must be reported to 0800 375 375.”
Telkom said all its fault-reporting channels were overloaded, so e-mailed complaints were unlikely to get a response soon.
Reporting the problem by phone while sitting in front of your computer and modem will speed up the fault-finding process because Telkom will immediately be able to check if it is a line or a modem problem.
Unfortunately, this route takes a huge amount of patience.
Eskom’s load shedding has caused chaos for Telkom’s ADSL service because sudden power cuts often scramble modem settings. Telkom advises its customers to reset their modem to the default factory settings and then reconfigure it to their preferred settings.
“The problem is that most customers need a help desk to take them through the steps of reconfiguring, which is one of the reasons the helpline is overloaded ,” a spokesman said.
But resetting the software won’t help if the modem has been damaged by lightning, as many in Gauteng have recently. To complicate matters, thundershowers have made many Telkom lines faulty.
ADSL customers fortunate enough still to be online are complaining that their Internet connection speed has plummeted.
On Friday, Telkom lost a third of its international bandwidth when its submarine cable to Malaysia broke. Telekom Malaysia is working on the problem.
Then, on Monday, local cable theft left Telkom with only one international data line. This problem has been fixed.
“Our installation and repair crews are being messed around badly by Eskom’s power problems. T he electricity crisis is hurting our data service badly.”
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