Telkom lashes out at MTN
Telkom issued a press statement today rejecting claims made by Tim Lowry, Managing Director of MTN SA, that Telkom is to blame for the majority of their network faults.
Lowry today said that some elements of MTN’s network quality remain beyond their control, including electricity supplied by Eskom and transmission links from Telkom. According to Lowry the biggest point of failure in MTN’s network is links and transmission provided by Telkom, accounting for 53.11% of all MTN network faults.
According to Telkom Lowry is blaming them “for their own network and capacity shortcomings as an attempt to deflect attention from MTN’s own failure to adequately service its customers.”
Telkom says that it is ironic and unacceptable that every time some of the mobile operators are made to account for their network availability and reliability, blame is conveniently apportioned to Telkom.
“Over the last few weeks (the period for which the mobile operators have reportedly been asked to explain their network quality to Icasa), there were no extraordinary circumstances or network problems on the Telkom network that could have contributed to the problems encountered by MTN or the other mobile operators,” Telkom said.
“Also, delays in messaging and dropped calls are not a function of Telkom’s access or core network but a reflection of the switching and transmission capacity of the mobile operators’ network dimensioning practices.”
Telkom says that another factor that needs to be considered is that the deployment of mobile broadband networks require significantly more bandwidth and network capacity which, in turn, could impact the quality of service of the mobile networks.
“In view of these considerations, perhaps MTN must be challenged to prove to the public that the dropped calls and SMS issues can be directly correlated to Telkom over the past month,” Telkom states.
“It must also be remembered that the mobile operators had the right to self provide since September 2005 and that Telkom is no longer the sole provider of all their network capacity requirements.”
Telkom emphasized that the mobile operators, and not Telkom, are fully responsible for the end-to-end performance of their respective networks. “They do order links from Telkom at a specific Service Level Agreement (SLA). This may be at either 99.5% or 99.95% availability levels.”
“Telkom has been consistently designing and providing these links to the operators at the mutually agreed service levels with all our mobile operators. In fact, Telkom is proud to highlight that we have achieved our service level agreements regarding network availability with all three mobile operators over the last 12 months, with the only exception being the month of November 2008 where we were 0.007% outside the SLA for MTN.”
“This has been achieved even if we take into account that whatever network failures were encountered are usually outside our immediate control. These include weather conditions, construction activity, theft of cable and the like.”
Notwithstanding these factors Telkom says that it has not only maintained its SLAs with all the mobile operators but has also provided links to the mobile operators in a prioritised way as dictated by them over the past 24 months.
“This performance must also be seen in the light of Telkom currently providing in excess of 105 000 E1 (2 megabit) links to the mobile operators, with a 34% increase in link provisioning to the mobile cellular operators occurring in the past year,” Telkom concluded.
Telkom or MTN to blame? – give your views
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