Telkom VoIP mess
Voice over IP (VoIP) providers in South Africa are not impressed after people calling certain numbers from Telkom’s network could not make a successful call.
One industry player, who asked to remain anonymous because of his close ties to Telkom, explained that Telkom had big issues last week when they were sending calls from their network to ported numbers (hence numbers which were moved from Telkom to a VoIP provider).
“When anyone called from a Telkom line to a ported number, the recipient would be met with one way speech. The caller would hear the person they called, but the recipient would not hear caller,” he explained.
MyBroadband confirmed that this problem affected numerous South African VoIP operators, including many prominent providers like Nashua Communications.
Andy Openshaw, MD of Nashua Communications, confirmed that they experienced sustained call quality issues on the Telkom network. “Many of our customers and partners were affected,” said Openshaw.
Openshaw said that, according to a source in the industry, the problem was related to the upgrade of equipment in Telkom’s IP network.
“The issue appears to be related to poor planning and a lack of change control processes at Telkom – this is a concern given the critical nature of its IP network. Telkom runs backbone network and interconnection services for most of the operators in the SA market,” said Openshaw.
Andy Openshaw
Another VoIP provider was less diplomatic, saying that his company had poor responses from Telkom and that he lost lots of business because of this issue. “This equates to anti-competitive behavior,” he said.
Telkom was asked for feedback about the problem and the accusations about anti-competitive behavior, but the company did not answer these questions by the time of publication.
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