Carte Blanche: Your Feedback Needed

South Africa’s Carte Blanche is working on a story about Telkom, and their role in the prohibitive costing and lack of accessible internet service in South Africa. We are looking for personal and small to medium-sized business case studies involving exhorbinant costing, delayed installation times and any other story highlighting the issues behind the lack of fairly priced internet services, which ultimately may inhibit the country’s educational and economic success. Contact Tanya BEFORE MARCH 9, 2006, at the latest, on [email protected]

Cool. Should be interesting..

I'm not sure I understand wrt exhorbinant costing as everyone in SA is subject to the same line rental.

As far as roll out goes Telkom actually does a better job then the likes of iBurst and MyWireless as they just concentrate in the 3 major cities.

Are schools even getting the half priced internet as promised by the government last year?

Still - nice to see carte blanche getting on the band wagon - finally.

bwana v.9 said:

I'm not sure I understand wrt exhorbinant costing as everyone in SA is subject to the same line rental.

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Surely, cost of bandwidth, line rental, installation, etc.

COST .... COST .... COST and how the COST is keeping the majority of kids off the internet for EDUCATIONAL purposes ....

.geek said:

Surely, cost of bandwidth, line rental, installation, etc.

Click to expand...

What I'm saying is line rental and installation are pretty much fixed by telkom. The only real variable is bandwidth cost and telkom pretty much sets the minimum at an already exorbitant rate including the costs they sell SAT3/SAFE to the likes of Verizon.

Carte Blanche can also take a look at what the Knysna Municipality has introduced, to see what is possible with Wireless Technology. Draw some comparisons.

Schools in Knysna now have free 24/7 Internet and the previously disadvantaged areas have free telephones within the 044 dialling area which extends from Plettenberg Bay to Mossel Bay.
No thanks to Telkom may I add, despite the 50% discount they were supposed to offer to places of education.

Well Carte Blanche can start their half hour program with the music from the Telkom Helpdesk and then end it withn the same music. They can point out that there are no facilities to inform the fault reporter of any known problems and can then proceed to repeat the wonderful Helpdesk comment of "it will cost you R400 if it is your fault". They can point out that with +- 20 halfhour waits that it has NEVER been my fault and that Telkom should have been aware of the problem in the first place and that they have never offered to pay me R400 for my wasted time.

They could point out that to upgrade to a 1gig line took Telkom a month, once again wasting my time.

They can then show the wireless presention of JAWUG and point out that a) it is illegal and b) that Telkom does not do anything similar for communities, which thus lose the benefit of such a service. They can also point out that although Telkom had to provide half price internet to schools, that this has not yet happened.

The story of flying to Hong Kong would also be good.

They can also cover the fact that Telkom's interference with the network makes it very difficult to actually do work or enjoy normal internet benefits. The streaming problems I had with 512 is the same as I have with 1024. They can show that all Telkom is doing is protecting a dying business ie Diginet) by interfering with ADSL. They can also point out that I have to pay for bandwidth that do not pass my firewall(such as port scans) and over which I have no control.

They can cover how Telkom even today interferes with SKYPE.

They can cover how all Telkom media people lie and how Telkom uses false advertising. They can even cover Samuels? stupidity and how this is the only country where it is more expensive to download something volumous rather than buy it.

Etc Etc This forum contains many examples of Telkom abuse of the public. We did not eeven cover the fact that there are no Telkom branches in black communities. They can also cover how Telkom evenntually control all the bandwidth pricing even for wireless and how they kill opposition by dirty tactics. They can cover the threat of stopping ADSL.