Dear South Africans

Dear South Africans

Many of you have had a problem with Telkom. Many of you have left this *********** failing parasatial. Some have stayed, like me, hoping that things would get better and giving Telkom the benefit of the doubt.

Today I want to share my story in the hope that I can dissuade future potential customers from making the same mistake as me.

I got my 2 mbps uncapped @ R399 ( eventually upgraded to 4mbps @ R599 as we were receiving less then 2 mbps line speed ) adsl line package a few year ago. Due to ageing infrastructure and Telkom being selective where they roll out fibre I had constant problems and logged many faults. At one time I was logging at least 4 faults every month for almost a year. I eventually moved into another area in the same city and had my lines moved in the hope that the lines would be better. They were good for all of 4 months and During March this year my lines went down again. For 3 months I reported the fault and phoned daily about fixing the fault. I was later told that it was due to cable theft after at least 7 technicians came out to the site ( going first to the old address as Telkom hadn’t updated my details on the system causing a lot of confusion).

Seeing that Telkom were dragging their feet seeming disinterested or incapable of fixing the line I moved to a whole new area/ town outside the city. One that is safer, upmarket and has a very low crime rate as it is situated on a Blue zone and has a very active anti crime network . There have been no reported cable thefts and all the residents that have adsl line in both my road and the adjacent one have never had cable theft issues. A month later ( making it 4 months later) they finally sent someone to install lines. This was in June.

4 months later this November 2018 the lines go down again. I log a fault and am later told ( had to follow up myself) by Telkom, that they wont be fixing my line due to ongoing cable theft and because repairing them is costing them too much. They then tell me I have two options LTE at R900 ( which I cannot afford) and a stupid service called fixed look alike that can only accommodate 10 gigs of data, Does not work properly ( according to negative reviews) and which does not cater for my son and my needs.

SO this is where I find myself now. With my service provider denying to offer me the service I signed up for and bullying me into taking their two alternative solutions one which I cannot afford and one that does not cater for our needs. In other words they have given us the middle finger and told us to take it or leave it.

This ladies and gentleman is how Telkom treat their customers, (even those suckers that have been faithful to them and put up with their incompetence for years). I cannot tell you which provider to use but I hope that I have shed some light on Helkoms incompetence and blatant disregard for their customers in the hope that you will make a more informed decision going forwards. And to those that are with them already I can only advize you to pray your lines don’t go down and you end up in the same situation as I am in because its inevitable it will happen at some point.