LTE poor connectivity

Telkom LTE and general service:

Good day, I would just like to make you aware of the service experience I had with Telkom and I would also like to advise you to look at all the available options before considering Telkom LTE.

Telkom LTE was sold to me as a premium product that deliver high connection speeds of between 20 and 50Mbps and in the beginning it was, but for more than a year I’ve been struggling with buffering (which I was told I will never experience) and needing to reset my system on a daily basis. I did log calls once or twice, but we all know how those go.

Come lockdown, I actually realised how bad it is, and as soon as more than one person are connected you have huge issues most of the time. I started running the Telkom speed tests as available on their site to find out my connection speeds are down to 2 or 4Mbps…the one day/test it was on 0.4Mbps….basically not functioning at all.

I eventually managed to get a call logged, but the operator/technician wasn’t able to solve the issue on the spot and told me she will escalate it to the appropriate people.

So on Friday the 24th of April I received a call from a technician in Pretoria w.r.t my logged call Ref ***4 and it seems there is no help or solution available from Telkom. Can you believe the Technicians solution to me is for me to cancel my contract with Telkom. Wow!! (After the call he just changed my ticket to completed)

Apparently the Telkom tower in my area is overloaded, resulting in the LTE basically stopping to function. Telkom is also not planning any upgrade to it, so the recommendation from his management is to inform his clients to rather cancel their contracts with Telkom. I obviously questioned him on how Telkom allowed it to get it to this overloaded stage while knowing they have existing customers whose contracts they must honour. I mean, how do you keep on taking someone’s money knowing you cannot deliver your part of the deal. (I suppose their logic is to take the payments until the customer cannot bear it anymore, and then you just tell him to cancel, because you cannot deliver….not very responsible or ethical in my opinion.) I told the technician that I can obviously not cancel now in the middle of lockdown, because then I’ll have nothing and as a minimum my son in matric at least needs to receive his material no matter how slow or delayed. I expected Telkom to at least offer me a reduction in the monthly payment since I’m mostly only getting a 10th of the promised capabilities of their LTE……, but obviously a reduction in my service received don’t result in a reduction in their income.

So I suppose I’ll just have to keep on paying the premium amount per month for this limping connection until I can arrange something reliable. To me this is bordering on using the Lockdown situation to their advantage.