PATHETIC SERVICE

Our experience with Telkom has been the worst ever. They promise you all the pomp and glory and then give u **** in the end and still expect you to pay for a service you are not receiving. My patience has really run out. I am an 81 year pensioner who decided to give my granddaughter an opportunity to work on online to sustain our living expenses. With this in mind we app**** for an ADSL line. On advice from the store consultants together with the specs that we required we settled for a 4 MGB line. Bare in mind this came a month later, nobody had the decency to let us know what the prolonged delay was. After several calls on my side we found out the reason was that the technician could not get to the line that was inside somebody’s yard because there was a dog. I as the CUSTOMER had to make contact with the owner of the house and had to make sure the dog was tied, I put myself in danger in order for the technician to work in the yard. What is the protocol in this respect is it my duty as a customer to arrange all this. Why do you place these poles in a place that is inaccessible in the first place? We finally get a technician to my home the same day. He did not know what to do, where to place the modem or where to run the wiring. He had drilled unnecessary holes in my wall which has just been left as is. My grandson took over and instructed the technician on what to do. The technician left the place in a shamble and my grandson had to tidy up after him re-gluing the wiring. A 4MGB line was now installed only to be advised that the 4MGB line was indeed running at a lower speed at what I SHOULD BE RECEIVIENG and hence the job opportunities ceased . All this while I still paid my monthly installments , and tried to get help from the call center agents , I was told that my router could be faulty and I should take in to the Telkom store to have it tested , I went to a Telkom store only to have a rude person tell me it’s not their job to test routers in store I must phone the call center to have it tested , when I was specifically instructed by the call center technician to have it tested in store ,as that is the only place they do the testing , I left with nothing resolved and unsatisfied . I logged a fault and had a technician come over, not knowing what the fault was she said I must go to Telkom and tell them to give me a new router because my current one is still under guarantee , the next day I go back to Telkom only to have them say they do not give new routers and that it is the customers duty to buy a “ reliable “ router as the one Telkom provides is not trustworthy , if it is free I must expect that it will not work properly, this is coming from a Telkom employee, blatantly telling me the quality of the routers provided by them is pathetic , straight out of the horse’s mouth . I proceed to purchase a R700 router at additional cost to myself ,when I got home and tested the speed with the new router I was not shocked to find NO CHANGE , the speed was the same , there was nothing wrong with the router to begin with Here we are a year later, my speed issue still not resolved. I decided to upgrade the line to a 10MGB line in hopes of achieving the adequate speed. The upgrade took over a week, along with 3 days of which I was offline and unable to carry out my online job, losing income each day. I phoned the call Centre numerous times to find out what was the progress and all they had to say was it is still being attended to, finally I was forwarded to the sales department who informed me that a technician had done the upgrade but FORGOT TO CLOSE THE ORDER leaving me offline for those 3 days that followed, I had to then arrange that the order be closed and proceed to set up the line with a call center agent. Bare in mind that a relative and I both upgraded the same day and her upgrade was done overnight. The upgrade was finally done and I HAD the adequate speed of a 10 MGB line for ONE DAY, not even a full day , it was probably a FEW HOURS , it has been 3 weeks now, I have logged 2 faults of which, both, was closed and I received a message to say the problem was resolved. I conducted a speed test and of course the PROBLEM WAS NOT SOLVED, I was still sitting with the speed of a 6MGB line when I am paying for a 10MGB line. I have phoned the call centre almost every day since trying to get help only to get absolutely nowhere, a new fault was logged on the 13th of September and this still has not been resolved to date. Each time I call in, I speak to the dumbest of agents not knowing how in the world to assist me. I have probably called them 15 times since the upgrade, to have spoken to only TWO people who actually knew what was going on , My 10 MGB line is syncing on a 6MGB line and all a technician has to do is simply change my line to a higher port profile of a 10 MGB line . I am paying for a 10MGB line only to be receiving the speed of a 6MGB line. PATHETIC is understatement for Telkom’s putrid Service