Telkom is USELESS!

Hello fellow South Africans.

I am absolutely fed up with telkom's "f#%jjd8*" service.

With more and more people working from home, Internet is becoming a prerequisite for anyone earning a salary, or better yet, still able to earn a salary. We have had ADSL with telkom for around 10 years or more. i have been reasonably happy with the service and cannot complain until now.

We all get those call centres calling all day everyday and i generally ignore them. But last week, something told me to answer this number that kept trying to contact me. So i did, and it was Telkom offering me fiber. I spoke to my wife and we agreed that we will migrate once the fiber is more stable in our area as there have been many complaints. Then, our adsl goes down randomly. We log a fault, they say they will attend to it and a few minutes later it was sorted. Happens again the next morning, same thing, a "reset" corrects it. The whole time telkom sales are phoning me asking if i want fiber. Quite a coincidence? I accepted the fiber because we dont really have a choice, right?

As of today, we have had no internet since thursday last week at all. Can a business function like this? How does telkom expect us to function??? We phoned and phoned and it takes 30minutes minimum for telkom technical to actually answer. Yet sales answer in 2mins. Seems like they are having far more issues than sales.

Friday we get a sms stating a technician is looking into the fault and that was it. As of monday, they update me with an sms stating that adsl copper lines will not be repaired anymore, and that was that, no "we will provide you with a temporary line or service" to keep us able to work from home.

So, the Openserve technicians come to my house as i was leaving on friday. These guys looked so ***** that i did not feel safe leaving my wife home alone with these guys. They were contractors to openserve apparently. We have a pole right in the corner where the adsl is currently run. There is also a openserve fiber junction box that was installed about a month ago, so you would think that it would be a easy swap of cables to fiber line. Nope, these guys want to put another pole up on the opposite end of my property, 35 meters away and then the line would have to run past my garage to the other end of the house probably 40m. Currently, if they ran it from the current pole installed with the new fiber junction box, it would be 10-12m to my house. This doesnt make sense, its like these contractors are incentivized to install more hardware so they can benefit from charging openserve more?! so i said as you can see i am building and that they can not install it now, nor did they have the equipment for the extra pole etc. They couldnt give me an answer why they couldnt use the pole and fiber connection that was already installed by openserve. I was actually happy for them to leave though, fearing my wifes safety.

I didnt know when these guys came on friday, that the adsl will not be repaired at all as this info only arrived with me on monday. Otherwise i would have made sure they find another way to hook us up. I have been trying to contact telkom since monday in an attempt for the technicians to please return and find another way to help us. I have screenshots of all the times i have called and waited to speak to their operators and its like 5 hours in total. who can do this just to get in touch with a company you are getting a service from and paying good money for?! In the end, the call centre has no way of contacting the installation technicians whatsoever! how is this possible???? So for three weeks that i will be building for we will be without internet?!

I cancelled all my telkom services online. there are no email addresses anymore for proof of cancellation now days, seems like if telkom dont get official emails, there is no proof right? I decide to go in to a telkom store, to confirm all is in order. i even gave them 30 days notice even though we are not getting any internet from them, at all. So for the remainder of this month and the entire November 2021, they will be basically *****ing my money. The agents in the shop after waiting for an hour and a half in a queue of 2 people in front of me, the lady says the cancellation will not go through until they come to install the fiber in 3 weeks. There is nothing they can do i must wait. They cannot contact them, i must be patient?!?!? In the meantime, waiting in the queue, my wife went next door to vodacom, we signed a deal there, they gave us an LTE 100gb and modem to keep us connected until their fiber is installed for no additional cost. Telkom is the most useless company i have had to deal with in years, i am so frustrated and i still dont know where i stand with the cancellation.

How can a company operate like this? The call centers keep saying you must phone this number, push this option which doesnt even exist? i am done with telkom. i will be happy paying 200 more to another company per month for even the slightest bit of better service!