Unbelievably atrocious service

1 star is still too much to give Telkom. I wish we could give negative stars.

We are having endless issues with our landline and adsl.

We used to have a landline/adsl combo. The adsl was not good. We never got the full speed we were paying for and had frequent outages. In March 2018 we decided to move our adsl over to Afrihost. We filled in the required documents and submitted them. One month later we were informed that the documents were incorrectly filled in and we had to re-submit them. From April to July nothing happened. We made numerous calls to Afrihost who said that the line was not in the “holding pool” and only Telkom could put it in the “holding pool”. We called Telkom and they gave a reference number: ********** 3 and said the manager will call me back as I was frustrated by then. Nobody called me.

Several more calls were made to Telkom. The call centre agents at 10213 kept saying it was not their department and to call 10210. The call centre agents at 10210 kept saying it was not their department and to call 10213. This resulted in many calls to both numbers with each department saying it was not their problem. Each call took on average 30 minutes for someone to answer. This was very frustrating.

Since we could not get the adsl transferred to Afrihost we were advised by Telkom to keep the data with Afrihost and keep the adsl line itself with Telkom and increase the speed. It was R130/month more so we agreed and we filled out all necessary forms online. This was done in July/August. Again no action was taken by Telkom. With my husband busy at work and son busy studying nobody had time to follow up until November when we started experiencing internet outages for days at a time.We called Telkom who said there were problems with the “bolt cables” in our area and they were waiting for spares. After 2 consecutive weeks of no internet we decided we could not wait as Telkom said they did not know when the spares would arrive. We then spoke to Afrihost for advice. Afrihost said we should migrate the adsl line as well over to them. On 14 November we submitted the documents online again and were told we had to wait 30 days. On 14 December the adsl and landline were disconnected. When we called Telkom we got a real run-around again. At first they said it was due to cable theft but 10 days later all our neighbours had their services restored. Our line was still dead. Calls to our number were greeted with the message “this number no longer exists”. On 7 January we called the 10210 (faults) and spoke to Raeez who told us the line was definitely disconnected and there was no service at all but all other agents we spoke to said it was cable problems. Raeez said the best option for us was to call 10213 and select options 1-2-2 and ask them to check the XACT status line and only they can confirm if it is disconnected and only they can re-connect the line. When I called the number the person was extremely rude to me and did not want to even give me his name. He also said he has no idea what I was talking about with regards to checking the line status and re-connecting. I asked to speak to his supervisor and he rudely told me that they do not have a supervisor in the call centre. Who in the world works without a supervisor?

On 24 January I called 10210 and spoke to Sonnet who advised that the line is definitely cancelled as she cannot see any services related to it. She suggested we order a new line from scratch and go for wireless so we do not have cable problems.She said that our old number is available and we can get it back. She also said we have to cancel our data package with Afrihost which we did. The account is officially on my husband’s name and Sonnet could not process anything without speaking to him first. Later in the day when my husband returned home we called the sales department and spoke to Tony. He advised of the packages available and we chose the 120GB (60 day + 60 night) for R555/month. He also suggested we take the wireless phone for voice so we do not have cable problems again. He took all details and told us it should take 7-14 days to process. If we get no reply from them after 14 days call back with the following reference numbers: ADSL – YHQ ********** 4001 Wireless landline – 446354

We did not get any feedback so on 4 February we called 10213 (follow up on sales). Spoke to Evelyn who said that the details for the router were still waiting to be captured and she could not find an order for the wireless landline on our account. She said the reference number was not valid. She also said that there is no Tony working in the sales department. So Telkom has imposters working in their sales department. Surely the sale of the 4G router will show on the system who the salesperson was. She wanted to open another order for the landline and give us a new number as the old number was taken. I told her not to do that as Tony said the old number was still available and he had allocated it to the new wireless landline. I also did not want to risk there being 2 orders for us. So we waited for the capture to be done.

On 11 February I called 10213 (follow up on sales) again and spoke to Lesley who apologised for the order still gone through but said she will escalate it and gave me a new reference number: ********** 7 All these calls were costing a lot of money as each call meant a 30-40 minute wait to actually speak to someone. It seems that Telkom want to frustrate you by making you wait until you give up. All these calls cost me in excess of R1000 cellphone airtime. I also had to buy additional data for my cellphone as I no longer had internet at home.

On 12 February I saw the Telkom chat feature on Facebook and posted my complaint and frustration there.I got a reply the next day from Frank who requested my service number for his team to follow up. I sent him my service number on the same day. After no reply on 16 February I asked him to contact my husband if he could not get through to me. After no response I messaged on 19 February I advised Frank that we received the router but no phone. The router also could not connect.Frank rep**** on the same day requesting my ID number to assist further. Why did he not ask for this at the start??? I sent him my husband’s ID and his phone number again as the service is on my husband’s name. On 20 February Lebo rep**** to me asking the same questions that Frank asked me ie. If I wanted to re-instate the adsl or keep only the 4G router. I rep**** saying I wanted to keep it as is with only the 4G router and no adsl. I also requested her to send a tech team member to assist with setting up the 4G router. I also asked Lebo to follow up with our wireless landline order. I gave her the reference number. On 22 February I requested a reply from them but got nothing. After no feedback I again requested a reply on 25 February advising that it was urgent. On 2 March I received a reply from BF ( no full name) who said that we cannot have a wireless phone and adsl/fibre. BF also said that they have now rep**** to me. On the same day I explained in detail to BF what the issue was. No reply as yet.

We eventually got the router working ourselves on 21 February. Once connected we were allocated just 8GB of data. We called 10213 and spoke to Mduduzi who advised that we got 898MB pro-rata allocation and 8GB from midnight to 6AM.He also said we will get our full allocation on 1 March. 60GB per month works out to approximately 2GB per day. For 8 days we should have got 16GB pro-rata. Telkom has ****** us of our data allocation.

Looking on the Telkom website today we see we only have 20GB remaining after 3 days of use.This is totally incorrect.

We run a small business from home and having a landline and internet is essential. We have lost a lot of money as a result of having no landline and internet at home. I am completely at my wits end at how to proceed from here. I would greatly appreciate it if anyone out there can please offer me some advice on what to do.

Thank you