We dont care as long as you are paying

<p>Around April this year i decided to try out telkom mobile since well the internet service provider I was using went down. I did not want a complete 24 month contract commitment, so I bought a router from them and app**** for a month-to-month contract(20+20gigs). I stay in soshanguve, so they confirmed that we do not have LTE coverage but 3G is surely availbale. I rush home, connect my router and insert the sim; and indeed the router is registering full 3 bars for 3G signal and I am happy. Then come using the internet, i try to open simple pages just to test if its working and i wait ridiculous times for these sites to load. I then decide to speedtest my new connection, and the results were shocking; an average of 0.4mbps for download speeds and upload speeds were non-existant.</p> <p> </p> <p>I waited and after midnight around 1am, the same connection yielded speeds of 3mbps for both download and upload. The following day after 9am the speeds went back to the unsable 0.4mbps. This didnt make any sense at first since it was not a signal issue. I then called Telkom and reported the problem. They said it will be tended to. Eventually 2 months later the network testing team came out and did some tests at my place, and this was from a telkom tower that is only 3km away from me. The speeds were horrible as i had reported. The exaplanation to this problem was very simple; there are too many people connecting to the same tower and they are forced to share the available bandwidth(which is already limited). Meaning that during the day when everyone is connected to the tower(including university students, since the tower is on university premises), there is absolutely no bandwidth available to use.</p> <p> </p> <p>Now in my desperation for usable internet when i got the telkom connection, i bought myself a poynting LTE booster. This was installed by me and it managed to get me 1 bar of LTE which is giving me about 2mbps during the day. But the network testing team pointed out that the booster was not installed properly and that they would make a recommendation for me to get a proper installation from Telkom since I have already purchased the booster myself. I waited some more for feedback. It finally came this week when a lady called me and told that yes there is a problem and it will take 12 months for Telkom to fix the issue and I wont be getting any assistance with my booster since i bought it myself, case closed.</p> <p> </p> <p>How is it acceptable to Telkom to sell people their routers and data sims while knowing that there isnt any usable internet connection during the day. Why will it take so long for them to actually provide service to their many customers? This is a problem because they actually have alot of customers connecting to the same tower, and that should be a good enough sign for them to treat this urgently, so that many of their paying customers can get the service they deserve. Are they dragging their feet because of the demographics, predominantly black township?Its so sad that you have to be in a fancy suburb in SA for you to get decent service, even when you are paying for it. And how cheap is Telkom when they can not provide me with installation for a network booster that i bought because of a problem they dont want to fix?</p> <p> </p> <p>Please be warned before you get their 3G/LTE products, them saying coverage is available does not mean that you will automatically have a usable internet connection.</p>