Vumatel little bette than Telkom

Most of us have learnt that trying to get "through" to Telkom is a lost cause. One gets through to call centres staffed by seemingly resentful consultants who appear to take out their frustration with not being rich & famous fast enough on us poor jabbering muts whining about our internet issues.

I had hoped that the Vumatel/Telkom tie-up in my residential building in Cape Town for fast and effective fibre would work better than just Telkom doing it alone because Vumatel could be expected to be driven by a desire to compete on service and to raise their profile. Yes? Surely yes. This is what smart business wanting to grow do, right?

Wrong. Vumatel is little better than Telkom. Apart from their faux-friendly telephone manners, they do exactly what Telkom always does, without fail, ever - shift the problem elsewhere.

Now I have Telkom telling me that it's Vumatel's issue that my 20mbps fibre runs aground five times a day and needs - painfully - to be rebooted, and Vumatel swearing that it's Telkom problem because Telkom is not responding to Vumatel's attempt to shift the blame. Result: fôkkol service.

The one thing that Vumatel's "consultants" refuse to hear is that their own technician, who came to my apartment recently, said he could swear that the issue was a faulty "splice" by VUMATEL - yes, Vumatel, not Telkom - when they installed their fibre-connecting goodies into my building, 5 Howe Street, Observatory, Cape Town.

I have tried to mention this in more than one email to them, but they seem quite deaf to it, always cannily shifting the problem back onto Telkom and ignoring this priceless piece of data. All I get is more stonewalling d****d in PRO-speak. The one thing they seem remarkably unable to do is to fulfill their remit as "service" providers.