Telkom!! It is just crazy!

It is becoming boring ranting about Telkom. Once they again Telkom is up to no good. The rumoured price changes are coming into effect (most likely) and the hardest hit are small and medium businesses and people who use more than a few GB bandwidth a month. Those of you overseas (Europe/North America/Asia) may find this bizarre but we have bandwidth caps and our highest ‘speed’ connection is a whopping 1Mbps connection limited by caps on how much bandwidth we can use.

I am not going to bother trying to rehash the story. I am just pissed off at how evil Telkom can be and how our government just lets Telkom get away with anything with just a few rumblings about cracking down on our enormously high bandwidth costs. I feel ill when I think about how callous Telkom and government are. They know this type of service is essential for small and medium businesses because it gives us a leg up and helps us compete that much more effectively. At the end of the day we can do little more than wait for the second national operator to go online and start offering a competing service. The sad thing is that when that happens, Telkom will be sure to drop their prices dramatically.

To get the full picture, take a look at the following sites:

• iWeek – Telkom Torpedoes;
• Hellkom;
• MyADSL – New pricing will hit SMMEs hard;
• Gabbahead’s thoughts on the subject (quoting a nice explanation)
• Technorati search

To give you another example of how Telkom operates, take a look at this email exchange that apparently took place this last month between a user and a Telkom product manager:

From: Bladebla mailto:******@telkomsa.net

Sent: Thursday, October 13, 2005 12:45 PM

With all the rumors etc around, it might be a good thing if Telkom can inform their subscribers what is going to happen on the 1st of November 2005, since some ISPs have informed their subscribers.

Can you please let us know what’s going on

I got this response:

From: Royden Dall (RF) DallRF@telkom.co.za

Sent: 14 October 2005 11:16 AM

To: ******@telkomsa.net

Cc:support@telkomsa.net;info@telkomsa.net

Subject: RE: ADSL Capping

Morning Bladebla

Thanks for the e-mail and first off no need to panic just yet

From 1 November the ISP’s move to usage based service, not necessarily the subscribers, if that makes sense to you. What happened is there is a group of ISP’s out there that took the same 3 Gig service we sell and sold it as 30 Gig service. So we don’t really have a problem with the vast majority of our DSL users, as they bought a 2, 3 or 4 Gig service and for most of them, stay within that limit.

We will be moving to a usage model as there is a large demand for more than the current Gig offering. I assure U that as soon as we have buttoned down our strategy, our subscribers will be the first to be informed. On the other hand if U are one of those subscribers that is running at over a 100 Gigs a month, U will be getting a mail from us sooner than later

Warm regards

Royden Dall

Product Manager

TelkomInternet powered by ADSL

Office: +2712 680 6657 Mobile +2782 454 2766

www.telkomsa.net www.aardvark.co.za

“You tell me, and I forget. You teach me, and I remember. You involve me, and I learn.” Benjamin Franklin

A petition has been set up at http://www.adslpetition.co.za/.  I hope this counts for something although I despair at times like this. If you use ADSL in South Africa, sign the petition. Support every effort to bring Telkom to its senses or to its knees. A monopoly that abuses its position like this shouldn’t be allowed to thrive.

Technorati Tags: adsl, Hellkom, Telkom