The Yellow Llama | Web Design South Africa, Port Elizabeth Web Design, Search Engine Optimization

Another anti-Telkom Ranting

Ok this is a serious rant post. I’ve bottled up these feelings for long enough, and although this post will probably solve the problem about as much as another facelift will help MJ, I need to vent.

Hands up everyone who is sick of having their country throttled by their government endorsed telecoms. Yeah I thought so.

Readers in US and UK are probably right now saying, “Huh? What?”, as they download 13 movies, surf the net, and do a 10 member Skype conference call. Yeah, life is wonderful when you have a 24mb ADSL Line. Well, please, I ask you with tears in my eyes, spare us South Africans a thought.

You see, our telecoms company, Telkom, throttled the telecoms of South Africa even further this past week, when the jacked up the prices of their ADSL bandwidth from around R350 for 30gigs downloading to R1600 for the same amount. Yeah, you read right, R350 to R1600. They pride themselves on offering the latest and fastest internet connections in South Africa… the 1024 line.. Yeah.. a whole 1mb. Thats a step up from the 512 lines that have been used up until now.

Oooh wow.. here’s a cloth to wipe up that sarcasm.

Even when competitor companies come along and try to offer better or alternate services that cut Telkom out the loop, like VOIP for example, Telkom shoves their fat overpaid foot in the door and throttles that transaction too. Now all VOIP calls are channelled through Telkom lines so that they can claim a slice of the pie.

WTF South Africa! Why the hell doesn’t some big ass US or UK telecoms company spend a few million and establish some competition for the telecoms in SA? You have any idea how much money you’d make almost instantly. I can think of…oh I dunno.. like 6 million South Africans that would gladly swop providers given the chance.

You know that we phoned Telkom a while back to complain. Surprise surprise. We called through and said to the lady, “You know how frustrating it is to deal with you guys. I’d love to take Telkom to court.” You wanna guess this professional, well-trained telephone executives answer? “Take a number Sir”

Take a number….

Ok, well I think I’ve gotten rid of most of the frustration. Like I said, this is just one little blog post that forms part of the millions of complaints against Telkom and against the SA government for not encouraging competition for the sake of better services & products.

And the difference it’ll make? About as much difference as ordering 7 Big Mac Supersize meals and a Diet coke.