Written by:
2009/01/16 12:22 PM 

Don't you just hate Telkom. Oh how I wish there were some one else to use. Unfortunately Neotel is not in our area yet.

My internet has been down for two days. Apparently I ran out of bandwidth. Now that's another story. How on earth did I run out of bandwidth in the middle of the month. I an very careful about my internet usage. I tried to do a audit trail, but all I got wa a proxy address. So how on earth do I prove or disprove my internet usage. But that's for another blog...

Anyway, two days ago my internet went down. No bandwidth. So I proceed to the Telkomsa.net website to purchase more bandwidth. Only to find that my access was denied. I could not purchase any bandwidth. So I tried to go to the telkom.co.za site. I was successful there. But soon realised that that was the only site I could browse.

So I got onto the phone to the Telkom support. After an hour and many run arounds, I came away no wiser than that I was an hour ago when I first made the support call. No one could tell me why I could not go into the telkomsa.net site. You could hear the inexperienced call centre operators reading from a pre defined set of manuals and procedures. None of which could correctly diagnose my problem

After many hours of phaffing around I found out that I had a proxy set-up in my browsers. Well, I never found out by mistake I knew that it was set-up like that. The only problem is that it was a saix proxy. Now shouldn't that work. Its a Telkom company, based in SA, so local bandwidth should allow me to use it. The proxy address being "dsl-cache.saix.net".

Once I deleted the proxy address and disabled all proxy setting, I was able to at least browse to the telkomsa.net site. But my troubles did not stop there. I tried to purchase more bandwidth. Top up in other words. But after I put in my credit card details and proceed to the final step, I got an server 500 error message.

So I waited 30 minutes and tried again. But before I purchased more bandwidth I checked to see if the transaction was a success or not by checking my top up history, Clearly it there were no transactions. But still same error message in the same place. At the last step. I tried this a few times without success.

I then phoned Telkom support. I was called back by the Telkom automatic phone system. I then proceed to explain the problem, when I was redirected to billing. Which I was transferred to. After waiting in the queue for over an hour I eventually got through to a lady, who said that the only way I can purchase more bandwidth was to get a new user account costing R79. I thought this was a cheek as the normal price is R64 when bought through the telkomsa.net's site. But this was not working at the moment.

I got pushed from pillar to post and was eventually promised a call back by a supervisor or a technical person. I was also promised that the problem was escalated.

No such call back arrived. The next morning, this morning actually, I tried to purchase more bandwidth. But found that the problem persisted. Once again I got on to the Telkom support. After waiting another few minutes. Surprising but it was 08h00, I got through, but was transferred to billing again. Billing said that they could only help me if I purchased the new user account at the cost of R79. I explained to them that this is not what I wanted. I wanted the problem fixed and I wanted to pay the normal R64. I was then re-routed to their technical department.

The technical guy came on the phone and after explaining the problem to him. Something which I had done about 20 times over the last two days, he said that he could not help me. In fact he referred me back to billing.

By this time I was so frustrated and angry I was about to rip the phone off the wall and murder someone. Don't you hate this. You can't get good service. You can't find a competent person. You can't close your account and move to another provider. What do you do?

I went back to the billings department. Another ten minutes off explaining the problem to a different call centre operator went by. By this time I was nearly screaming down the phone to the poor man on the other side.

Fortunately he was rather calm about this. While I was on the line he requested some other technical people to test the top-up module. After he tested it, they came back saying nothing was wrong. Now what? I was about to erupt. They said that I should wait a bit and try again in five minutes. I have been trying for the last 24 hours, what's another five minutes gong to do. A server error does not just rectify itself. I know this because I am in the IT industry myself. I normally use that line when I am resetting a server or module because of some fault somewhere.

Anyway I went back to my pc opened up Firefox and tried again. No guesses as to what happened. So to calm down I waited the proposed five minutes. I had breakfast and a cup of coffee.

After calming down, I went back to my PC, but this time opened up IE. I tried again, and surprise it worked.

Now what was the problem Why did it take two days to get working. Was it my browser, Firefox? Was it in fact a Telkom problem that when they reset something it worked.? We will never know. I must say this, that I never received a server 500 error on one browser and not on another.

I just HATE Telkom, and wish, oh so wish I could go somewhere else.

I would be interested to know if you have experienced something similar. What other dealings or problems have you had with regards to Telkom? Let us know by dropping us a comment.

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