Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Telkom ADSL service down again


Maybe the reason why he's called "Jack the cable guy" is because the service goes up and down like a Jack-in-the-box. Last night the Telkom ADSL "service" went down again. I'm wondering how long it will take for them to attend to the problem, given that yesterday they still thought they hadn't fixed the previous problem from 12 days ago.
It's always the same thing: it rains, and then the PPP signal goes. I have notes from the last 5 outages: in each case the phone line remained working, but the ADSL light started flashing, or just no PPP facility and no ability to authenticate. Here are the reference numbers:
  • 6ARK170206: 16th Feb 2006
  • 36ARK170506: 17th May 2006
  • 215ARK211206: 21st Dec 2006
  • 237CRK180107: 18th Jan 2007
  • 24CRK310107: 31st Jan 2007
That's a pretty impressive list for the last year: 5 outages for a total of 12 days, or only 96.71% uptime. So much for "always on", and that doesn't take into account the fact that the service is disconnected every 24 hours to assign a new IP address, and this can interrupt downloads or streaming audio.
Update: Last night I called to find out the status of my fault. The person who originally took the call, Mahomed Moses, cancelled the call after we were disconnected, so I waited the whole day for nothing to be done, even though I had been sent an SMS telling me the fault had been logged. So I had the fault reinstated, and asked for a written letter of apology. Do they get paid commission on the number of calls they don't log?
Update: When they reinstated my fault it got a new fault number: 378ARK310107. Nice of them to let me know. The line is back for now. Does that mean that it would have been back yesterday already if the call hadn't been cancelled? I guess that's too much to hope for.
Update: The line went down again on Friday afternoon at 3.30pm, so it will presumably be down for the entire weekend. I have to re-use reference number 378ARK310107 because even though the service was working the call hadn't been closed. These guys are unbelievable.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Don, you idiot! Everyone knows that JACK stands fror Just Another Confused Kretin, or words to that effect. At least you have an ADSL line, so be grateful to the government and stop complaining.

Allan said...

Once the 3g infrastructure put in by SA's service providers are done paid for, the price of 3g will drop and become much cheaper, maybe even further in the future 3g will be just a bit more expensive than ADSL then we wont rely on these unstable ADSL lines Telkom supplies.