An open letter to Telkom

This should really have been sent as an e-mail to Telkom, but Telkom play “hard to get” with their subscribers (or “customers” as they like to call them in these days of neoliberalism) and the e-mail address they give on their web site is invalid.

It is also an instance of the kind of occasion in which e-mail is a better form of communication than a voice phone call — see Millennials hate phone calls — and they have a point, so in what follows I shall try to point out why that is so, and some other more general observations which I would not normally include in an e-mail to Telkom, but which the people at Telkom probably ought to know.

Telkom provide us with a fixed line voice phone service, which also includes ADSL for linking to the Internet, and Telkom is also our ISP, so we use their services for e-mail, the Web and other Internet services. We recently signed a new contract with Telkom for a higher-speed connection by fibre-optic cable when the physical infrastructure becomes available (they are still digging trenches for the cables in our neighbourhood).

On Tuesday 3rd September I could not access my e-mail. I reported this to Telkom by e-mail to support@telkomsa.net, and included a copy of the error message I received when I tried to download e-mail:

02:00:52.125: >> +OK
<< 0015 PASS XXXXXXXX
02:00:55.203: >>
-ERR login failed

The aim of this was to give them specific information to help them to detect and fix the problem.

There was no response from Telkom, and I repeated the fault report the following day. I tested and found that outgoing e-mail was working, it was just incoming pop3 mail I could not get.

The next day, the entire ADSL system stopped working. Not only could I not download e-mail, I couldn’t conntect to the web, or send e-mail.

At that point, I used Telkom’s SMS reporting system to report the fault, which is not specific, and only allows vague specification of the fault. I indicated that the voice service was working, but ADSL was not.

On 7 September I got an SMS from Telkom saying fault Ref 2991487 has been restored.

I tested it, and it had not been restored, so I reported it to them again.

7 Sep 2019 06:28 AM — received another SMS from Telkom giving new reference 2992412.

On 11 September there was still no Internet service.

On 12 September a technician arrived, sent by Telkom.

Before he had even looked at any equpment, he asked how old our contract was, and then said that the problem was our ADSL modem, because the contract was more than two years old. After your contract is 2 years old, he siad, you must get a new modem.

He then connected his modem, and it didn’t work either. It looked considerably older than ours, so why didn’t he have a new one, I wondered.

He then phoned someone, and asked them to reset the ADSL password. After that, he entered the new password in his modem, and it connected to ADSL. He then tried to fiddle with my e-mail program, but was obviusly totally unfamiliar with it, and got frustrated, took his modem and left. I asked him to stay long enough to see if our modem would work with the new password, but he would not. Fortunately I had written it down, or he would have just taken it off with his modem.

When he had gone, I entered the new password in our modem, and it worked, in spite of the contract being more than two years old.

But e-mail still did not work.

Eventually, two days later, I managed to phone through to a human being at Telkom after several attempts at pushing numbers on an SMS to try to let them know that the technician they had sent had failed to fix the problem.

The human reset my e-mail password, and then I was able to download my e-mail, but all e-mail between 3rd September and 11th September had been lost.

The next thing was that we were billed for an unnecessary call-out for the incompetent technician who had come and failed to fix the problem. We went to the nearest Telkom office with the bill to query it. But all they did was press a button so that someone would call on a cell phone.

Eventually, after waiting half a day for a call that never came we tried again an managed after several attempts to get through to a human being. And I tried to explain all that is written above, which the person at the other end was trying to type out as I spoke, and I wondered what sort of garbled version was getting written there.

Meanwhile, if Telkom had responded to my first e-mail, which had a detailed description of the problem, they could have reset my e-mail password within 10 minutes, without, on their own initiative, not at my request,unnecessarily sending an incompetent and rude technican, and then wanting to charge for an unnecessary call out.

Everyone’s time was wasted because they wanted to use voice calls or button-pushing instead of e-mail, and they are too incompetent even to put their own e-mail address correctly on their web site.

Telkom try to encourage people to use the debit order system, but when they add contestable items like “unnecessary call outs” to the bill one can hardly trust them enough for that. And when they threaten their subscribers with dire action for unpaid bills that the subscribers have not yet received, no wonder people are looking for other service providers than Telkom.

Incommunicado

For more than three weeks we have had a faulty ADSL line, and have been virtually incommunicado.

Every time we tried to connect to a Web page, the following message appeared:

Secure Connection Failed

The connection to notepad-plus-plus.org was interrupted while the page was loading.

The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because the authenticity of the received data could not be verified.
Please contact the website owners to inform them of this problem.

Learn more…

Report errors like this to help Mozilla identify and block malicious sites

Today the problem has been fixed, and we can communicate again.

Instead of reporting it to the Website owners or to Mozilla (how would we do that when we are unable to send e-mail?) we reported it to Telkom. They sent a couple of people round who informed us that our router was at fault and pushed off. We spent R1000 on a new router, and installed it and it had exactly the same problem. So we reported it again to Telkom.

The people came back, restrung the wire between the house and the pole, and tested various other things, but could not solve the problem.

We were able to communicate to a limited extent with a mobile WiFi gadget supplied by Telkom, which works on 3G. We’ve previously used it when travelling, but it proved quite useful for emergency use when the ADSL line wasn’t working. Unfortunately, however, it only has 1 Gb a month on our contract, and when that was used up, even our limited emergency access to the Web came to an end. We asked Telkom if we could transfer some of our bandwidth from the ADSL line to the 3G mobile WiFi device until the ADSL line was repaired, but in spite of their advertising such devices in their brochures as “failover”, they said it wasn’t possible. We’d only get another 1Gb at the end of the month. They would give us a credit on our phone bill for the time the line wasn’t working. In the mean time, of course, there is still snail mail.

I’ve actually been able to download most of my e-mail, usually after 5-20 attempts. But none of the queued replies were sent.

 

Telkom subcontractors trying, unsuccessfully, to repair our line

I’ve been thinking uncharitable thoughts about who ever it was who invented and recommended outsourcing. On a previous occasion when our phone line was down, we got two different subcontractors, who could not sort out the problem. The third one came in a Telkom van, and fixed it. This time it was the second subcontractor. But outsourcing such things seems to be a remarkably inefficient way to run a telecoms business.

But my main purpose in writing this is not just to complain about Telkom’s rigidity in being unwilling to allow us to use the 3G device while the the ADSL line waa not working (if you ever see this, it will be working again). It is about the bad advice from Mozilla.

Reporting such errors to Website owners or to Mozilla, as the error message suggests, could be not merely misleading but could cause a lot of unneccessary problems. There is nothing a Website owner can do about a line fault, which might be in another country or another continent.

Similarly, the line fault does not necessarily mean that a site is malicious, and so reporting such things to Mozilla could lead to a lot of quite innocuous sites being identified as malicious and blocked.

So I suggest that Mozilla add a line to their error message along the lines of “if this error is reported for several sites, report it to your ISP, as your connection may be faulty”.

 

Telkom upgrade: lots of freebies, but what are they for?

One of those Telkom salespeople phoned a couple of months ago and offered us a faster Internet connection for an extra R100.00 a month, and it included free datadownloads between midnight and 6:00 am.

Since one son does computer animation which requires regular huge program updates, and the other likes to watch videos of motor racing, that seemed like a useful deal, so I signed up for it.

It came with a lot of other benefits. One was that it included Telkom-Telkom calls 24/7 instead of just during “CallMor” time. We don’t make many calls anyway, so it’s not really a benefit, but nice to know in case we need it.

But there were a lot of physical goodies too, which came in a big box.

The trouble is that there were no instructions, and only the barest descriptions, so we don’t know what half these things are, never mind how to use them, and for what.

So this is a plea for help: can anyone tell us what these things do, and if they are at all useful? Or do they just incur more liabilities?

Can we use any of them, or should we just advertise them for sale on an online auction site?

You can see the web page with the list of goodies here: Telkom Smarthome Premium ADSL.

And here are the goodies that came in the box:

1. D-link ADSL Wi-Fi Router
2. 3G Hauwei E5330 Mi-Fi Router
3. Huawei Wi-Fi Range Extender
4. Microsoft Office 365 (x2)
5. SIM 1 with 1GB Data Every Month
6. SIM 2 with 1GB Data Every Month
7. SIM 3 with 100min Talk Time Every Month
8. SIM 4 with 100min Talk Time Every Month
9. Free DStv Explora

(1) The D-link ADSL Wi-Fi Router may be useful if our existing router gets struck by lightning.

(3) The Huawei Wi-Fi Range Extender may be useful for using laptops away from the router — is that what it does? How do we get it to work?

3G Hauwei E5330 Mi-Fi Router

(2) 3G Hauwei E5330 Mi-Fi Router — Am I right in assuming that this could be used to connect to the Internet while travelling or during load shedding, using SIM cards (5) or (6)?

If so, it could be the most useful thing in the box. We’d just need to learn how to set it up and get it working.

MS Office 365

(4) and (9) —Microsoft Office 365 and Free DStv Explora seem to be the gifts that go on taking, since it seems that you can’t use them without paying expensive monthly subscriptions. Should we try to sell them on an online auction site?

(7) & (8) the SIMs with 100min Talk Time Every Month seem to be useless without extra cell phones, or are they the kind that you can transfer your existing number to when your present contract expires?

Any ideas/comments/suggestions anyone?

 

Under the weather

Posting on this blog has been a bit erratic of late because we have been a bit under the weather.

For details see: Back to the Dark Ages, or the heat death of the universe?

Dead phones and the power of Twitter

Our phone is working again after being dead for 12 days.

We reported the fault to Telkom as soon as we noticed that the phone wasn’t working, and when it hadn’t been repaired within a day, I posted a message on Twitter & Facebook (via cellphone) to let people that we had problems, so they would understand that we would not be able to respond immediately to e-mail messages and such things. Something similar had happened about 6 months ago, when the phone line was down for a similar period, and when the service was restored I found lots of messages saying “Did you get my previous message?”

Occasionally the ASDL Internet connection worked, even when the voice line was dead, It worked for an hour or so, perhaps once every 3-4 days, and then would die again.

On the Twitter messge I used the #hashtag #Telkom, and was interested to see that it was picked up by @TelkomBusiness, who asked for the phone number, and then followed up with the technical department, and after we had been without the phone for 10 days asked them to “escalate” our fault. Whther as a result of that or something else, the phone started working again today, and with it the Internet connection. So thanks to @TelkomBusiness for the role they played in that. It just goes to show that someone out there keeps an eye on the hashtags, and picked up the #Telkom one, and followed it up. It also shows the power of Twitter. Thanks to the people at @TelkomBusiness for their readiness to help.

It will take some time to deal with all the accumulated mail: when I downloaded it in the brief windows when the ADSL was working I would sort it into various “To Reply” folders, sometimes with a quick note that I would deal with it when the line was working again, and delete the spam. Apologies for the notes that were perhaps curt and abrupt, or full of typos. I was typing fast to try to get it off before the connection died again.

And here’s a picture that shows the bloke who was sending the notes; that’s me, in the middle.

The picture is over 40 years old, but then some of the people I send e-mail to I haven’t seen for 40 years, and so they will be more likely to remember me looking like that. And the two other blokes in the picture I haven’t seen for 40 years either. But I like the picture, and I’d like to see them again, and perhaps take a follow-up picture.

There’s one other thing to add.

I posted this to let people know that our phone line is working again, and over the next few days I’ll be working to deal with the accumulated mail. But when I tried to write this, I couldn’t. WordPress would not let me.  The WordPress editor simply would not let me type the text. So I thought I’d try to write the message on my Tumblr bloglet, Marginalia, but that wouldn’t let me edit it either. So eventually I tried loading Internet Explorer instead of Firefox, and that seemed to do the trick. So it looks like the current edition of Firefox is broken, and needs an update.

 

The heat death of the Internet

A couple of days ago I commented on entropy on the Internet, and things are getting worse. Amatomu is still broken. Technorati returns “Page not found”. I’m thinking of removing their widgets/links from my blog, since they no longer serve any purpose.

And last weekend my ISP, Telkom, announced that there would be service interruptions over the weekend so that they could improve their service, and the service interruptions have continued ever since. The service seems to work for 30 seconds, and then to be off for two minutes, in a continuing cycle. Two out of three web pages I click on return the following message:

Network Timeout

The operation timed out when attempting to contact groups.yahoo.com.

The requested site did not respond to a connection request and the browser has stopped waiting for a reply.

Is it just me, or are any other Telkom subscribers experiencing similar problems?

Americans whinge about proposed Internet bandwidth cap

For the first time ever, it seems American ISPs are thinking of implementing bandwidth caps to curtail Internet usage, and many users are up in arms about it.

But Comcast’s mooted 250 Gig cap seems infinitely generous compared with Telkom’s 3 Gig monthly maximum, and anything else one has to pay extra for.

clipped from www.consumeraffairs.com The era of unlimited Internet usage for a flat monthly price is one step closer to its end, as cable giant Comcast officially announced today that residential subscribers would top out at 250 gigabytes (GB) per month of data bandwith availability, beginning October 1. Critics of metered broadband say that the plans offer too little bandwith for too high a price. Customers will shy away from using high-speed Internet’s full potential, such as uploading or streaming videos, if they are afraid of going over their limits in doing so, and that companies who are supporting metered plans do so to protect their own video channels and hamstring competitors such as YouTube.

For a long time I’ve been annoyed by URL-only posts on Usenet newsgroups, and sometimes respond to them with a URL-only reply, to explain why I find them annoying. I never even try to look at You-Tube or other streaming video, I get annoyed with too many unnecessary graphics on web sites, and blogs that play music on all posts. Even with this, I find that I often run out of bandwidth before the end of the month, and have to pay extra to retain access.

If Telkom offered 250 Gig, most South Africans would be delirious with joy.

Americans whinge about proposed Internet bandwidth cap

For the first time ever, it seems American ISPs are thinking of implementing bandwidth caps to curtail Internet usage, and many users are up in arms about it.

But Comcast’s mooted 250 Gig cap seems infinitely generous compared with Telkom’s 3 Gig monthly maximum, and anything else one has to pay extra for.

clipped from www.consumeraffairs.com The era of unlimited Internet usage for a flat monthly price is one step closer to its end, as cable giant Comcast officially announced today that residential subscribers would top out at 250 gigabytes (GB) per month of data bandwith availability, beginning October 1. Critics of metered broadband say that the plans offer too little bandwith for too high a price. Customers will shy away from using high-speed Internet’s full potential, such as uploading or streaming videos, if they are afraid of going over their limits in doing so, and that companies who are supporting metered plans do so to protect their own video channels and hamstring competitors such as YouTube.

For a long time I’ve been annoyed by URL-only posts on Usenet newsgroups, and sometimes respond to them with a URL-only reply, to explain why I find them annoying. I never even try to look at You-Tube or other streaming video, I get annoyed with too many unnecessary graphics on web sites, and blogs that play music on all posts. Even with this, I find that I often run out of bandwidth before the end of the month, and have to pay extra to retain access.

If Telkom offered 250 Gig, most South Africans would be delirious with joy.

Blatant phishing expedition — Telkom scam

Someone sent me this blatant phishing message today

Date sent: Fri, 9 May 2008 07:36:09 +0100 (BST)
Subject: Please Verify Your Email Address‏
From: “TELKOMSA SUPPORT TEAM”
Send reply to: helpdeskmailteam@gmail.com
To: undisclosed-recipients:;

Dear telkomsa.net Webmail User,

To complete your telkomsa.net webmail account, you must reply to this email immediately and enter your password here (*********)

Failure to do this will immediately render your email address deactivated from our database.

You can also confirm your email address by logging into your telkomsa.net webmail account at http://webmail.telkomsa.net/src/login.php

We apologise for any inconveniences, but trust you understand that our primary concern is for our customers to be totally secure.

THE TELKOMSA WEBMAIL SUPPORT TEAM.

The giveaway, of course, is the Replyto: address — why would Telkom ask for replies to be sent to a Gmail address?

As it was no doubt a mass mailing spam as well, others may have received it, so be on your guard.

Back in touch

Yesterday afternoon our phone started working again after being broken for five days. At least this time Telkom sent an SMS twice a day to say that they were working on the problem.

Now I have a mountain of e-mail to catch up with. The advantage was that I was able to get some work done with a morning uninterrupted by phone calls.