#telkomza

Only way I can migrate from Telkom LTE to Telkom Fibre is to pay R3,200 to cancel my Telkom LTE contract - Where is the customer retention?

So I was waiting about a year to try to get fibre into my neighbourhood but will still nothing is shown as "planned" for my suburb by Openserve (also a Telkom subsidiary) I eventually decided to renew my LTE contract for a further two years and get the upgrade to LTE-A.

Suddenly a few months later I see fibre suddenly going into my suburb (although Openserve still shows no planned fibre in this area on its map). So I enquired with Telkom online to ask about migrating from LTE to fibre and staying with them. No migrations at all but I'm welcome to cancel and pay the R3,200 for early termination of contract! Then I'm told I can sign up with Telkom again for Fibre. Really? No thanks, I think I've finally learnt my lesson (I should have learnt it a few years back when Telkom Mobile wanted to charge me an admin fee to upgrade my contract with them (then it was free to cancel the contract, which I did at the time and moved to Vodacom).

So yes looking around I saw that Afrihost for example not only gives free installation and fibre modem, but will also compensate you for migrating away from another ISP up to R4,000 (including install but hey even R800 or so credit is still a nice gesture).

I really don't think Telkom has yet adjusted to the market it plays in. A bit of flexibility would have helped even if I just had to pay back the R1,500 cost of the LTE modem I got. Even Afrihost (by way of example) only charges a R999 cancellation cost if you cancel in the first 6 months and it costs them a lot more than R999 to physically install the new fibre into your house. I'd rather spend my money with companies who go the extra mile for their customers - we want to keep these types of companies alive and thriving.

PS: Yes I know Telkom Mobile and other Telkom effectively run as two separate companies... but then rather don't use the identical branding and shop front. Keep them separate and Telkom is just going to bleed more business.

#telkomza #telkommobile

Speedtest results from my upgrade to Telkom LTE-A running at 37 Mbps download speed

Only a few months back I checked and I was still just outside the green zone for the closest Telkom LTE tower. I used to get 4/5 bars signal strength using an external LTE antenna. Recently I noticed the signal has been showing 5/5 bars.

So when I got the "do you want to renew" call from Sell Direct Marketing (yes a 3rd party renewal company that does again get their technical info wrong but that is a whole nother story) I was intrigued to hear them say that I was now in fact covered by LTE-A. I checked and yes gone was the small green circle. So I took the chance to renew.

With uncapped the speed is just slower than with capped so I was getting between 5 to 25 Mbps and normally around 15 Mbps (capped used to show about 40 Mbps). So when I opened the new modem box (a Huawei B618) I was rather disappointed to see the external antennae plugs are the miniature ones which won't connect to my new modem. So I connected it and was surprised to see a speeedtest showing 37 Mbps without the external antennae. Signal bars are showing 5/5 too. Upload speeds had dramatically improved too from 3-4 Mbps up to 14 Mbps.

So the lesson here is to recheck every now and again to see if your LTE is now an LTE-A covered area. If so, all you need to do is otherwise buy an LTE-A modem and you should see the speed improvements. I'm just hoping it is not due to less congestion on the tower and over time it also drops down. LTE-A though is supposed to be faster so I'm hoping it at least stays above 20 Mbps.

This modem does also have an optional 7-day auto-reboot that you can set too which is a nice touch, and updates can be set to happen for idle time between 3am to 5am. An analogue phone can also be plugged in and configured to work with a SIP service. The Wifi has dual 2.4 and 5 GHz. The DDNS service now also includes No-IP.

#telkomza #ltea