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After move at the end of June, I’ve been without ADSL.  Telkom, our friendly neighbourhood state-sanctioned telecommunications monopoly has a 2-3 month backlog for installation of telephone lines and activation in the DSLAMs.

Out of the blue, I receive a phone call where a manager at Telkom offers me to have my installation done the coming weekend, almost a month before the scheduled installation. Apparently, they are so far backlogged they schedule their technicians to install 3-5 sites per day over weekends, focusing on residential customers, while trying to keep ahead with business customers during the week. Not that I’m complaining, mind you, but this is sure indicative of the state of affairs inside the Telkom house.

In other worrying news, it was announced yesterday that Telkom will be implementing a new per-GB billing model for broadband. Due to a loophole, service providers are currently able to legally offer 30GB to their customers at the price of the current 3GB accounts. However, this gap is being closed with the new model: It is expected that a 30GB account will cost anything from R1700-R2000 to the end-user — a far cry from the R200 I am currently paying. Of course, Telkom will be justifying this by saying that they themselves never offered a 30GB account, but that the resellers misused the system.

ICASA, the South African telecoms watchdog has recently released its findings of fact, where they rightly lambasted Telkom for generally ripping off South Africans and stifling e-business with their tariffs. This move by Telkom flies directly in the face of what ICASA proposed: a lowering of tariffs (by abolishing monthly ADSL line rental, for one) to ensure more wide-spread uptake.

Telkom, like any bureaucracy of their size, is acting like one hand doesn’t know what the other is doing. In their advertising, they extol the benefits of broadband (which they only offer in the form of ADSL) for gamers, business and surfing. But this doesn’t reflect the true state of affairs, where the service is shaped beyond usability by serious gamers, as well as the implication that 100MB of traffic daily (combined up- and downloads!) is enough for everyone.

I have been using 30GB comfortably. I think that this is a good starting point for moulding an account model suitable for use by a power user. I can do 1GB per day (which can be easily done just doing Ubuntu updates, ISO mirroring, a few videos of the free kind, etc) without having to constantly check my usage counter whether I’ll be making the end of the month. Sure, my mother is also on ADSL, and barely touches 500MB/month, so there is a market for the average user, but they aren’t being affected by these changes — in fact, they will probably see a reduction in costs.

What most of the users on MyBroadband, a community website that ties broadband users of South Africa together, are saying is that Telkom is acting in only its own best interests. It owns and effectively controls the infrastructure that connects South Africa to the rest of the world: The SAT-3/WASC/SAFE cables that connect the coast of Africa with Europe, India and the Far East. Although this new pricing scheme is more suited for a wholesale reseller (which it indeed is, although it has a vested interest through its own TelkomSA/SAIX ISP offering), the pricing is completely off balance.

If Telkom has been hurt financially all these past months by resellers offering 30GB at the price of 3GB, it would surely have put a much quicker stop to this practice? So it should be safe to postulate that 30GB at a reseller rate of ~R150 (i.e., R5/GB) is still above their real expense — and this is the crux of the matter: The per-gigabyte cost to Telkom for traffic over these cables are on the order of single-digit rands. Now they are proposing a reseller rate from R50 upwards per gigabyte. Furthermore, they are cutting off your local access as well: Local traffic (i.e., staying inside South Africa) will now be completely cut off once you cross the bandwidth threshold for the account you are paying for. Previously, you could at least still access local content (of which there is a lot!) after hitting your soft cap, but now they are implying that supplying local bandwidth is just as expensive as international? Bollocks!

As the 18 August article in iWeek rightly stated: so many users will be switching to the Second National Operator (whenever that is operational) just out of spite. Telkom is causing an incredible amount of bad will among its customers, which it is currently shrugging off because of its monopolistic position. But as soon as competition hits, they will have a hard time trying to convince their estranged users that they have mended their ways. I for one would not be holding my breath that this leviathan empire, in which the wheels of bureaucracy turns so slowly, can turn around.