The Internet has been Restored

So I thought it was probably about time to do "The Telkom Rant". Well, it's a lot easier to do it now that the issue has been resolved, I'll be honest. For a while back there I had just about given up hope and given in to tears (by while I mean the weeks on end with practically daily phone calls to their call center!).

Anyway. So, as you may remember I made the call to order my phone line back on the 01 February. And then it was 3 attempts before I had my phone line successfully installed on 01 March. And then I dutifully waited 3 days before ordering my adsl line (they have to wait for the system to be updated to say you have a phone line before you can order the adsl upgrade). And don't even get me started on why I need a phone line ... they all act incredulous when I try explain that no, I don't actually have a phone plugged in. I don't want a phone plugged in, I *just* want internet. Surely in this day and age I should be able to get just a pure adsl line and only pay for that? But that's probably too confusing for them.

About a week & half after I ordered the adsl upgrade I got a message saying my line had been upgraded. Yippee yay and I went about organising a wireless router for myself (thanks again @themba_m) and set up my account with Afrihost. Afrihost got everything sorted within a matter of hours but I still couldn't access the internet and so, my first adsl fault was logged on the 14 March.

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The next few weeks (up until yesterday evening) were grueling and involved 4 official faults, including one that was re-opened, 1 trip to my nearest Telkom Direct store to lodge a formal complaint, 1 bill dispute because (as I learnt on Sunday) someone had verified my line before it was actually working, 3 visits from Telkom technicians (one lasting for 2 & half hours!) and countless calls (from my cellphone!!) to the Telkom call-center.

I will admit I did get my hopes up that I was following some kind of weird date-trend and my adsl would start working on the 01 April, since the technician had been out for 2 & half hours the afternoon before and assured me that once the lightning fault at the exchange had been fixed the next day it would be, but it wasn't.

I even had a technician come out to my house on a Sunday, which I thought was quite impressive ... or I would've if I hadn't already been at my wits end with these so-called service providers. And finally they got the little internet light on my router to switch on. Yayness, right? Not quite. Still couldn't connect to the internet. So I let the technician go on his way thinking the issue must be elsewhere and called Afrihost. Turns out all my details were correct, so I called Telkom again. Only to be told that my router still wasn't synching with the line and he had no idea why the internet light on the router was even on. Great. Dismal dissappointment.

And then strangely, the next day (yesterday), it started working. And I would never have figured it out unless one of the guys from the office hadn't galantly offered to come out and take a look at it for me. I will admit I felt like a bit of an idiot having him pop round only to show him this perfectly working connection :P

Now I've heard worse stories than mine (some people have waited up to 9 months for Telkom to sort their lines out) and I've heard some people who've had no problems at all, but this is my story. I'll say that thru it all the Call Center people were friendly and polite. Sadly I can't really add helpful to that list because they couldn't seem to actually *do* anything and I got different stories on different days when I ended up speaking to different people (which is discouraging to say the least). Their technicians were also friendly and at leats mostly pseudo-helpful. But again there seems to be no communication between the call-center and the technicians. I always let them leave my house thinking they'd solved the problem only to discover that they in fact hadn't. It's a depressing series of events!

And really, what's with only being able to escalate a fault once. That didn't help at all. And their automatically closing of faults was also unhelpful ... I had to keep phoning back and they kept opening new ones. One woman even fought with me about the fact that it must be working because the technician had closed the fault. Hello lady, I was at home looking at it and it wasn't working ... would I be calling you if it was?!

Anyway, I am very happy to announce that I now have internet at home. Plenty of things to get moving on ... like 30th birthday planning and peru-holiday planning ;) I will say that the first thing I did with my new-found connectivity was book my 30th birthday family-celebration weekend in Cape Town. All is right in the world again :)