Hellkom – lost another customer

I decided to abort my Telkom-science project in the pursuit of getting broadband. Although I had an existing IBurst connection, I thought it would be most patriotic to use our nations broadband service provider. It is just a pity that Telkom does broadband really badly and half of their service-staff and installation teams seem to have no clue what is going on or how to provide customer service.

It is now 64 days after I applied and during that time Telkom did not (as promised) phone me to arrange an installation date. I have now decided to cancel my line installation and stick with IBurst – at least they could provide me with broadband service within 2 hours.

Find the history of this ordeal below:
2008-01-19: Allocated telephone number. Was told that line will be installed within 21 days.
2008-01-29: Phoned for status. Was told installation only available on 28th Feb. Asked to get higher priority.
2008-01-31: Phoned for status. Still end of February.
2008-02-05: Phoned for status. Contact number was missing. Install date 27th Feb. Complex seems to run on optic fibre, might require conversion fee. Spoke to Johann/Springs
2008-02-21: Phoned for status. Installation still on 27th Feb.
2008-02-27: Telkom installation team arrived un-announced. Installation team did not want to wait for 30 minutes and left.
Spoke to Andries (technician 082 373 7586) to arrange for installation on Saturday 1st March.
2008-03-01: Technician did not arrive. Spoke to 10219 and was told that installation will happen on 8th March. Phoned Andries and was told that he is on leave.
2008-03-05: Spoke to 10219 and reconfirmed that installation is on 8th March. Also confirmed that line will support ADSL. (Not given an answer, this can only be established once the line is installed)
2008-03-08: (8:30) Phoned to confirm installation for today. Engineer arrived at 9:00am – no line installed since he did not bring cabling. Got phone-call at 15:30 from head-office that engineer got denied access – confirmed with guardhouse and no-one from Telkom arrived.
2008-03-11: Spoke Johann/Springs and he will follow up.
2008-03-18: Spoke to Leon – still have not received any notification that cabling will be pulled through. Has been escalated as very important – will receive feedback within 4 hours.
2008-03-20: (12:25) Spoke to Mkangeli. Was told that this will be escalated again and I should receive a phone call with order installation by COB.