The Internet is a part of our lives today. So much that I don't want to miss a fast reliable line any more, especially when I am far away from home with lots of time on my hands.
So I figured I would get myself a fast line installed at Sandra's place in Johannesburg. The options are somewhat limited in South Africa and they are on the expensive side too. ADSL seemed the best fitting option for my needs and since the Yeoville exchange was upgraded in February 2003 it should also be possible to get it installed.
It being Africa I suggested to Sandra back in January 2003 that she should order the installation then so that it would be stable by the time I joined her in December. She thought this was ridiculous and ordered the line towards the end of October. The whole ordering process is rather complicated because you as the client have to order a phone line, an ADSL connection, the ADSL device and choose an ISP. They act as if there was a choice and if you leave a component out it will of course not work. So several emails later Sandra knew what I wanted and could order it. She filled out several web forms and waited and waited. She told a friend about this. He told her she should cancel that order and put one in by telephone as they only respond to that sort of order and you get a tracking number that way with which you can remind them.
When she did this they told Sandra about the Service Level Agreements (that they agree amongst themselves probably). They will let 21 days pass before installing the service. This would have given them enough time to set things up before I arrived on 1st December. I arrived punctually but Telkom did not. It took them till the 29th of December till a guy pitched up.
He was well trained though and knew what he was doing. Since the wires in the walls of the 1940s building were no good any more he had to thread a new phone line from the trunk line on the ground floor to the second floor. He told me I was lucky because had Sandra lived on the third floor he would have packed up and left us to find an electrician to do the job. Their Service Level Agreement only covers wires to the second floor apparently.
He also helped me configure my Laptop to do PPPoE in XP. This is a bit cumbersome and it's smarter to set up the ADSL Modem to do this PPPoE business for you as you then only need to plug the laptop in and it gets everything it wants to know from the DHCP server in the modem. Whatever. It worked.
I was happy and could watch the evening news that Swiss television publish on the web shortly after airing the program. My throughput was rather low though. I paid for a 512kBit download. In reality during daytime I would get 50-80kBit with this getting better as South Africans go to bed. I think I once saw 320kBit at two in the morning once. The Uplink was much faster than the Downlink. Since my TV news comes in a 80kBit or a 160kBit stream it can be trying to watch it when the network load surges.
Some days later the phone rang:
"Hello, this is Richard." I answered.
"Hello, my name is Chantel from Telkom." she said.
"I'm calling about the overdraft on your telkom account." she started
"What overdraft?" I asked.
"Our records show that you have overdrawn your limit by 1609 Rands" she informed me.
"Really? How come?" I asked
"You have made lots of international phone calls" she suggested.
"No. I have not. In fact I have made hardly any phone calls as the line has just been installed. I only use
it for ADSL-Internet." I told her. "What sort of limit does this account have?"
"Let's see" she said, tapping away at her computer. "You made phone calls for 2 Rands 78 Cents"
"and your limit is 1500 Rands" she continued.
"Aha." I paused. "So perhaps the high numbers come from the installation of the ADSL line?" I suggested
She tapped away some more on her computer. "Yes I can see 590 Rand for Service and Telephone book
surcharges. But you must still settle the overdraft or we will have to cut you off."
"Now wait a minute!" I interjected. "Should you not first send us a bill before you threaten to cut us off?"
I asked.
"Yes of course we do. Let me just look up when we sent you your bill." She started tapping.
"Here we go... your bill went out on the 9th of January" she read.
"What date is it today?" I asked sweetly
"The 7th of January" she replied
"So you are calling me about paying a bill that you haven't even printed yet?" I asked incredulously.
"Emmh.. well... Can you pay your overdraft within two days?" she contered.
"I think that is hardly likely. Since you are only printing the bill in two days and that day is a Friday it
is likely to be Wednesday till we just receive it. I guess we can pay it by the end of next week then." I
suggested.
"I can send you a copy of the invoice by fax or by email." she said helpfully.
"Indeed. Why don't you send it to my email address. It is richard_eigenmann@compuserve.com" I told her.
She confirmed it: "richardunderscoreeigenmann@compuserve.com"
Naturally the email never arrived. I did take down her number and after several more unsuccessful attempts I asked her to send it to Sandra. Sandra got it and it became obvious that Chantel had not grasped the concept of the underscore character.
I used my ADSL to back up and synchronise my laptop with my home server. Taking many digital pictures this can add up to a fairly significant amount of data. I noticed that my connection was not very stable. The modem would drop the link and go into a Led flashing frenzy before synchronising again. My encrypted ssh connections didn't approve of this sort of thing and died.
We didn't care for the phone line that we had to order to have the ADSL installed. Both Sandra and I had cell phones in South Africa which served our communication needs well enough. But Telkom was adamant: you must have a phone line if you want ADSL. Pity, that.
On the evening of the 17th of January our phone line died. At first I though this might be a bolt of lightning or something that had outed the exchange. The cell phone worked fine though. Eventually on Sunday I figured that this was not going to resolve itself without some intervention so I called the 24hour helpline. After spending 3 abortive attempts to reach them (the phone disconnects after 10 minutes of music and "Please wait while we ignore your call") I got through. They said they would send a technician round right away but told me that there was a 400 Rand "call out" charge if it turned out to be something that I had done. I figured that if that's what it costs to get it going again then that's what it costs.
Several hours later we had to cancel the technician's promissed visit as we were invited for bobotie at Sacha and Debbie's. He came round on Monday and discovered that the wires were faulty between the building and the switchbox across the street. It took him some hours to hunt down a colleague who opened up a fresh pair of wires for my signal. I called up their client service department and put in a claim for two days interrupted service which they refunded me on without undue bureaucracy. I did not have to pay 400 Rands "call out" as it was clearly not my mistake.
One afternoon my ADSL line dropped again. It didn't restore itself after a few minutes so I got a little annoyed. By chance I picked up the phone receiver and was astounded to hear two people holding a long distance conversation. I could hear this because of the static and the frequent blips. They were talking an unfamiliar language. So I burst into the conversation asking how they had come onto my line. They rang off but someone else started talking to me:
"Hello?" he said
"Yes, hello?" I asked. "Who are you?"
"I'm from Telkom." he said. "Who are you?"
"Hi, my name is Richard. What are you doing on my line?" I asked.
"Oh, yes, I'm from Telkom and I am investigating fraud on your line." he explained.
"Oh! That's terrible. Is there a problem then?" I asked surprised.
"No, no. I'm just investigating it." he answered.
"Oh, so there has been fraud on my line?" I asked.
"No. I'm just investigating fraud." he said. I had heard about fraud. The guy who installed the ADSL cable
had told me he hated the neighbourhood because there was so much fraud. He hadn't implied that my line could
be under attack. I didn't think this likely as the main dispenser for the neighbourhood was on the other
side of the street and there was no need for the wires to go through many accessible places. Sandra's
neighbour, Sylvia, had told me about fraud on her telephone amounting to 27'000 Rands, however.
"Would you please get off this line, sir, so that I can continue my investigation?" he asked.
"Oh, sure." I said. "What's is your name?"
"I'm Tenbeeza" he told me.
"OK, Tenbeeza" I said "how long do you think you'll be? I can't use my ADSL at the moment."
"I don't know" he told me. "An hour or two probably."
"OK. Please let me know how your fraud investigation goes."
"Yes. Good bye."
By six o'clock my line was still not back. So I picked up the receiver and sure enough Tenbeeza was back on quickly.
"Hello?" I asked. "Is this Tenbeeza?"
"Yes." he said. "Can you please get off the line so that I can finish my investigation?"
"Well of course" I said. "But how long is this going to go on? I really need to have my ADSL line back
now."
"This is a difficult problem. It is likely to take me all night to sort this out." he replied. "Would you
please hang up so that I can finish this?"
"Yes of course. Are you sure you will have the work the WHOLE night on this problem? When do you knock
off?"
"Yes, the whole night. Please hang up." he said.
At this point I got suspicious. Who has ever heard of a Telkom employee working all night to resolve a problem the client hasn't even reported? So I picked up my cellphone and called the technician who had rewired my line. I asked him if he had a colleague by the name of Tenbeeza who was investigating fraud all night long. He got very worried and told me that this was fraud in progress. However, since it was five minutes past six his best suggestion was to call a number and have my line taken off the block. While that number was playing music to help me get over the fact that they were ignoring this call my ADSL came back on. So I decided against taking the number off the block. Also my phone line was back to normal so it was possible that Tenbeeza had been telling the truth after all.
That evening I interrupted another long distance call. Tenbeeza came on again and I questioned him thoroughly. He started getting very evasive when I asked him his supervisors name. Peter What was what he claimed this to be. He gave me his cellphone number which was short a digit and didn't want to reveal his case number. I shouted at him to get off and stay off my line.
I discovered that my line was being used for all sorts of conversations and fax transmissions. I started to disrupt these by pressing dialtones till the faxes lost their sync and people found it trying to chat that way. I then had the bright idea to leave the receiver off the hook. The South African exchanges stop the dialtone after a while and then the fraudsters tap into a silent line and think it's dead. I could hear them trying all night as it clicks slightly in the receiver when they connect and disconnect. It also disrupts the ADSL modem.
I tried to bring this to the attention of Telkom. They have a fraud phone line (more music while they ignore your call). Chantel doesn't deal with fraud and was no help into the organisation. So the next bill was for 4445.26 ZAR. Not quite sure where Chantel and her 1500 ZAR limit were this time. The phone bill read like a list of all the exotic places on earth. Here it is:
My Telkom bill reflecting the fraudulent calls made on my line
I called the accounts department (7 minutes of music while they unsuccessfully ignored the call) and got a cheerful Indian chap with an unspellable name who wanted to know how he could exceed my expectations today. I told him that I was disputing 2934.44 Rand of phone charges and 410.82 Rand of VAT upon those. He took the issue down and suggested I pay the fair amount due. This I did and two days later a competent boss-lady, Mrs. Krüger, called me and approved the refund due to fraud.
The Telkom Internet Service Provider (ISP) counts your traffic and caps you at 3 GB. This means that if you up and download (cumulative) more then 3GB they re-route your traffic onto an old line for the rest of the month. This happened to me towards the end of January. The throughput which barely beats an analog modem during daytime drops to around 200-500 bytes per second. This is so slow that some protocols running over TCP/IP give up. Fair enough though, 3 GB is a lot of data and limiting the bandwidth consumed by a few will give better performance to the majority. But then let's be smart about this. Bandwidth heavy apps like video streams should be curbed. But mail traffic which is the killer app of the Internet, the main reason many people get on it in the first place should remain working. Telkom have done some heavy engineering in their network with proxies caching traffic all over the place, shaping the load based on protocol. Surprisingly this has not caused me any annoyance other than when I tried to test my firewall and got a report of all the Windows stuff the Telkom proxy was permitting. But when you are capped and you can't download your email because you can only get 300 bytes a second, you would not expect a Real Video stream to go through at full throttle, would you? Yet that is precisely what happens. I could watch the high resolution TV news stream with full bandwith, no interruptions, no nothing while I could not download my emails! I never got such a good connection again in Johannesburg when not capped.
The next piece of Telkom trouble started when Sandra accepted her new job in Cape Town. I called up Telkom once we knew the address of the new place to have the ADSL transferred there. Transferring the line, I was told, is not possible. I had to go through the whole ordering procedure which takes exactly 45 minutes. Again the 27 day SLA applies so there was no way my line would be in Cape Town when I got there. Fortunately this didn't bother me too much as I had to leave the country because my Temporary Residence Permit was running out.
Two guys came round to Sandra's place to install the line. The block of flats is just 9 months old so all the installations are brand new and done according to whatever standards they have down there. The Telkom guys came in and busily opened up lids and poked at wires. Eventually they figured they hadn't a clue how the building was wired. I don't know how other telcoms do it but I have this somewhat outdated notion that someone ought to look at the plans. Hardcore technicians of course don't need any such nonsense. They pulled out their hammers and glue and felt it their mission to nail and glue a new set of wires up the outside of the building and then trail the wire all through the brand new flat to the desk where we wanted the phone. Sandra wouldn't have any of that and insisted that they talk to the neighbours to find out how the phone was hooked up there. After she did this for them they figured that they could trace the neighbours wires down to the switchbox. They figured they could use the 2 extra wires in that cable to hook up Sandra's phone. With this hack they were able to hook up the line that leads to the desk in the one bedroom. They had no time to hook up the other two phone outlets in the flat though. The main technician's wife kept calling him on the cell to remind him to come home. He figured he would quickly test the ADSL set-up.
Of course "doing something quickly" is an oxymoron when it involves computers and this dragged on and on. The second technician sat around looking bored but could not find the time to look at the wires and figure out how to hook them up. True to his Cape Town licence plates (CA) he figured he needed to call again to finish the job. The computer didn't hook up to the ADSL Modem for a surprisingly subtle reason. The speed of the Ethernet Port on Sandra's Laptop was set to 100MBit which doesn't appear out of the ordinary. However, the common setting is actually Auto which allows the Ethernet card to switch down to 10MBits when communicating with an older device that only supports the slower Ethernet standard speed. As the ADSL modem only communicates at 10MBit this setting prevented any communication going on.
They came round a second time to finish the job of hooking up the phone jacks. Sandra has an old Swiss phone that she took to Africa with her. The only problem with hooking it up is the pairing of the wires. The smart chaps figured that the phone was broken and she should get a new one! After they left we swapped the wires around and it works perfectly. The third jack in the other bedroom they were not able to hook up. The building is wired wrongly they said and given their remarkable performance so far we had to accept that as the final answer.
I checked the Internet one morning for an excursion with Reini. After the excursion I wanted to check the next thing and there was no connection. The ADSL Modem was not able to do the PPPoE thing. So I figured that perhaps something had gone wrong with my account and I called Telkom. Every one I spoke to after long periods of soothing music immediately suggested I call some other department. When they started suggesting that I should call departments I had already called I got a bit more insistant. Eventually I tracked down someone who could figure out what was wrong and more importantly could figure out how to fix it. As I had to cancel my contract in Johannesburg and set up a new one they had left the ISP account running out on the Johannesburg number. That day some smart person went through and closed down the ISP accounts for closed phone lines. So my account died. Reactivating an account is not quite so trivial so I had to wait for a whole day for the new account to be opened. So much for the advertising slogan of "Telkom, your ISP for life!"
Then we got a call from Chantel's brother. Of course I now know that the booking of the installation costs in their system blows their account limit. So it was a simple matter of pointing out that we would indeed like to pay the bill if only he could send it to us first. He was also a little smarter than Chantel because he actually had seen the underscore character on his keyboard and knew how to use it.
While driving from Johannesburg to Pretoria I got a call from a lady at Telkom. She really wanted to know how satisfied we were with the installation and the competence of their technicians in Cape Town. Before I could warm to the topic she asked me though if she could call me on a land-line. As I was travelling for the rest of the week this was not the case. She, however, was not able to do the interview over a cell phone line. She promissed to call me next week in Cape Town. I gather she isn't Capetonian as she didn't call again.
Telkom take their inventory control seriously. This is probably quite important in a country where evil people cut down the phone lines in the countryside to sell for scrap metal. The next call I got was from some bloke who told me he had to come round and collect my ADSL modem. At least he was kind enough to shut up and leave when I told him he was wrong on two counts. One I was still a customer just at a different address and second that since I had bought the device for 1499 Rand it was mine and I would not give it back to him even if I was not a customer.
Then I got a call from a guy who wanted to find out why I had cancelled my ADSL contract. He was surprised to learn that I hadn't actually cancelled it but transferred it. But since Telkom is not able to transfer accounts I closed one and opened a new one. Did his system not show this clearly? He thanked me and rang off.
At the moment the line is working and stable. In Cape Town throughput is a little better than in Johannesburg. The high resolution TV stream of the Swiss Television comes through reasonably well.