Telkom the Liar

ADSL South Africa (Broadband South Africa), 1 October 2006

Telkom seems to be hard pressed on continuing to deceive and irritate decent South Africans if recent developments are taken into consideration.

This time it’s not Jakob the Liar but Telkom the Liar that's making the headlines. Telkom’s ‘ADSL blacklisting’ email and their refusal to obey rulings made by The Advertising Standards Authority of South Africa (ASASA) show their continued discontentment for fairness and decency. In fact, this means that Telkom doesn’t like outside interference when they are busy bullshitting you from dusk till dawn trying to steal your hard-earned money. This is true because any person with half a brain knows that it boils down to taking something that doesn’t belong to you. No sophistry or sugar coating will be able to hide this fact from us.

It seems that Telkom especially likes to treat their high-end ADSL users like common criminals which is clearly evident in the recent ‘ADSL blacklisting’ emails received by many. “I am just really irritated and annoyed at this. They're treating me like a criminal who needs to be watched simply because I use the internet for more than 5 minutes a day. As if I don’t pay them exorbitant amounts of money for the simplest service already” (TelkomInternet Client).

Telkom didn’t at first complied with an ASASA ruling stating that it needs to remove false claims of “continuous connectivity” in regard to its ADSL service. “The respondent is not ex facie capable of delivering continuous connectivity or uninterrupted connectivity as advertised” (ASASA website). The lodging of a subsequent complaint was necessary before Telkom said that it would remove all references to ‘continuous connectivity’ from its website. It looks like Telkom did remove ‘continuous connectivity’ from its website just to replace it with “always- available broadband (Internet) connection.” Well, what’s the big difference? Are we missing something?

Telkom the Liar seems to be an appropriate designation for Telkom after all. One of these sunny days their ‘evil rule’ over telecoms in South Africa will come to an end.