Telkom internet weirdness

Lost my Telkom internet connection yesterday morning.

When we got back from church Val wanted to get into cricinfo to find out what had happened in the Oz-NZ match, and it was still down, so I reported it to Telkom.

And after explaining the problem the Telkom support guy said that he couldn't help me and that I must take it up with "the person in charge of your network".

Since I am the person in charge of my network, that's not exactly much use.

And the last time that happened -- when the Telkom technical support people said the problem was on our side, and that the ADSL router must be faulty, I took his advice at face value, went to Telkom in Hatfield and bought a new router. Brought it home, and found it had exactly the same problem as the existing one. So I took it back to Telkom (along with the original packaging) and demanded, and got a refund. So their technical support guy had wasted their time and money as well as mine.

So this time I didn't accept his advice at face value, but Val went into their web site when she got to work, and reported the problem again. This time Telkom did not get back to us, but in a couple of hours the problem was fixed.

Methinks that Telkom need an upgrade to their technical support.

How broad is "broadband"?

About 18 months ago we signed up for ADSL, which, while it cost about the same as our dial-up connection, seemed to offer certain advantages. The main one was that one could connect to the internet at any time without waiting for 7 pm, when the cheap phone rates kicked in.

At first it seemed marvellous -- if someone recommended a web site one could click on the URL and see what was there, without the need to wait for CallMore time (by which time one would usually have forgotten all about it).

The advantage of dial-up, though, was that if one needed to send an urgent e-mail, one could do so, even at the expensive times. Broadband is not nearly as flexible. Two weeks into the month, one hits the cap, and there is no internet access, no e-mail, nothing for the rest of the month.

After experiencing that for the last few months, the old system of 12 hours expensive, alternating with 12 hours very expensive doesn't seem to be such a bad idea after all.

Or does anyone know of South African ISPs who offer a better deal?

Anyway, from now until the end of the month I won't be looking at other people's blogs much, and will not click on links unless absolutely necessary. I never look at video clips anyway, so I don't know what uses all the bandwidth.