Sitting here watching my international bandwidth slow to nothing, getting timeouts pinging microsoft.com, and am contemplating the wonders of monopolies. Our lovely Telkom has had the following downtimes recently (from what I can sniff out):
Fri 20 Jan 11:45-14:00
Wed 25 Jan 13:00-17:00
Mon 30 Jan 16:08-16:20 - Slowdown on backbone
Tue 31 Jan 12:12-??? & sometime in the evening
Fri 3 Feb 17:30-current
So in 355 hours (from 00:00 Fri 20 Jan to 19:00 Fri 3 Feb), we have had approximately 9h45m of downtime. I'm counting the two times on the 31st as 1 hour each, and not counting the slowdown on the 30th. This equates to 2.7% downtime. Hell, Windows 95 has better uptime than that!
Of course if you try to phone them you get their lovely hold music for ages. I hung on for 8 minutes before giving up in frustration.
I've told my ISP in no uncertain terms that I'm very happy with their service, but the very day that the second national telecoms operator starts offering ADSL to the public, I'm moving. Ideally, I'd like to stay with my ISP, but I will move from Telkom immediately. I know of 3 friends, 5 smallish (<50 employees) companies, and two largeish (50-300 employees) that have the same attitude. Interestingly, those are the only people/companies I've discussed Telkom with, so effectively out of the sample I've polled, 100% will leave Telkom as soon as is practical. That's a whole bunch worse than the rosy 15% customer abandonment Telkom management are bracing their investors for.
[warning: I am not a financial analyst, and this advice should be taken with a BIG grain of salt]
My personal advice to any holders of Telkom shares would be to slowly start reducing their exposure. I personally would aim for a complete divestiture by the end of the year.
Telkom dogged by network problems
Latest ADSL shortage in Gauteng frustrates users
Telkom explains ADSL hitch
Telkom clarifies ADSL outage
All those are articles from one site since the 20th Jan this year. Not bad for two weeks work.
Another 30 minutes has passed, and Telkoms downtime grows to 2.88%.
Update: Missed some downtime they had on the 28th Jan from 20:33 to 21:28. That brings them up to (now) 11h15m of downtime in 355h30m, which is 3.16%.