This week has been a little frustrating in terms of working from home (and putting up blog posts on time) – thanks to a fault on Telkom’s side, my home ADSL suddenly wasn’t working any more (my modem was reporting a DSL connection failure, or rather, no DSL connection at all), starting Monday evening and finally being resolved late morning Thursday!
Sigh.
This isn’t a particularly great thing if you have fashioned a little work office in your braai room like I have, and because I haven’t really planned for this contingency, other than my Vodacom mobile data on my phone contract, I didn’t exactly have a backup Internet connection to fall back on.
(Luckily Wednesday I needed to be in office for my weekly meeting – hello Frogfoot fibre network in the Westlake Business Park. So, so fast…)
Of course, being a software developer means that I can do the majority of my development work offline anyway, so it’s not like my work world paused or anything like that for the duration of this week – though I have to say it was rather nice to not be able to respond for a bit to all the support queries and calls for changes that come into my inbox on a daily basis. (I’m currently the only development resource in the company. In other words, I have to do pretty much everything.)
Calls to Telkom’s call centre for support didn’t get me anywhere (due to the loadshedding there are a lot of confused old people and broken modems flooding into the support system at the moment), so in the end I grabbed the Telkom Android app off the Google Play platform and used that to log a fault.
A day and a half later, I got a phone call to get more details about the issue, and the next day I got a phone call from a technician asking me if everything was working now. I glanced over at the modem, and true as Bob, both the DSL and Internet lights on my old Mega 105WR router were now happily flashing along.
Problem solved.
(Though if this was a simple line re-synch or whatever they did remotely, it bothers me a little that they haven’t automated this process yet. Surely it can’t be hard to get people to log a fault in a particular way, those instances then being picked up by a monitoring system and automatically sorted out? Or at least, if it is already an automated system, then why does it take so long? Or am I just being silly at this point?)
Anyway, although not fast, the service was good, so I have to commend Telkom on that.
But just to be safe, I’ve gone and ordered a mobile data monthly package from Afrihost, to use with the existing modem I have from them.
Thanks to the whole RICA process, it should finally be arriving on Tuesday. A little too late to be of actual use, but at least now I’ll be ready for next time! :)
Related Link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=za.co.telkom.android.residential&hl=en