For those who may not already know, I’ve finally cancelled my Uninet connection in favour of a DSL connection. I’d pick Telkom over Uninet any day of the week and twice on Sundays; the only reason it took me so long to switch over was the initial cost and subsequent value for money.

Uninet finally earned my eternal enmity and ire when they decided to disconnect me with absolutely no warning due to “non-payment”. I actually had to contact them to find this out. Their reason was that I was not paying them enough but they agreed that I had paid them for that month — I was paying the price as advertised, not the price they want to charge me (which is 50% more). Can anyone else see the problem with this? Dual pricing schemes…

After 2 and a half years of loyal patronage I promptly cancelled my Uninet connection and ordered DSL. This was the straw that broke the camel’s back I guess. I’m still now even having fights with them as they think I haven’t cancelled, too bad I don’t have a contract with them and have always been on a month-to-month basis — which is one of the ridiculous reasons they want to charge me 50% more for an identical service.

So… that’s the end of my story, a very abreviated version I might add; I could quite literally fill books on the general crap and dealings I’ve had with them.

To Telkoms credit, a week after I ordered they contacted me to tell me I could go ahead with the self-install and my line would be activated 7 days hence. So 6 days later I picked up my router, plugged it in and no line sync. Well there was still 1 day to go right? So the next day, still no line sync. I went to Telkom Direct, picked up the self-install kit and filters (you don’t need these to get line sync) and asked them what the situation was. I spent about half an hour with a consultant while she phoned around Telkom for me to find out what the problem was as my line was already listed as activated. After all that she came back and told me that they were working on the exchange and my line would be working Monday afternoon. Yay… I stood there for a good 30 minutes to get a 5 second response.

That reponse had me a little worried though, when Telkom tells you they’re working on the exchange, it can often mean months before your dsl is working. So I didn’t hold out any hope of having my DSL fully working by Monday. I was however quite surprised when I got home from work on Monday to find my router had obtained line sync.

So all-in-all just under 2 and a half weeks from order to installation to activation to full working DSL. From some of the horror stories I’ve heard, the process was relatively fast (within Telkom’s 3 week target at least) and painless. DSL lines do pretty much have the highest priority in Telkom at the moment though.