A Telkom broadband advertisement in South Africa seems to be causing concern to customers. Ian Stockdale, a potential Telkom customer, has approached Computing SA with various complains regarding the ad. He alleges that it is an example of false advertising on behalf of Telkom.
Stockdale states that when he called Telkom to verify the advert and find out more about the offer, he received a completely different response to what the actual advert offered.
The advert states that the BusinessDSL 512 contract was R699 (US$107) per month and is now Rand 477 per month, and also states that this offer includes 3GB usage per month and that ?additional usage can be purchased if required".
The two main reasons why Stockdale called Telkom were to find out if the offer included the 3GB free of charge, and if the price reduction affected existing Business DSL512 customers.
However, when he approached Telkom, he was told that this was not the case, and that customers had to pay for the 3GB. He was told that "any usage account was, is, and always will be, an additional cost".
According to Stockdale, this caused him to complain to someone from Telkom, but he says that he was shunted from pillar to post, and was even told that the advert was the publication"s mistake.
"But the advert had to be signed off by someone from Telkom before it could be sent to the publication," Stockdale states.
He claims that he continued to follow up on this, and that he called Telkom every two to three days for almost a month, which should have given enough time for someone to discover the facts, and return his call. However, he received no replies, and not even a call informing him that someone was working on his query.
To make matters worse, Stockdale states that all of the people to whom he spoke at Telkom refused to give their surnames, stating that there was no need for this, as they would get back to him as soon as they could help him with his complaint.
Apart from the phone calls, Stockdale claims that he also faxed the adverts to people at Telkom underlining the discrepancies. Prior to going to print, he was still awaiting a reply, he says.
Computing SA was unable to speak to any of the people to whom Stockdale claims that he spoke, as they only provided fax numbers.
However, we did manage to get in contact with Lulu Letlape, Group Executive - Corporate Communications for Telkom, to clear up any misconceptions that the advert had caused.
According to Letlape: "The customer pays Rand 249 per month for a 3GB Telkom Internet ISP account (in addition to the ADSL access fee, e.g. Rand 477 per month for the 512kbps service)."
This is a flat rate charged monthly which allows the customer 3GB of Internet usage per month, Letlape says. If the customer exceeds 3GB, then the service is capped until the start of the new month, whereupon the next 3GB of usage becomes available.
"The customer has the option of purchasing an additional Internet ISP account which would then provide a further 3GB of usage within any particular month, this is a voluntary purchase, and could be considered as a way of buying additional bandwidth/usage," she says.
Letlape said that she would get someone to contact Stockdale immediately, and resolve the problem.
Letlape also states that Telkom believes that the ad was not misleading, as there is a disclaimer at the bottom of the ad stating that the ISP cost is excluded. However Letlape said that she would get someone to contact Stockdale immediately, and resolve the problem.