Let's hope Telkom don't fall over!

If you are a large corporate or parastatal; with a large geographical footprint, you best hope and pray that Telkom keeps on delivering the goods. Which they happen to do better than most by the way! Ask me, we manage clients all over South Africa, spending ten of millions of ZAR per month, who would not be doing business without Telkom.

To be clear, I am not saying that Telkom don’t make mistakes, behave arrogantly or treat us all badly. I am just saying that they are the best of the bunch if you have a large geographical footprint.

And if you hate Telkom because they gave you bad service it is not going to change your dependence on them. Despite the fact that most people have some kind of hate relationship with Telkom, South Africa will face serious economic growth problems if Telkom is stuttering along and not delivering on their basic services. And growth is all that is going to solve the unemployment, crime and education problems.

Everyone in SA including the VANS [or whatever they are now called] rely heavily on Telkom. The new infrastructure being laid down by Vodacom / MTN and Neotel will take many years to make a significant difference to our lives in any area outside of the main cities and economic hubs of activity.

At this moment in time and for the foreseeable future, there is no-one else that will deliver a MPLS / VPN or voice services to your company in both Kuruman and Sandton at the same time without making use of the Telkom infrastructure.

We can only hope and pray that Telkom keep it together in the short to medium term.