Telkom to offer mobile phone services from 2010

If Telkom is reverting back to mobile business, what was the wisdom of desposing its stake in Vodacom?

If you go in the depth of it you will get to know that so many tonnes of consultants were engaged to give advice for the Vodacom stake disposal. And an equal number of tonnes of analysists were hired to give advice to Telkom to start a mobile business, then you will understand vulture business practices of 21 Century.

Bantu, good comment. However, it is due to incompetent management that was and still is very active at Telkom. Also, as to your vulture comment, considering the level of intelligence of most senior management at Telkon it would have been an extremely easy sell for all consulting firms to convice Telkom to do the analysis and thus create a massive vulture revenue stream for themslves, which as I am certain you will agree, would have gone directly either Tokyo or Cyril, or a close relative. You would have thought that they (Telkom) would have had some sort of three year stategy for such a massive monopoly.

Why don't they work on getting their land line service working smoothly before they tackle mobile services... anyone tried to get a land line lately? what a joke!!

Telkom are mad. They are so hated for ripping cutomers off that I doubt people will move over in droves to them. If there were more competition in fixed line phones Telkom would lose so many customers. They need to bring their broadband prices down drastically for anybody to have a bit of faith in them. Then they need to sort out their service. It doesn't help when you have problems on your phone and have to wait a week for it to be sorted out.

Apocalypse Now ...then again, putting aside the usual cynicism, a 6 billion injection into the economy is not too be scoffed at.. and as for competition and vultures - more competition is needed amongst the vultures living off the government, including tax payer, meaty bones...

Basher I agree R6 billion is not to be sneezed at, but it will give you a massive coronary if you have to pay R10 billion for it.

OK, so now they stuffed up land-lines and want to destroy mobile phones, why don't they sell their land-line monopoly and use the proifts to get into mobile technology? If they can't focus on their core business someone else should!

A year ago I told Hellkom to stick their landline where the sun don't shine. They're five TIMES more expensive than similar services in civilized countries, and, in addition, are 38% owned by the ANC through various front organisations.

Have you noted how 'busy' their technicians are over weekends? Double pay, of course.

As for the other mobvile service providers, thery're also a cozy cartel.

Better still, why don't they simply shut up shop ? No one will miss them.

Good old sperm counters at it again - they're resently still milking the nation with their (thankfully) ever receding monopoly and now wanna play "me to" in the space they ensured would whip their butts originally; how cute, how sad... they should be providing infrastructure for the nation to do business and should not be a profit-seeking outfit

They should actually change their name and most certainly never use the name Telkom in any new venture since marketing that name would be an exercise that not even the most accomplished marketers would relish.

Room for a fourth service provider? indeed! - two problems come to mind here - firstly in order to provide a service one needs to understand what service means and secondly one needs to understand what is required in order to provide that service!

Enough said? Amen!