Letters: Hello, can you hear me?

My wife and I moved to the North Coast in May 2011. Upon arriving, we got ourselves a landline and an ADSL connection from Telkom.
Things worked pretty well and although there was obviously the occasional hitch, Telkom was always efficient in responding and sorting things out within one or two days. Unfortunately, it seems that times have changed.
On Monday, November 21, I discovered that our landline was down and our internet connection had become so unreliable, that it was basically non-existent. As always, I reported the error to Telkom by SMS. This time however, in place of receiving a return SMS requesting me to select an option which best described the problem, I received a message stating that I should check whether or not I had paid the bill.
In our instance, since everything is done by debit order, this was a somewhat strange response, and so I contacted Telkom. As expected, the account was in order and so Telkom opened a fault report. So far, so good.
Four days later, after still being without a landline and an internet connection worth mentioning, I queried the status of the fault report. I was told that nothing had been done so far, because the fault had not yet been allocated to a technician. I was however promised that the matter would now be escalated and even received an escalation number. Upon asking what exactly an escalation means, I was told that the fault would now be allocated to a technician within max 24 hours.
Twenty four  hours later, I decided to check whether anything had changed, and so once again phoned Telkom. Well, you guessed it – nothing had happened. This time I was told that faults are allocated to a technician within a period of seven working days. Escalation numbers appear to be just show with no impact.
Heck, is this some kind of a joke, or is it a new Telkom sales strategy, so that people will chuck out ADSL and buy the new fibre which is currently being installed in our area?
MARKUS KÄMPF
Simbithi