On Monday, June 22, 2020 at 8:00:22 PM UTC+2, Alain Fournier wrote:
On Jun/22/2020 at 02:58, wrote :

Now if the local telecomm provider (read: government enforced monopoly) would just do their jobs and fix our landline....

???

I'm curious here. Where are you hailing from? Which country imposes such
horrible hardship on its citizens?

South Africa, a semi-government owned company called TELKOM has the monopoly on all cable based telecomms. There was another company whose name escapes me right now but they went belly up when ESKOM's problems started a decade ago. In 1996 the new(ish) government promised to dismantle this legacy of apartheid ASAP and usher in a new era of prosperity. I guess they figured out that seeing as the Cabinet gets to (indirectly) appoint the leadership of state-owned companies that keeping TELKOM was a good way to keep friends and supports gainfully employed.

We have a similar situation with ESKOM, the electricity provider monopoly, who has major problems keeping the lights on. Their cabinet appointed leadership can't figure out why 40-year old power stations keep breaking down, or why coal suppliers refuse to supply coal when they haven't been paid in three months, and whose leadership gets hysterical when they can't figure out WHY the company has a 25% decline in income during a period when the parts of the country that actually pay for their electricity were being turned off for 25% of the time. Oh and the new power station (was supposed to be the biggest, most efficient, least polluting coal burning power station in the Southern Hemisphere) is 10 X over budget, 10 years later, and all work done so far has been found to be defective, or sub-standard. Estimates are that it will be 20 X over budget and won't be fully operation before 2040.

We also had a government owned iron and steel monopoly, ISKOR, which except for some minor low volume specialist metallurgy has gone the way of the dinosaurs. The state-owned national airline SAA hasn't paid its staff in 3 months, and before that they weren't on full pay anyway. It has just received another billion dollar rescue package. We have a government owned monopoly on rail transport, and they can't even get the trains to run on time, or prevent the passenger trains from being torched in arson attacks. Our ports are run another monopoly which makes getting your good through customs an exercise in frustration.

And yes, 2G is scheduled to go away here soon too. The rights to those wave lengths of that transmission space have already been sold. The wireless operators don't really mind, because that means they get to sell everyone who wants to stay connected a 4G or LTE device.



Alain Fournier


Sorry for the long winded reply. An update on my landline connection. The connection is restored but I still can't use it because the modem's software can't reset the password used by the last device. I got this far by waiting patiently on the phone for just over 75 minutes yesterday.

Be grateful for what you have over in the real world.

Regards
Frank