January 9th, 2009
Useless Routers From Telkom
Routers in the current household I am living in generally only last a few months before they either get hit by lightning (yes they are on a UPS and we also try unplug every time there is a storm) or they just randomly pop. In the last year we went through I don’t know how many routers.
What I have found though is that the worst routers are the ones that you get from Telkom when you sign up for an ADSL account. As a side note for my international readers, Telkom is a monopolistic telephone company down here in South Africa. It seems as if Telkom change their router brand every month and every time they do, they somehow get worse and worse than the previous brand/model.
I was just at a ladies house this afternoon fixing her PC and setting up her ADSL account (the joys of being a helpful geek) and she is about to order her third router from Telkom this week because the other 2 were both faulty. One of them randomly packed up while I was setting up her internet and just decided not to switch on again.
If you are getting a new ADSL account, rather goto the local PC shop and buy a good quality router. It will save you a lot of time and trouble and you will probably even get better connectivity out of it.
South Africans, have you also had problems with Telkom Routers? or is it just me…
Did you check the ADSL line stats for high error margins?
Line quality problems usually result in people (including Telkom technicians) faulting a perfectly good modem for a problematic line.
Some problematic lines work better on Telkom USB modems than Telkom ethernet-based ones. I only know this because I’ve replaced wifi modems 3 times at Telkom’s suggestion only to have them all behave the same. The problem being the line not the modem. This is a common problem because we use crap old lines for ADSL.
Please offer useful advice on diagnosing a problem correctly before suggesting people go out and spend money.
I can’t agree with you more.
I wish more people would just go spend a couple of hundred bucks on a router that you won’t find in a lucky-packet. The Telkom routers use some of the worst electronic components, and feature the very worst firmware I’ve seen.
I have one friend who is on his SEVENTH (yes, seriously) Telkom ADSL router. Shocking.
Hey Richard,
Thanks for the comment.
The modem I was working with today completely fried (as did another one I worked with in the past). Definitely not a line problem there.
Now, I am definitely not a hardware expert, but from my experience, using a so called “brand name” router has saved me a lot more time and money in the long run. Just my experience
Hey Tim,
7th? Wow, thats insane. I thought I was unlucky with routers.
The old Marconi brand modems were shocking to the point of basically being useless. You had to be within 2 meters to get vague wifi signal assuming it wasn’t about to explode from being on more than 20 minutes.
The new Billion make is better but I always still advocate getting a Linksys or Netgear router.
I have been using the Telkom Marconi router (got it with Do3) for about 2 years now and have had no problems at all. Wifi reception is fine even in the garden, it never drops, DSL connection is always stable etc.
In the office we have endless trouble with the much more expensive Cisco (Linksys) and Netgear ones.
So I guess it is a bit up to chance
hi. I have a friend that needs me to log into her computer remotly. She sends me the invite but when I try to open it I cant acces her computer. Is there eny other settings that needs to be changed and/or is it het telkom router that is blocking me from accessing her computer?