competitors
Charlene Smith
Telkom is beginning to fight, and beat, their cellphone competition on their own ground.
The latest Telkom innovation is its Call Answer service. First piloted over four months early last year to residential customers in Rosebank in Johannesburg and Middelburg in Mpumalanga, it is now beginning to pick up momentum with availability at 45 exchanges nationwide and 50 000 activated services handling more than two million calls a month.
At a R43,55 connection fee, and a paltry R5,70 a month rental, the service makes cellphone answer fees of about R3 a time seem outrageous.
The Call Answer service answers the phone after seven rings, or immediately if you are busy on the phone, and, with a greeting recorded by the consumer, takes a message. A broken dialling tone alerts you to new messages. There is no fee for retrieving messages. Subscribers can also ask for an additional R2,28 monthly rental for the use of the call-waiting facility.
A further advantage over cellphones is that the Call Answer service can be dialled, using a tone phone, from anywhere in South Africa or neighbouring states by inputting your personal code. Remote retrieval costs one telephone unit per minute, but callers are not charged extra for leaving messages.
Call Answer can store 15 messages for 10 days, and allow 90 seconds per message. If you don’t retrieve your messages, the system will phone you to remind you to check mail.
Telkom says their primary target market is upper residential users and the small office or home office that does not use a PABX – the facility is not compatible with a PABX.
To find out whether the facility is available in your area, call the toll-free help desk at 0800-113216