Telkom has urged its basic rate Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) customers to check the configuration of their modems, to ensure that these to not automatically dial up to their Internet Service Providers (ISPs) on the second ISDN channel and ring up short duration calls on their phone accounts.
Towards the ends of last year, Telkom introduced its Multilink service that enhanced the capability of the South African Internet Exchange (SAIX) network to accommodate speeds up to 128 Kb/s to access ISPs. It achieves this by bonding the available two 64Kb/s ISDN channels into a single 128Kb/s Internet access channel.
However, the modems of a number of non-Multilink customers are automatically establishing short duration calls to ISPs due to incorrect settings or because the second channel has been manually selected. The result is a successful telephone call destined to the ISP through Telkom’s network but immediately terminated by the ISP, as it does not accept the 64 Kb/s subscribers as being a 128Kb/s (Multilink) type subscriber.
“While Telkom encouraged ISPs that use the SAIX network to correct their customers’ modem settings in April this year, a high number of short duration calls are still prevalent. These are valid calls that are transmitted and switched at a cost to Telkom, and from 1 September 2003 we will bill these calls in order to recover our costs,” said Telkom’s Managing Executive of Corporate and Global Markets, Randall Seidl.
He added that short duration calls generated through manually selecting the second ISDN channel would also be billed from 1 September, and urged basic rate ISDN customers to approach their ISPs and ensure their modems were correctly configured before then. – I-Net Bridge