Telkom sells Skype phones!
I wanted to consolidate our various telkom business accounts into one, to make all the bills easier to manage. The only time I have available for this stuff is on the weekend, so I went to the Telkom shop at Fourways Crossing to sort it all out.
As with most of South Africa I can't stand Telkom. Telecoms is the biggest expense after salaries in our business!Their rapacious pricing and anti-competitive behaviour endears them to no-one other than a few greedy shareholders. It has been widely reported that Telkom attempts to shape VOIP traffic to render it unusable and that they refuse to connect land lines to VOIP servers if you let them know what you are trying to do. The under-handed tactics used by Telkom are an example of why net neutraility is so important.
But what is interesting is what I saw on display at the telkom shop. While the Telkom representative was sorting thing out I took a look around and was surprised to find that they were selling Skype enabled phones! Not only did they have the box prominently displayed in their window, they had a demo model setup! I took some pics with my cell phone. I was tempted to try and phone our Asterisk box from the demo phone but decided not to. Maybe I will try this coming weekend ;)
