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Cable thieves hit Pretoria exchange

Telkom services to over 3000 residential, corporate and business customers in Akasia, Pretoria have been disrupted due to extensive cable theft at one of the area’s exchanges.

In the early hours of Thursday 4 July, cable thieves opened two manholes close to the Akasia exchange and cut 11 main and direct feed cables, making off with approximately three-hundred-and-sixty-three metres of Telkom's cables.

Customers with the exchange code (012) 549 in the suburbs of Akasia, Karenpark, Chantelle, Amandasig, Orchards and Clarina are affected. Large shopping centres have been affected as well as various medical centres in the area.

Telkom has deployed several teams and will work around the clock to restore the affected services as soon as possible. The services will be progressively restored by Wednesday 10th July 2013.

Telkom apologises for the inconvenience caused by this outage and assures customers that we are doing all that we can to prevent further damage of cables in the area.

Telkom has reported the incidents to the South African Police and Telkom’s internal security, and the police have launched an investigation. Affected customers qualify for pro-rata rebates on their line rentals.

“Copper cable theft remains a major inhibitor to Telkom's capability to maintain and improve service levels. We appeal to customers in this area to be on high alert and to report any suspicious activity to the Telkom 24 hour crime/fraud hotline number 0860 124 000,” says Mr Theo Hess, Telkom Managing Executive for Network Field Services.

In Telkom's ongoing efforts to counter the scourge of copper cable theft, explains Mr Hess, it has adopted various interventions, which include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Proactively alarming critical and sensitive cable routes and employing services of armed security firms.
• Deploying various wireless technologies that are alternatives to copper.
• Assessing vulnerable aerial cable routes and, where feasible, these are buried underground.
• Working closely with the Non-Ferrous Theft Combating Committee (NFTCC) under the auspices of Business Against Crime and the South African Police Services, to jointly find ways of protecting our cable network.
• Implementing a national campaign to raise awareness of the Company's toll-free crime-report line (0800124000) as the co-operation and support of all communities is vital in stamping out cable theft. All members of the public are urged to assist Telkom by making use of this number if they see any suspicious activities.

For further enquiries, please contact:

Telkom Park, The Apex 92 Oak Avenue Technopark Highveld Centurion

As of 30 September 2015, we had approximately 3.3 million telephone access lines in service and 1,030,441 ports connected via MSAN access. We offer business, residential and payphone customers a wide range of services and products, including:

• fixed-line retail voice services using PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) lines, including ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network) lines, and the sale of subscription based value-added voice services and calling plans;
• fixed-line customer premises equipment rental and sales services both voice and data needs and these include PABX, Computers, Routers, Modems, Telephone handsets and other ancillary equipment;
• interconnection services, including terminating and transiting traffic from South African mobile operators, as well as from international operators and transiting traffic from mobile to international destinations;
• fixed-line data services, including domestic and international data transmission services, such as point-to-point leased lines, ADSL (Asymmetrical Digital Subscriber Line) services, packet-based services, managed data networking services and internet access and related information technology services;
• Data Centre Operations includes e-commerce, application service provider, hosting, data storage, e-mail and security services;
• W-CDMA (Wideband Code Division Multiple Access), a 3G next generation network, including fixed voice services, data services and nomadic voice services;
• mobile communication services, including voice services, data services and handset sales through our mobile navbar-brand called Telkom Mobile;
•  information and communication services including cloud services, infrastructure services, workspace services, global service integration management and hardware and network equipment sales locally, in seven African countries, the UK and Dubai through Business Connexion Group; and
• other services including directory services, through Trudon (Pty) Ltd, wireless data services, through Swiftnet (Pty) Ltd.

Convergence is one of our key strategic initiatives in building a sustainable future for Telkom.  We will lead the provision of converged services in South Africa in support of our mission statement: Seamlessly connecting people to a better life.