Photo by: Duane Daws
Telecommunications giant Telkom on Friday doubled its reward for information leading to the prosecution of those responsible for malicious damage inflicted on Telkom facilities and its infrastructure over the last few weeks.
Telkom is now offering a R1-million incentive to deal with increasingly frequent cable theft, targeted sabotage and damage to its network, particularly in Gauteng, Limpopo and KwaZulu-Natal, “once and for all”.
“Over 60 of our street distribution cabinets (SDCs) have been damaged in the past few weeks and fibre and copper cables cut. While most of our infrastructure has now been fixed, our technicians are working around the clock to ensure that those that remain [out of service] are brought back to stream,” the company said in a statement on Friday.
Multiple investigations have already been launched, with Telkom confident of a number of imminent arrests.
In a five-day period up to August 19, 13 200 Telkom customers had been impacted by the destruction of 85 SDCs, which led Telkom to announce a R500 000 reward for information leading to the arrest and prosecution of the saboteurs.
This was double that of the R250 000 on offer on August 3 following a serious incident of sabotage to the Telkom network in Limpopo that left thousands of customers without services.