Telkom’s group chief operating officer, Brian Armstrong, says the telecommunications operator is a changed company, one where customer service is not an afterthought but the top priority.

“Telkom went off the boil in terms of customer experience,” Armstrong told delegates at the company’s annual Satnac conference in Port Elizabeth on Tuesday. “In the last six months, we have really been working on this.”

He says every meeting of Telkom’s executive committee is prefaced with 20 to 30 minutes of discussion on customer service and what is being done to improve it.

If Telkom is successful, it will mark a significant change for a company that consumers have historically loved to hate for its tardy response times to faults, its call centres which were notorious for how long people were kept waiting, and its lengthy lead times in installing new services.

Armstrong says Telkom is already seeing “very heartening results” from its focus on customer service, but cautions that the service improvement programme will run for at least another two or three years. “Hopefully by then it will be embedded in the DNA of the company.”

Turning to broadband, Armstrong says the number of broadband households in South Africa will grow from 1,4m in 2013 to 2,9m in 2020 and Telkom intends playing a leading role in that growth, both from a retail and a wholesale perspective.

It will do this by deploying a range of access technologies, with fibre to the home (FTTH) and very high-speed digital subscriber lines (VDSL) making up 60% of the portfolio.

A further 30% will come from fixed-wireless 4G/LTE access and the final 10% from older ADSL and 3G technologies. Satellite will continue to play a role in outlying areas. VDSL will be Telkom’s future “core product”, Armstrong says.

FTTH will be driven by demand for video, particularly 3D and 4K ultra-high-definition video, he adds.

“Operators have started bundling IPTV [Internet protocol television] with their broadband services as it helps the business case for FTTH stack up. There is also dramatic reduction in churn when you bundle TV as a ‘four-play offering’. But the jury is still out on the success of these models.”

Telkom is still determining what role it will play in content delivery. It is considering four options, Armstrong says. These are being a “pipe and portal provider”; mediating other companies’ content; becoming an aggregator of others’ content; and becoming a fully fledged media player.