The City of Tshwane has yet again suffered another technical glitch affecting a prepaid vending system, causing frustration among thousands of customers using it to purchase electricity.
Last month, the municipality reported that some prepaid customers with the third-party vending system could not buy electricity owing to migration of the current prepaid meters from one system to another.
According to the municipality, the system has been online and off-line interchangeably since November 25 and unable to connect with the outside network.
Municipal spokesperson Selby Bokaba said the City’s Information and Communication Technology and the Energy and Electricity Departments were attending to technical challenges affecting the system’s operation.
“The technical team has been working on this matter until the late hours of Sunday night, frantically trying to find a lasting solution. Although we have managed to resolve the challenges experienced and the system has been stabilised, however, we will continuously monitor its performance,” he said.
He appealed to prepaid customers to be patient while efforts were under way to rectify the technical glitches that have hampered the effective functioning of the system.
“Customers will be kept abreast on the developments. The City apologises for the inconvenience caused to the affected customers,”he said.
In October, the City experienced a similar technical glitch affecting some prepaid electricity customers such as the banks, filling stations and retail stores.
The challenges then were as a result of the migration of the current prepaid meters from one system to another, as part of Tshwane’s readiness towards prepaid metering’s standard transfer specification-2 (STS-2).
At the time the City said: “All prepaid meters and vending systems across the country need to be upgraded from prepaid metering’s standard transfer specification 1 (STS-1) to standard transfer specific-2 (STS-2) compliance.”
It further said systems were being prepared to be able to upgrade the current prepaid meters from STS-1 to STS-2 compliance.
“The vending systems will soon be able to generate the ‘Token Identity’ code to upgrade the current prepaid meters to be compliant with STS-2,” the City said.
Pretoria News