dhiren.za.net

I've been having trouble with Vodacom's 3G for a few months now, and they've apparently finally agreed to release me from my contract early (although I'm still waiting for written confirmation from them, as well as waiting to hear how Autopage is going to handle it).

I signed up for a 3G contract with Vodacom via Autopage the day after I moved to Jhb last year, as I didn't have any other sort of connectivity at the flat I was renting. I got ADSL at home at the beginning of this year, but decided not to try and transfer the 3G to someone else, as it was pretty convenient having it around. It generally worked fine, until sometime around April, when I started getting disconnected occasionally, and got really bad in May, when I would be disconnected almost every half hour.

Apart from being incredibly annoying, it was also wasting money, because every time I got disconnected, I would have to reconnect to a whole bunch of different things and resynchronize a whole bunch of data, wasting a large chunk of my 500mb monthly bundle. The 500mb would usually last until the last few days of the month, or not even be fully used up, but I not got notified that my bundle was used up more than a week away from the end of the month.

When I first noticed the frequent disconnections, I contacted Vodacom customer care to complain. I told them that they need to either fix their network immediately, and arrange to refund me whatever money I've wasted by going over my 500mb limit, or to release me from my contract early, failing which I would complain to ICASA about their unusable service.

After wasting a good few days trying to blame the problem on my operating system (I need to write another story about that one, because it's incredibly retarded), they finally agreed to open a ticket with the network division. So that Saturday, I got a call from someone at Vodacom's network division who readily admitted that they had been having connectivity problems over the past few weeks, but said that it should be sorted out by then. I didn't get a chance to use it very much as I was leaving for Cape Town on that Tuesday, and I had a lot of work to do till then.

When I got to Cape Town, I had problems of a different kind - I wasn't being disconnected frequently, but websites just wouldn't load. I was connected, and the connection was working, as I was on MSN/GTalk/etc which all worked fine - it was just loading actual sites that didn't work at all. I called Autopage and reported the problem, and they said that they would take it up with Vodacom and get back to me.

Around the same time, I had also submitted a complaint to Autopage via their website, as I wanted them to refund me the out-of-bundle charges that I had to pay as a result of going over my 500mb because of all the disconnections.

The first response was that they had checked with their network division, and there had been no disconnections. So I replied and said that they are lying, because I had already contacted Vodacom, who had confirmed that they had been having connectivity problems. Autopage forwarded my reply to Vodacom, and Vodacom again confirmed that they had been having issues, and that Autopage should work out some sort of deal to credit me for the wastage.

Vodacom also said that they were going to arrange with me for someone to come over and do a field inspection and try and figure out what the issue was.

Of course they both then started taking their time to respond to things, so I decided to start emailing them every time I got disconnected. It did get a bit tedious after a while, and wasn't entirely accurate, because I would sometimes get disconnected while typing up an email to complain about the previous disconnection. So eventually I told them I'm not going to bother reconnecting for the rest of the day, and I would just sit at my desk and draw pictures on a piece of paper because I couldn't get on the internet.

Vodacom started to get a bit annoyed and emailed me back to say that they had already told me that they were sending out someone to investigate "in due course", and Autopage decided that they were not going to do anything further until Vodacom completed their assessment, so I continued sending emails to them both every day or so telling them how many times I'd been disconnected so far.

Finally, on Friday morning, somebody from Vodacom called me to say that they are going to be putting up a new tower near where I work, which should sort out the problem. I told him that
a) I'm not prepared to wait for what could be months before a new tower is put up, and suffer with their pathetic service in the mean time; and
b) The problem isn't that I don't have a strong signal - I almost always have what should be a strong signal from the existing towers - the problem is that despite having a strong signal, I get disconnected at random, without the signal strength dropping. So it's not a coverage problem, but some other issue that they have with their network.

He then said that he is going to complete whatever process is required to authorize an early penalty-free contract termination, and said that he will be in contact with Autopage to advise them to release me from my contract.

I haven't heard anything since then, although I'm guessing that most people would have been on leave yesterday, but if I don't hear anything by around Thursday then I'll start hounding them again.

So, it's a good thing I guess that they acknowledged that the problem is on their side, and also acknowledged that I shouldn't be forced to continue with my contract. Although I'm sure if I wasn't persistent with both Vodacom and Autopage, as well as threaten both of them with a complaint to ICASA, they would have probably brushed it off.

Vodacom's 3G still sucks (I gave up trying to use it this weekend in Stanger), but hopefully I won't have to put up with it for too much longer.