BBSA said:
Hi V3G
I'm confused by your statement.
I use my 3G card in Centurion and Moreleta Park. On both locations I get very bad speeds. A Siemans rep was on site and he confirmed that it is a network problem. As you are aware this has been escalated to siemens premium support.
I'm not sure how the network works but it does seem if the network problems is NOT just at one location. In which areas are the network problems?
Think of the network as a star network, or more accurately, a distributed star, i.e. a star network with each end-point forming a new star.
Each final end-point is a radio cell and the arms the transmission network. The hub of the main star connects you to the internet.
Currently we have (on the 3G network) thousands of these radio 'end-points' with thousands of transmission links forming the 'arms'. Tens-of-thousands of users access the 3G radio network around the country.
You can therefore see that the closer you get to the center point the more users would be affected by any network problems. If the internet connection goes down, all users are affected. If a specific cell or transmission line is down or faulty in any way, the users attached to that cell or area will be affected but everyone else will be OK.
If there were general network problems over a large area (say Pretoria), the call desk gets swamped with calls, so we quickly get a feel for the scale of the problem (outside of the network management tools that auto-detect these failures) and react to those.
There is no such network problem in the Pretoria area. This does not mean specific cells are not problematic.
Out of the 10's of thousands of towers, cells and transmission lines there will always be a small % of faulty systems, typically far less than 1%. This is the nature of technical systems.
Vodacom (obviously) endeavours to get every single cell working as designed.
Ignoring customer satisfaction for a moment, remember a faulty cell results in little or no network traffic, i.e. lost revenue. So even if you believe customer service is not a high priority (and trust me, it is), no business is going to stand by and watch revenue being lost. This alone should be enough assurance that Vodacom tends to a network problem with utmost priority.
Hope this helps
Thanks V3G - that's good news - seems as if I got the phone just in time 
. Must say Vodacom has never let me down in the 9 yrs I have been a subscriber (with the same number nogal) Now I can really see what the battery life is like on the phone (read that loong V800 topic and have disabled 3G until its live in the area).