With yearly increases becoming the norm, speed increases stagnating and more and more FNO's getting rid of their customer facing support, I thought I'd air some of my FNO horror stories to check if I live in a bubble.
My FNO interactions over the years:
Vuma - The OLT/PoP in my area received a firmware upgrade (Vuma pushed out a maintenance notice for my area), after the upgrade my line would hard die (100% packet loss) for about 5 seconds every 2 minutes, which if you’re a gamer like myself, is incredibly frustrating, the atrocious part is that it took over 3 months of constant gaslighting from 3 Vumatel techs, being pushed to the Business Division of my ISP, an ISP swap after the first gave up and a complaint letter to finally resolve an issue that was clearly documented on their side. Another issue I had was an admin issue which they cancelled my promotional package on a Friday at 5pm, which left me without any connectivity or support from my ISP or FNO till Monday. This happened twice without any warning or notification.
MFN - Finally moved out of my parents place, and got a 1 year lease for a place. From the day I got the line activated till the end of the lease my line would be congested with 20-40% packet loss every single night between 6-10pm for that year. I had a support ticket so long that it auto closed and I had to restart the entire process over. MFN proceeded to reprovision my ONT at least 50 times in all of this, say nothing is wrong and blame it all on my ISP.
Openserve (I'm still struggling with this btw) - Managed to sign up on their app for a free installation which comes with a free 50/25 service to keep you connected while you shop around for an ISP. It was always meant to be a service that would be migrated to another ISP of the customers choosing.
For the better part of a week, I've been trying to get a service from another ISP, and still my line is not provisioned for the new service, I just get told from the ISP that they waiting on Openserve and that’s that. Not to mention the countless Telkom Whatsapp messages I get that borderline on harassment has to be illegal, especially if I manually opted out.
I managed to get an install scheduled on a Sunday evening, and the next morning at 9am I had a working install. But the fact it takes over 5 days to swap an ISP takes is crazy.
With ISP's only taking home between 20-30% of the price you pay monthly I can't be too harsh on any of them, with having to be competitive with other ISP's in the space and practically run the customer facing support on behalf of the FNO, it’s a rough game to play. But at the end of all of this I feel it’s just the consumer that has to bear the brunt of all this incompetence.
What is the point of ICASA and ISPA if they almost never result in any help to the consumer?
Now it’s not lost on me, that I might be the most unlucky soul in ZA when it comes to fibre providers and these are edge cases, but I doubt that I'm the only one and some of you might have similar stories.
My FNO interactions over the years:
Vuma - The OLT/PoP in my area received a firmware upgrade (Vuma pushed out a maintenance notice for my area), after the upgrade my line would hard die (100% packet loss) for about 5 seconds every 2 minutes, which if you’re a gamer like myself, is incredibly frustrating, the atrocious part is that it took over 3 months of constant gaslighting from 3 Vumatel techs, being pushed to the Business Division of my ISP, an ISP swap after the first gave up and a complaint letter to finally resolve an issue that was clearly documented on their side. Another issue I had was an admin issue which they cancelled my promotional package on a Friday at 5pm, which left me without any connectivity or support from my ISP or FNO till Monday. This happened twice without any warning or notification.
MFN - Finally moved out of my parents place, and got a 1 year lease for a place. From the day I got the line activated till the end of the lease my line would be congested with 20-40% packet loss every single night between 6-10pm for that year. I had a support ticket so long that it auto closed and I had to restart the entire process over. MFN proceeded to reprovision my ONT at least 50 times in all of this, say nothing is wrong and blame it all on my ISP.
Openserve (I'm still struggling with this btw) - Managed to sign up on their app for a free installation which comes with a free 50/25 service to keep you connected while you shop around for an ISP. It was always meant to be a service that would be migrated to another ISP of the customers choosing.
For the better part of a week, I've been trying to get a service from another ISP, and still my line is not provisioned for the new service, I just get told from the ISP that they waiting on Openserve and that’s that. Not to mention the countless Telkom Whatsapp messages I get that borderline on harassment has to be illegal, especially if I manually opted out.
I managed to get an install scheduled on a Sunday evening, and the next morning at 9am I had a working install. But the fact it takes over 5 days to swap an ISP takes is crazy.
With ISP's only taking home between 20-30% of the price you pay monthly I can't be too harsh on any of them, with having to be competitive with other ISP's in the space and practically run the customer facing support on behalf of the FNO, it’s a rough game to play. But at the end of all of this I feel it’s just the consumer that has to bear the brunt of all this incompetence.
What is the point of ICASA and ISPA if they almost never result in any help to the consumer?
Now it’s not lost on me, that I might be the most unlucky soul in ZA when it comes to fibre providers and these are edge cases, but I doubt that I'm the only one and some of you might have similar stories.
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