CellC Balance Enquiry Unreliable

[brandrock]

I signed up for the SmartData 500MB service last month. When it got to the 27th I asked for an SMS balance enquiry and got back the figure of 115MB remaining. I relied on that as being an up-to-date figure and surfed on. Big mistake! The balance enquiry system at CellC is hopeless. The message did not mention an as-at-date, and was in fact 5 days out of date according to my itemised billing. That makes the whole system absolutely useless.

I've been haggling with CellC for a refund of the R163 I was charged for excess usage, but no luck so far. Their accounts department are taking the stance that I used the access, so I have to pay. My last email to customer service has been ignored for a week so far.

My advice is to download a bandwidth monitor program to keep track of your monthly uasage on your own PC. Do not rely on the CellC balance enquiry. I wrote my own monitor program, but you could try BitMeter freeware from http://codebox.no-ip.net/.

 

[brandrock]

It's been over a month now and no reply from Cell C to my email despite at least 5 calls to ask them to reply. I think they are hoping that I will just go away if they ignore me. They say their Service Level Agreement states 48 hours to reply to an email. Its been 778 hours now, so they are somewhat late ne!

They want to charge me R1000 to cancel my contract, plus, plus I don't know what. You can guess what I'm going to do when my cellphone and SmartData contracts come to an end.

They say that they count traffic uploaded as well as downloaded (makes sense). I have noticed a difference between my bandwidth counter and theirs of 20MB that they haven't charged me for. Perhaps thats for traffic between their server and my PC which doesn't leave their server (logon dialog etc.) and therefore isn't included. Gives me some leeway so that's cool.