Complaint against Vodacom

blunomore said:
We have a 3G contract with Vodacom and received a shocking account of R20K this month.

Our contract gives us 2Gig per month and, whilst we normally exceed that limit and get charged out-of-bundle rates, the total bill is never more than approx R1 500.

We tried to find out from them how it is possible that we used so much data and they were uhmm-ing and ahh-ing and could not give a proper answer. The guy I spoke to, speculated that it could be due to e-mails looping (the IT people will know what that means, I don't!) or that there could be viruses on the PC.

Does that sound like a probable explanation to you guys?

We reported them to the Consumer Commission and will see what happens.
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you are screwed I think. These big companies normally couldnt care less about customer satisfaction, especially when there is a R20k bill to be had
 
Since moving onto Vodacom I got an SMS warning me that my limit was close and I would be charged OOB rates. Is it a new service? Pretty lame not assigning it to existing customers.
 
Sinbad said:
The average user may not be technically savvy enough to understand all of this.

Hence, my opinion about a hard cap
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Yeah, Im fully with you there. Hard cap should be mandatory. The bundles are designed to shaft users who do manage their systems correctly... which is most people.

I honestly believe people should go for computer licences like they do car licences. So they can at least get enough training to understand how to manage their systems. Not doing so causes so much needless issues. End users are the primary reasons for botnets. If they are going to manage a device with so much power, they should be trained in the basics before being allowed onto the Internet.
 
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blunomore said:
How on earth will I know that ? I am a lay person when it comes to IT ........... TYPICAL END USER ! :)
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As a non-geek, I use netlimiter. You can check per application and process how much data is being used at any given point, and look at it historically, which will pin-point exactly which application or process was responsible for how much data...
 
Fudzy said:
Since moving onto Vodacom I got an SMS warning me that my limit was close and I would be charged OOB rates. Is it a new service? Pretty lame not assigning it to existing customers.
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Problem is if you plug it into a modem the SMSs are effectively useless...
 
DJ... said:
Problem is if you plug it into a modem the SMSs are effectively useless...
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See what I mean? If even you guys, who are supposed to be much more IT savvy, differ on some of these things, there is no hope for the likes of me to make sense out of all these options !
 
I am not sure about email loop on a PC or Laptop...but it is definately possible on a phone. One of my corp clients last year had this happen to one of the directors wives. She had a Iphone and her company email account. Something went wrong on their email server and it kept on rejecting the email and the phone kept on trying to resend it. They reported the phone getting very hot and the battery draining after a few hours. This went on for days apparently untill they tracked down the problem.

Next month they got a bill for R30 000.00 of data usage.
 
Ockie said:
We can load a alternate destination SMS for clients if the modem does not support SMS and there is always the option to follow your usage on www.vodacom.co.za
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I wasn't aware of the alternate SMS destination. Nice service but pity it isn't advertised to the layman, who is ultimately the one who will end up with these shock bills.

The Vodacom site - I had an immense amount of troubles with it when I was back home. Eventually gave up and never tried again. Also wasn't aware data usage could be followed there...
 
How about a nightly email showing data usage for the last 24 hours. iBust used to do that...
 
blunomore said:
See what I mean? If even you guys, who are supposed to be much more IT savvy, differ on some of these things, there is no hope for the likes of me to make sense out of all these options !
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Are you using the default software, my old Vodacom software as well as my current Dell software both notify me of SMSes on the SIM. No limit notifications as it's on a private APN but lots of spam.
 
I have comodo firewall running. Nothing gets through without confirmation. Bit of a pain but I see its value.
 
Vodacom's website works really well since they redesigned it recently. You can track your exact usage at any time.
VMC shows you sms' received on the 3G device.

I don't think you can do much about this. It's the end users responsibility to track their usage. Networks thrive on non-tech savvy clients who don't monitor their data usage...
 
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