My, you guys are a suspicious lot!
I've been 'quiet' for a while mostly due to other commitments and not at all for not caring about the forum or being 'cut down by the old guard'. I'll rather be called in for NOT responding than posting too much info...
ic and rpm, who've met the senior management team at Vodacom, will know how passionate they are about the forum and customer feedback in general.
But it's nice to be missed!
A lot of valid comments have been made by everyone in this thread. Let me try and answer/comment on some of them:
1) Vodacom insists on open communication with its subscriber base and especially this forum. It's your service and you have the right to know what's happening. Only by being open can a trust relationship be built.
2) You pay for, and therefore are entitled to, a professional service. As mentioned Vodacom must be committed (and is, trust me) to providing as best possible service within the technology constraints.
3) The network is in a massive growth phase and is not in a static state for even hours. This is any production environment's nightmare; delivering a stable service while, at the same time upgrading all the components on a continuous basis.
On the one hand people are screaming for more coverage and, on the other, we see calls for stabilising the current system. A balancing act of note.....
4) As mentioned below by Harley79, a lot of this technology is rolling out at these capacity levels for the first time (in the world) and this sometimes causes hiccups not anticipated. The engineers tweak the system on a daily basis based on the new stats as they come in but are often faced with new scenarios. In comparison, the 2G network is a well known animal.
5) On top of this we are learning about new concepts not previously known about in 2G comms, for example the IDLE-mode issue that can so often cause apparent DNS failures.
6) Having said that, we've had continuous stability problems with some back-end systems. (I won't mention the dreaded SMTP word...). Although these problems are also caused by loading and reconfiguration issues, it's not nearly as complex as sorting the RF side and should not happen.
7) Vodacom's policy to cancelling contracts is that the service must be fixed. Only if you can't fix what you've sold, should you consider a cancellation. No company is going to give away business but sometimes it's better to cancel a contract if the sub requests it and there is no way to deliver the server sold. The most common example is a subscriber being sold a contract when there is no coverage in his primary location.
A number of forumites (Harley79, biometrics, fingers121 amongst them) have been very involved and can vouch for this process, i.e. Vodacom will try and resolve the problem, whatever it takes to make the service work.
Sometimes it takes a long time and can be frustrating for both parties, but the important thing is that is gets sorted. Both you and us would rather see the service working.
So what went wrong recently:
a) A few weeks ago we had that major failure that rendered the service unusable for 2 days. As Harley79 mentioned it turned out to be an in-line security device (put there for your protection, nogal!) that decided to do such a good job that it started filtering data packets at random.
b) Over the last two weeks the IP pool started filling up and this caused spurious disconnects or you could not connect at all.
c) Over the weekend a new backend system, installed to increase above capacity, failed and resulted in a pretty miserable weekend for many.
d) On Tuesday another service affecting failure happened, with the complete data accelerator cluster (all 10!) freezing up.
e) Yesterday (Wednesday) there was a failure on the SMTP server. A new smtp cluster is going active today.
In addition to the above, there will always be general capacity issues but these should be addressed as part of the normal ongoing operations. Someone once told me: "Network Management is the continuous management of a revolving set of bottlenecks." This is very true but should never affect more than a subset of the network for as short a time as possible.
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