We acquired a Huawei P20 Lite from Cell C in December. My daughter was really happy with the phone. One sim slot held her Vodacom contract sim and the other her Cell C data sim. Regretfully she had it in her jeans back pocket and it fell in the toilet! She bravely fished it out, but it died over the course of the day - the same day she moved into her university residence in a different city from her home! I bit the bullet and went off to Vodacom to take out another contract for her, again choosing the Huawei P20 Lite. I did the sim swap for her contract at Vodacom and then went off to Cell C to do the data sim swap. What a relief when that was done and the phone delivered to my daughter!
That relief was short-lived as my daughter reported the following day that the phone didn’t recognize the second (Cell C) sim. I was horrified when I called Cell C today (thinking that something had gone awry with the sim swap) to be told that Vodacom have the second sim “port” blocked/disabled! Feeling sure this could not be the case, I then called Vodacom, who confirmed it. Had I known that the Vodacom version of the dual sim phone I had received from Cell C was actually single sim, I would never have signed a contract with Vodacom. I would have gone to Cell C! The branch manager where I entered the contract told me that it was illegal in South Africa to sell dual sim devices - that Icasa prohibited it. Clearly that can’t be true.
The bottom line is that I feel that I had a reasonable expectation that what I was receiving was a dual sim phone. Having just had exactly the same phone (which did accommodate 2 SIM cards) it would never have occurred to me to question whether the device was single or dual sim.
I feel cheated. Can anyone suggest how I can fight this?
That relief was short-lived as my daughter reported the following day that the phone didn’t recognize the second (Cell C) sim. I was horrified when I called Cell C today (thinking that something had gone awry with the sim swap) to be told that Vodacom have the second sim “port” blocked/disabled! Feeling sure this could not be the case, I then called Vodacom, who confirmed it. Had I known that the Vodacom version of the dual sim phone I had received from Cell C was actually single sim, I would never have signed a contract with Vodacom. I would have gone to Cell C! The branch manager where I entered the contract told me that it was illegal in South Africa to sell dual sim devices - that Icasa prohibited it. Clearly that can’t be true.
The bottom line is that I feel that I had a reasonable expectation that what I was receiving was a dual sim phone. Having just had exactly the same phone (which did accommodate 2 SIM cards) it would never have occurred to me to question whether the device was single or dual sim.
I feel cheated. Can anyone suggest how I can fight this?
