From News24 regarding MTN

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Farewell MTN
2009-07-30 09:54

I am a fairly loyal customer. In general, when my bank, my security company, my car service centre and my cellphone service provider do something to annoy me, I let them know, accept their apology, and stick with them. But after two weeks of relentless rubbish service from MTN, I am sadly bidding them farewell.

It's been a good ten years, but in recent months I've often found myself without signal. My husband and mother are also on MTN, so I have been able to compare my woes with those of my closest family. Always, when I'm having trouble, they are too.

I have also checked in with my friends on the same network. They always tell the same story, but I've heard of problems with other networks, so I’ve stuck with the devil I know. Until now.

For the last two weeks, there have been only two days of uninterrupted service on MTN. And on the bad days, I'm not just talking about the occasional dropped call or "network busy". I have gone for entire 24-hour periods without being able to make a phone call. The signal meter is empty.

I've tried sneaking SMSes through - something that worked in the past - but to no avail. Endless undeliverable messages appear on my screen. Occasionally a message from a friend sneaks through in a moment of contact. These messages were increasingly more concerned. "Are you OK?", "What’s happening?"

I missed the worst of these altogether on yet another day of no signal at all. My mother, who, since I have had a baby always assumes the worst in times of no contact, sent me frantic SMSes asking me to get in touch. Her signal was strong that day, so she thought that mine would be as well.

Eventually, after no response for eight hours, she came to my house and was very surprised to find me and my husband dancing around our room with the baby, having a marvellous time and very much alive.

Aside from the stress of not being able to get hold of our loved ones, being without a cellphone also has certain practical drawbacks. My mother has a business bank account that sends an RVN to her cellphone when she wants to add a new beneficiary. Of course, this doesn't work when the networks are down.

A problem that my husband and I have encountered is in our night-time routine. We take it in turns to put the baby to bed, but when we need something from the other person, we'll give a missed call. Putting the baby to sleep turned into a very lonely exercise as I sat there, desperate for a glass of water while rocking frantically, trying very hard to send a telepathic message to my husband. My telepathy is about as effective as the MTN signal.

Before jumping to any conclusions, I sent around an e-mail on a mailing list that I belong to. Everyone on MTN in Gauteng was experiencing the same problems I was. Someone even told me about a manager who had purchased Cell-C starter packs for his entire workforce so that they could get on with their business. And the worst part of all of it is that if you visit the MTN site, there is all manner of gong banging about new business, but no word of apology to subscribers who have been inconvenienced for two weeks. Perhaps they sent me an SMS.

The past two days, our service has been uninterrupted. But it's now not good enough. The problem happened as I was on the brink of renewing my subscription. Considering that I can now switch networks and keep my number, I see no reason to stick with the Devil I know. The only remaining question is which other Devil I'm going to tango with.


Georgina Guedes is a freelance journalist. She thinks that the ICASA fine of R500 000 for bad network service isn't a big enough penalty.
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from news 24
 
That chic has it tough hey. Shame. Good on her for cancelling.

Whats the deal with terminating contracts early? Wasnt there some ruling, you don't have to pay the pull monthly subscription due on the remainder of your contract?
 
They have got issues. I have not had problems with uptime but I got this sms the other day....

Valued customer, please note your billing data for July will be delayed. The billing data will be available as soon as possible. Thank you MTNSP.
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LancelotSA said:
They have got issues. I have not had problems with uptime but I got this sms the other day....
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Same sms i got.

Yeah no issues with the network being down. But like most others i get the network busy message sometimes, and dropped calls. But nothing more then i used to get on vodacom.

Some people have more issues then others, and in those cases, i say change network. No better way then to show companies how crap their service is like cancelling your contract.
 
MTN has been useless for ages, its only the amount of subscribers that have been subjected to it that has increased.
 
They're not useless when they're scamming their subscribers with competitions.
Vote with your wallet!
 
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