@joshuatree - Hi there, hope you're doing well.
That's a good question with a long answer I have not always been a happy camper at all with regards to RAIN and have not minced my words about this here on MBB.
I have been with them for about 14 months or so and can say that I do see improvements. Having a rep here on MBB has been key to having problems resolved for me and whoever that rep is, he/she is doing a great job considering that they are also probably bearing the brunt of customer's anger being vented towards RAIN for some reason - yet he/she still shows up and tries their best to help all of us. At some stage I did feel that even though the rep was doing their part, he/she was not always getting the internal support - I can't say for certain whether this is still the case though.
I'm on the "19 hours unlimited off-peak for any device at R250pm package" and have relocated twice during my time with RAIN in the Western-Cape. In the first town I lived in, I'm almost certain I was the only RAIN client and lived near the tower (like 400 m) and got excellent speeds using nothing but a simple Huawei USB dongle and never had any other issues with them apart from the tower not coming back online by itself after load shedding which was fixed at some stage.
In my new town, RAIN was very helpful with setting me up with the correct equipment to get a very specific reception problem resolved and I have been here for 11 months now and in that time I have experienced only two major breakdowns in reception when the main tower I connect to went offline twice in about 4 weeks - in both cases the issues was sorted out within about 18 hours and that was about two months ago and never recurred again. The speed however is about 40% of what I got in my previous town, but apparently there are many users here, in fact they have 4 towers up already in different areas. I'm getting about 4Mbps during the day only which really sucks ☹
4Mbps is not LTE speed so it would be great if they could bump this up a little.
Yesterday was the first time I had an issue again when I discovered there was something wrong with the DNS servers and reported it immediately and got confirmation back that they basically discovered it at the same time and that the issue was related to their DNS servers in Cape Town. To resolve the issue temporarily they have rerouted DNS queries to their DNS servers in JHB while fixing the problem - I have however set my own DNS servers manually on my router and will probably just leave it like that for a while.
In summary, my huge fight with them was at the beginning of COVID-19 when they abruptly just took away al means for customers to contact them - who does such a thing? I had to make a huge noise here on MBB to eventually get noticed. Customers do NOT want to feel abandoned!
Since then, I have noticed improvements on their website and the rep that monitors MBB for issues. I do believe that leaning on a public bulletin board like MBB to deliver customer service is not the best solution and they would be better off bringing the live chat service they had at the beginning, back online.
I have also noticed that they have expanded their coverage to include even more towns which is always good if they can deliver the expected support that needs to go with that.
Considering the price I'm paying I have to be realistic and appreciate the value of the data I am able to consume when keeping in mind what other mobile broadband carriers are charging per Gig - sometimes over a R100!!!
All-in-all it seems like they have access to, not only great technology, but to great customers who all have the potential to become amazing brand ambassadors - how this all pans out will however all depend on how RAIN constructs their customer support division and whether they can do this before too many people have had enough and the new fibre options become just to irresistible.
At the moment, I prefer the advantages of mobile broadband and will stick with RAIN for as long as possible, but I think something RAIN and any other service provider should never do, is to take customer loyalty for granted!
The End.
