Neotel? Run for the hills!!! My brother and I both paid the price for early adopting Neotel Prime uncapped. They seem to have some good people up top but little if any competence to back the service up. We both showed "excellent" signal on their signal map. When our handsets arrived I was unable to connect to EVDO and my brother's signal was very very far from "excellent". It took me three months, many many logged calls and two handsets to finally find that they'd forgotten to activate the high speed data on my account, something I'd read on forums and had told them about since my very first call, but something they seemed insistent of being unaware of. Of course each call to the call centre had to start with the ceremonial running through the support hand book, reboot the computer, reboot the handset.
So finally I managed to get an EVDO connection and returned the one handset, then it seems they deactivated the wrong handset. Took another month to get my handset reactivated, all the while I was being promised that I wouldn't be paying for the service I wasn't receiving but the bills kept coming off my account though they were promising refunds, as they were for my brother who had zero signal but they were keeping him with Neotel by promising him no payment as an incentive to stay signed up while they got their act together.
I finally got a working EVDO signal after many months of no service cost me a good few thousand which was great for all of about a month before the signal started degrading. Funny, I checked their online signal map, I'd been demoted from "excellent" signal to the line between bad and no signal cutting my garden, it was then I decided to invest in an antenna, which I paid for myself from their supplier. After installation the RSSI was around 77 and I was almost satisfied again.
By now my brother had received his long awaited antenna from Neotel which made little if any improvement to his signal and because we had travelled to area of signal and tested his unit, Neotel now claimed that he couldn't have had no signal because there was use so they refused to refund him as promised, something he had confirmed at the time of them promising the refund would not be the case.
Well now my signal has degraded to unusable and Neotel's signal map now shows the "needs and antenna" area about 2km from where am and I am now completely void of signal with a RSSI of between 97 and 105 depending on prevailing weather conditions. My brother has managed to cancel his account, with his service being cut off the minute he cancelled his account even though their billing department carries on deducting a grand a month off his account. I have been on the phone to Neotel more times then I can count, with technical guys on a number of occasions it seems being unable to offer anything other then a software reboot which does nothing for my service.
Its now about time to cancel my account and I know I'm going to have to struggle with Neotel's apparent policy of stealing your money while wrapping you up in enough lies and red tape to never let you get to the bottom of it all. Thankfully their hideous service meant that their representative never pitched to collect my signed contract so they will be unable to furnish any proof of it though I doubt that will stop them from red taping me some more.
Neotel will be a very expensive mistake. You have no idea how much you can love your Telkom service when you become a Neotel user.
[EDIT]Oh yes, we've found emailing their call centre is also useless, the best way to get any response out of Neotel is to post on hellopeter [/EDIT]
