Terrible Support and Experience with Cool Ideas

[DeanMF21]

Good evening all

I am hoping someone here will be able to help me as I am fed up with the pathetic service I am getting from the so-called support agents at Cool Ideas.

#COOL-20230515-1226614

On Monday morning, Vumatel in our neighborhood went down at about 08:30. The issue was resolved at about 08:40. So it was a quick outage for everyone in the neighborhood besides the cool ideas customers. We are still offline.

All other ISP's in the neighborhood is up and running since the problem was fixed on Monday morning, and yet, cool ideas is still offline.

The support staff still insist that it is a Vumatel issue, however, my neighbour was visited by a Vumatel technician today on request of cool ideas (yet they did not ask them to visit us) and the Vumatel technician stated that there is no issue on their end as all other ISPs in the neighborhood is online besides cool ideas, and therefore it must be a cool ideas issue.

I don't know how many times I've been asked to re-enter my credentials or restart my router and ONT box and they even made me reset my router to factory default settings, yet nothing works. Still no internet.

On the ONT, all lights are green and according to the vumatel technician, they can see the internet is working on the ONT, but the ISP (cool ideas) is not seeing the internet.

I am sick of being treated like I was born yesterday by the cool ideas staff who apparently escalated the issue many times and after each time I get told to wait another 72 hours for a response. I don't know how many times I have to explain I know how to tick the box for PPPoE and I know how to type my password is CAPS. I even sent them a screenshot of my settings and they confirmed it's correct - and then called me today just to re-enter everything again just in case that might magically fix the issue.

Today, while on the phone with one of the support staff, we even caught them lying about the situation and when we told them we are recording the call, they suddenly stated that they made a mistake and then suddenly gave correct information regarding the situation.

Is this the level of service cool ideas have gone down too? Is this now their normal level of service? Should we rather just cancel and move to MWEB who is online while cool ideas is offline on the same fibre network?

Can someone please advise what we can do in this situation? Or does someone have an MWEB technicians' number so I can give it to cool ideas? Their technicians are clearly much more competent than the cool ideas "technicians" and maybe they can help cool ideas fix their issues.

 

[PBCool]

Hi There, sorry to hear of your frustrations. If it is an area related outage it is most definitely the fibre provider. We get handover from the fibre providers in the same place.

And by the sounds of things there was a config change during the maintenance that would have affected our customers in the area.

This would be more a network logical issue which a Vumatel technician on the ground would have no idea or ability to resolve. He/She would check their parameters (IE is the line up) and state everything with Vumatel is fine.

Let me investigate and escalate for you.

 

[CrypticZA]

@PBCool Seems one for you to maybe look into, instead of cool escalator...

EDIT**

That timing

 

[DeanMF21]

Hi There, sorry to hear of your frustrations. If it is an area related outage it is most definitely the fibre provider. We get handover from the fibre providers in the same place.

And by the sounds of things there was a config change during the maintenance that would have affected our customers in the area.

This would be more a network logical issue which a Vumatel technician on the ground would have no idea or ability to resolve. He/She would check their parameters (IE is the line up) and state everything with Vumatel is fine.

Let me investigate and escalate for you.

Thank you for the quick response. I do appreciate it and glad to hear that someone more competent will investigate the matter.

What I don't understand is, that if this is the issue, why has no one at Cool Ideas support been able to resolve this after 4 days? If Vumatel did a config change, surely cool ideas would have known about it as, like I said, all other ISPs in the area are back online besides the cool ideas customers. This has really been a frustrating experience, especially the way in which the support staff is handling this (making us re-enter our details and restart a hundred times)

 

[DeanMF21]

@PBCool Seems one for you to maybe look into, instead of cool escalator...

EDIT**

That timing

Thank you for your time in linking someone who can assist.

 

[swakop_toe]

FWIW, I have 2 staff members with the option to WFH, both only have Vumatel as an option as fiber providers, that I am willing to pay for as their employer.
They are both still working from the office as Vumatel is screwing them over so badly they have no choice but too. No other broadband wireless or sky-what-what is an option.

Honestly, I do not care what the fiber providers challenges are, they continue to take the money and pass the buck to the ISPs like CoolIdeas, etc.

Sure, area specific/dependant, but the absolute apathy and disdain we as consumers are bombarded with by the ilk like Zumatel is sickening.

Vote with your wallets.

 

[PBCool]

Thank you for the quick response. I do appreciate it and glad to hear that someone more competent will investigate the matter.

What I don't understand is, that if this is the issue, why has no one at Cool Ideas support been able to resolve this after 4 days? If Vumatel did a config change, surely cool ideas would have known about it as, like I said, all other ISPs in the area are back online besides the cool ideas customers. This has really been a frustrating experience, especially the way in which the support staff is handling this (making us re-enter our details and restart a hundred times)

If there is maintenance, it typically has no impact on the configuration of hand-off to us, etc. So, it is not something that is a planned change involved with us.

Typically, what happens is we escalate to Vumatel. They make a change. We have to go back to customers to test. Confirm settings haven't been changed (as often customers reset routers, etc)

Rinse and repeat, if you have multiple cases and ticket examples, it should help us resolve it quicker.

 

[PBCool]

FWIW, I have 2 staff members with the option to WFH, both only have Vumatel as an option as fiber providers, that I am willing to pay for as their employer.
They are both still working from the office as Vumatel is screwing them over so badly they have no choice but too. No other broadband wireless or sky-what-what is an option.

Honestly, I do not care what the fiber providers challenges are, they continue to take the money and pass the buck to the ISPs like CoolIdeas, etc.

Sure, area specific/dependant, but the absolute apathy and disdain we as consumers are bombarded with by the ilk like Zumatel is sickening.

Vote with your wallets.

Something I can assist with?

 

[swakop_toe]

Something I can assist with?

Thanks, we tried.
For months now.
Vumatel reprovision and reprovision and reprovision the lines and the very next day it's back to a useless, unusable trickle.
My guys are close to tears, but alas.
The condition was, get a stable, usable minimum 30/30 fiber link or continue to commute.
If you really believe you can make a difference, I can forward you the tickets.

 

[PBCool]

Thanks, we tried.
For months now.
Vumatel reprovision and reprovision and reprovision the lines and the very next day it's back to a useless, unusable trickle.
My guys are close to tears, but alas.
The condition was, get a stable, usable minimum 30/30 fiber link or continue to commute.
If you really believe you can make a difference, I can forward you the tickets.

Of course I do, it's the whole point of being on this platform. Please send.

 

[DeanMF21]

FWIW, I have 2 staff members with the option to WFH, both only have Vumatel as an option as fiber providers, that I am willing to pay for as their employer.
They are both still working from the office as Vumatel is screwing them over so badly they have no choice but too. No other broadband wireless or sky-what-what is an option.

Honestly, I do not care what the fiber providers challenges are, they continue to take the money and pass the buck to the ISPs like CoolIdeas, etc.

Sure, area specific/dependant, but the absolute apathy and disdain we as consumers are bombarded with by the ilk like Zumatel is sickening.

Vote with your wallets.

I get what you are saying, as yes, Vumatel is very often an issue, however, in this instance, the only ISP still down is Cool Ideas, where all other ISPs came back online after the 10 minute outage.

So, from a consumer's perspective, you can understand how that looks to me; Vumatel is online, MWEB is online, Vodacom Fibre (also using vumatel in our area) is online, but cool ideas is offline. Therefore, as you rightly state, we need to vote with our wallets and move to MWEB, as, in this case, they have no issues where cool ideas don't even know why they're offline and keeps sending us from pillar to post.

 

[DeanMF21]

If there is maintenance, it typically has no impact on the configuration of hand-off to us, etc. So, it is not something that is a planned change involved with us.

Typically, what happens is we escalate to Vumatel. They make a change. We have to go back to customers to test. Confirm settings haven't been changed (as often customers reset routers, etc)

Rinse and repeat, if you have multiple cases and ticket examples, it should help us resolve it quicker.

I get it, but like I said, we already confirmed the settings are fine, yet we have to redo it over and over. It makes no sense.

This is the ticket number of the user who was visited by the Vumatel technician yesterday:
#COOL-20230515-1229483

Another ticket I logged on the same issue which has not been attended too:
#COOL-20230517-1237712

You can understand that, even though you and your support staff keep saying that this is a Vumatel issue, that it does not look like it from our point of view. Maybe consider speaking to MWEB or Vodacom Fibre to find out why they're online but you're not?

We truly are fed up with this situation, and I can almost guarantee you that you will lose multiple customers if this is not fixed today as the group discussions already moved onto comparing service and prices for everyone to move their ISPs.

 

[B-1]

I get what you are saying, as yes, Vumatel is very often an issue, however, in this instance, the only ISP still down is Cool Ideas, where all other ISPs came back online after the 10 minute outage.

So, from a consumer's perspective, you can understand how that looks to me; Vumatel is online, MWEB is online, Vodacom Fibre (also using vumatel in our area) is online, but cool ideas is offline. Therefore, as you rightly state, we need to vote with our wallets and move to MWEB, as, in this case, they have no issues where cool ideas don't even know why they're offline and keeps sending us from pillar to post.

Its the pass the buck mentality that's the problem. "Oh its the line providers fault therefore its not the ISP"
The customer is with the ISP and they should be the one following up until the issue is resolved not leave the customer having to constantly chase them and log tickets and escalate matters. Its a bad system and the government should put laws in place like there was for phones that drops this "best effort" nonsense.

 

[PBCool]

I get it, but like I said, we already confirmed the settings are fine, yet we have to redo it over and over. It makes no sense.

This is the ticket number of the user who was visited by the Vumatel technician yesterday:
#COOL-20230515-1229483

Another ticket I logged on the same issue which has not been attended too:
#COOL-20230517-1237712

You can understand that, even though you and your support staff keep saying that this is a Vumatel issue, that it does not look like it from our point of view. Maybe consider speaking to MWEB or Vodacom Fibre to find out why they're online but you're not?

We truly are fed up with this situation, and I can almost guarantee you that you will lose multiple customers if this is not fixed today as the group discussions already moved onto comparing service and prices for everyone to move their ISPs.

Thanks, and yes, I completely understand. Engaging with another ISP around this is frivolous as it's Vumatel relative. I should have some feedback this am.

 

[DeanMF21]

Its the pass the buck mentality that's the problem. "Oh its the line providers fault therefore its not the ISP"
The customer is with the ISP and they should be the one following up until the issue is resolved not leave the customer having to constantly chase them and log tickets and escalate matters. Its a bad system and the government should put laws in place like there was for phones that drops this "best effort" nonsense.

"Oh its the line providers fault therefore its not the ISP"

This is exactly what we aree dealing with atm. The Cool Ideas support staff just keeps blaming Vuma and stating there is nothing they can do about it. We were even told that they, Cool Ideas, have no way of communicating with Vumatel besides logging a ticket the same way we have to log a ticket with Cool Ideas when our internet is off. I find this very hard to believe.

At the end of the day, we pay Cool Ideas, not Vumatel, and constantly just hearing, "it is not our fault" is a terrible attitude from the side of Cool Ideas support staff.

 

[DeanMF21]

Thanks, and yes, I completely understand. Engaging with another ISP around this is frivolous as it's Vumatel relative. I should have some feedback this am.

Thank you. I hope you are able to resolve this as your support team has completely failed.

 

[swakop_toe]

Of course I do, it's the whole point of being on this platform. Please send.

Here you go.
This is the one line in question, for now.

 

[PBCool]

Thank you. I hope you are able to resolve this as your support team has completely failed.

"Hi Paul Its a provisioning related issue which Vumatel is investigating with AEX, I have followed up with them, and I will provide feedback and update the customer accordingly."

Again, unfortunately, there is a set process we have to follow in escalating with Vumatel.

AEx is an entity that sits between ISPs and Vumatel, so another party in the mix as well.

 

[PBCool]

Here you go.
This is the one line in question, for now.

Thanks. These are all wireless related issues. For a stable connection, I would advise either run a cable or get an additional access point.

If its for work purposes, then cable is first prize.

 

[DeanMF21]

"Hi Paul Its a provisioning related issue which Vumatel is investigating with AEX, I have followed up with them, and I will provide feedback and update the customer accordingly."

Again, unfortunately, there is a set process we have to follow in escalating with Vumatel.

AEx is an entity that sits between ISPs and Vumatel, so another party in the mix as well.

This does not appear to be promising. So, for the foreseeable future, we should anticipate to be offline?