Vodacom review: Home Internet 4G LTE Contract

Over the past few months I have made countless service requests to Vodacom due to poor or no network coverage. Now, I'm sympathetic and cognizant of loadshedding & its toll on network resources but this is over and above that.

On numerous occasions I have made all effort to demonstrate to service agents, on call, that my area would have full network coverage as confirmed by 4G mobile data coverage on my phone but my wifi router would reject network coverage displayed as 'no sim' on the Alcatel router management app

Last December (2023) I had to take the Alcatel router to a vodacom shop (Galleria Mall, Amanzimtoti in Durban South) as per service agent suggestion for general checkup and to also remove the sim I had re-inserted the wrong way after a lengthy troubleshoot with a service agent the day before. At the shop they helped remove the sim and connected the router and the verdict was everything was fine with the router but for a more detailed checkup I had to personally take the router to a vodacom repair centre which could mean a length of time without any means for network connection and a possible personal cost for me arising from the work done by the repair centre.

I took exception to the repair centre suggestion and inability of the vodacom shop to assist with matter by receiving the router themselves and seeing to its detailed check-up and maybe also offering a temporal router whilst work was done at the repair centre, and never followed through with their suggestion.

After visiting the shop the router has been working fairly as expected, loadshedding considered, but for the past few days I experienced the same issues that led to me visiting the vodacom shop in December and I explained everything to a service agent including the vodacom shop incident and she suggested to give me a call whilst at the shop and we agreed on the date of 06 March 2024.

I am, however, very much at odds with how vodacom has handled my case thus far. I would appreciate it if they use the same bounding contract between myself and them to honor their obligations to me by ensuring I have a working device and a good network connection to the best of the prevailing circumstances (loadshedding)

I feel undervalued and abused because I continually pay my monthly contractual fees without fail and cognizant of the fact that if I fail to do this I will be served with a notice and be liable for additional fees but Vodacom is not honoring its end of the contract and they expect me to move heaven and earth to check-up their store provided and compulsory-to-use router when they should be the one doing this or otherwise allow us customers to use our own routers.

When I picked up this contact I had a very good tp-link router but had to sell it because I couldn't use it with the vodacom contract sim

Please assist, my name is Sibusiso Dlamini and associated contract sim is of number [protected]

Contact phone: [protected]

Email: [protected]@protonmail.com