Unreliable LTE connectivity - still ongoing

I have been a customer of Afrihost since 2009. For most of these nine years until recently, I have considered my relationship with my internet service provider to be a good one, with better-than-most pricing, helpful staff and little fuss with respect to up-scaling and down-scaling services, which I have done many times. My frustrations and general discontentment began, however, after I opted to change my internet service from fixed line (ADSL) to wireless (LTE), ironically for its reliability and speed, whereupon my satisfaction with the service, and subsequently, the company has begun to sour.

I hold a number of accounts/services, for ADSL, 3G, and now for LTE and fibre. Their 3G is a more reliable service than their LTE, and were it not for a number of cost issues that prevent its viability in doing so, I would s**** the LTE entirely and use the 3G instead and I would write this experience off as a bad one and be done with it. However, 3G is costly in comparison, and owing to the mechanics of the LTE deal, I feel held to ransom to accept this poor/absent service for a further 4 months if not resolved, and it appears that it may not be.

Beware of deals which include "free" hardware with conditions attached.

I have taken two such deals with Afrihost at the same time two months ago - for both LTE and fibre. Both products included hardware in the deal, and if cancelled within 6 months, the customer is automatically liable for R999 per product cancelled. But what if the service turns out to be sub-standard and problematic, or as in the case of fibre, still not installed? What if your bad experience with the first service undermines your faith in the second? Had I been more cynical, this stipulation might have given me pause to consider this.

LTE (on Cell C network)

Upon receiving the router and connecting it, it was discovered after a few hours of running that it was prone to regular disconnecting. Being an IT professional, knowing that the sooner one reports an issue the sooner it can be resolved, and accumulating as much diagnostic information as possible, I immediately notified Afrihost's support desk and requested that they escalate the complaint to the network provider because the fault appeared to be software-based. The fault resolution experience was amicable at first, with a genuine sense that the problem was being attended to. The router had been disconnecting as regularly as clockwork every 60 minutes, and over the course of that week it had eventually been reduced to between one and three resets every 24 hours. This was acceptable though not ideal, but I am not unreasonable. My work requires an always-on, fast connection as I am permanently connected to a server to conduct my business, and provided that any disconnections are random, sp**** and as brief as possible, I can live with it. But the contentment didn't last. After a week or two, the disconnections became frequent and regular again and longer lasting, often requiring my manual intervention by restarting the router. I complained again, this time after two days of incessant disruptions. Then two months after I had requested that this be escalated to the network provider, the Afrihost representative suggested that it might be time to escalate it. It then became clear to me that my original complaint had not yet been escalated since I requested it two months earlier.

After two more weeks of enduring frequent disconnections, I wrote to Afrihost again, but evidently they don't respond to me anymore whatsoever, leaving me with two options: either I cancel this product or I continue to pay for it for another four months. The problem with the former is that I would then be charged R999 for the redundant hardware delivered to use the product that I am cancelling, with that of the latter being to continue paying for a product that has been unreliable and thereby reward the ignorance of my complaints.

The only stated disclaimer when signing up for the LTE service was the onus upon the customer to ensure adequate signal in their area and I have full signal strength at my location. Had these regular hourly resets been disclosed up-front - if it were standard - then this certainly would have affected my decision to purchase the product, as it would any other users of real-time server connections, eg: online gamers, traders, etc.

I do not believe that I was adequately informed of the limitations of this product, because I don't see the evidence of an effort to resolve the problem with it. My complaints have been falling on deaf ears while I continue paying for connectivity that is consistently inconsistent. I do not believe that my complaints have been escalated as I have requested, whether within the company or to the network provider, and this has resulted in poor service delivery met with increasing frustration. With any luck, what has not been appropriately escalated before will eventually get where it needs to go.