One of a kind

tl;dr - Bad service, unhelpful support staff, avoids fixing issues to spam promotions

So I moved over from Afrihost to Axxess some time round March 2017, and my sole reasoning for this was I had heard a lot of good things from other people online, word of mouth, and their prices were just marginally more affordable. Now I'm going to try give as much detail within this review for my own personal experience and I understand that everyone's opinions may vary, but just bare with me if you can.

So in March I phoned up Axxess to sort out the entire deal as I know of people who've had terrible experiences with registering for new services online, and decided that it would be best to talk with someone in person. Very helpful and friendly guy I spoke to, made me feel welcome from the get-go. So I opted to transfer my line from Afrihost to Axxess and get the (40GB+40GB) Capped package as this was more data than I had before and was more affordable as well. Makes complete sense so far.

Anyways, I know that these things take time with the transfers and so on with the line migrations and porting it into the holding pool until the transfer is complete, so I didn't expect it to be done instantly. I put a mental note up expecting 2-3 weeks to overcompensate for myself, when I was told shortly after that it would take effect from the 1st of the following month(April 2017). Take note that this was a week away so I was impressed.

Fast-forward 2 months(about end June), I had fairly unstable internet during this time, but gathered that it was just issues with the network or something along those lines. So I decide to phone them to see if maybe they could reset my port or at least provide me with some info as to why my speed and connectivity have been so bad these past months.

Turns out that my line was still with Afrihost or in the pool or whatever, and my data was the only thing that had been swapped over so far. So they tell me that the line number I provided them was incorrect and that they couldn't do anything without the proper number. So now I'm feeling really dumb and all and tell them to email me the provided number so I could verify it. Now while I'm waiting for this I start thinking, why didn't they notify me at all as soon as they discovered this issue, but I brushed it aside and didn't worry too much about it. Here comes the good part. I open up the email with the provided number and guess what, it's ********** % correct? I checked it over and over just to make sure my eyes were still working perfectly, I even phoned my own damn number just to make sure that I wasn't going insane. So all I did to test this was I took the "wrong" number, copy pasta, and resent it to them and boom. It worked withing 2 days following that, it's a Christmas miracle!

Minor fault and slight staff incompetence, but again I pushed this issue aside because I now finally had the service that I opted for and was prepared for pure internet glory! For a week... After that it was just issue after issue after issue. I opened so many tickets you could fill up a stadium, yet not a single person could tell me what the issue was. So I did some troubleshooting of my own and figured that it may be 2 things, either a problem with my router or with the line itself. So to narrow down the list I called them up and asked to check my line status for any issues or irregularities, and luckily there were none. So next step, I loan a friends router with no luck. Same issue, but I wasn't done yet. I got a hold of, wait for it... 5 extra routers and tested each and every one of them, yet the problem persisted.

Now my brain can't figure out what the problem is, so I open a ticket and phone them up at the same time. I come to the conclusion that maybe I'm being throttled? Absurd I know, with it being a capped line that doesn't get shaped at all, but you know I wanted to eliminate all possibilities. They told me no they don't shape capped lines, which I knew from the start, but I had to be sure.

Now its late in the year already (August 2017) and I'm still dealing with this pain. But a new problem arises where their oh so lovely "Family Axxess" protection **** or whatever it is. started blocking almost all of my websites, from 9gag, Steam, Takealot and surprisingly even the damn Google homepage? I manually disabled this feature many times and even phoned in to have them disable it, but it keeps appearing at random times and I have no way of controlling when it appears or not.

Now we're at today (15 November 2017) and not one single issue has been resolved from day 1. Now you might just say "well if you're so unhappy with it, why not just use a different ISP?". Well this is the plan, but as it stands I um financially unable to do this at the moment. Strange thing is that it can't even be my distance from the exchange causing this either, as where I live is literally within a 2 minute walk from a Telkom service station, a Telkom signal tower and the main Axxess building in Cape Road.

Personally I've had enough, and this long ass rant just proves a tiny bit of what I truly feel, but that's a whole different story. On a side note, I also utterly despise it when the call center people talk down to you as if you have no idea what technology is. At least inquire the level of knowledge that the client has before you proceed or have the common sense to realize that if someone is talking to you in really detailed terms (FYI - I am a software developer, game designer, technology enthusiast and have installed too many network setups to remember) that maybe telling them to find the big button on the back of the router, pressing it till all the blinking lights go off and turning it on again after 10 minutes, is just downright degrading and disrespectful.

I'll end it here before I write my own novel, but long story short. Don't believe what shining reviews online tell you, as a majority of these are made by in-house marketing staff to overshadow the actual truthful reviews. Look for buzz words and similar featuring themes in the reviews and you'll figure it out over time. Thank you for your time, and if you made it this far I would just like to say that I appreciate you taking time out of your day to read my review, and that I hope you never experience anything near to what I've had this past while.

Good luck to you all, and may the Gods of internet watch over you and bring good speed to all!