DO NOT EVER SIGN UP WITH THESE ****S

Whatever you do, don't sign up with Cell C for anything if you consider your time to be valuable. If I could give no stars I would! It was all supposed to be easy they said, yeah right, here's what happened instead.

On the 6th of January 2020, I phoned Cell C Fibre to cancel my internet services in preparation for my move from Johannesburg to Cape Town at the end of the month, once on the line with the call centre, I was quite delighted to find out that cancelling the service was totally unnecessary and that if I did that, that I'd probably have to pay a hefty connection fee on the other side. Instead, I had been advised that it would be as easy as sending them the details of my new address in form of an email and requesting the migration of my services while stipulating that the old line should be cancelled so that they can release the object number of my old ONT box back into the pool. Alright, since I did not know exactly where I was going to live up until a week before we actually moved; I had to put this on hold for a while.

The move happened on the first weekend of February and on Monday the 3rd of February 2020, I sent them the mail containing the new address in hopes that this migration process would be completed by the time we unpacked our boxes. I received a mail from them the same day which stated that there are active services on the new address' line and that I should confirm with the previous owner if they cancelled their services. So I phoned the previous owner asking if he did and he told me that it was cancelled in October 2019 already and that he hasn't been billed for those services since. As an extra courtesy though, he phoned his previous ISP to find out if the line's object number had been released, which they confirmed that it was. So I phoned CFibre and they just told me that I have to send them proof of this confirmation from MWeb (which nobody had) so that they can do something about it, and this is where the first part of this nightmare started... long story short, I phoned CFibre support, VUMA support and MWeb (Previous ISP) on a daily basis since the 7th acting as the middleman/messenger between all of them since it was a finger pointing game when all I wanted was to get the issue resolved.

One thing that became quite clear in my dealings with all of these service providers was that this is was clearly an issue is between VUMA and CellC and that there were no active services on the line as told by Cell C on the 3rd in the first place. What's worse is that it was left to me (the customer) to find out what the hold-up was during my own working hours and that there was absolutely no effort on Cell C's side to resolve the issue... and let me tell you now, VUMA protocol states that if there is a problem, that your ISP MUST log the issue on your behalf so I was left dead in the water. Not once did I actually get a call from Cell C regarding the matter despite numerous promises from Gugu among others in Admin Support. I literally had to phone them every day to get an update which needed to be explained to them every single time I phoned and guess what, they just shrugged off as if that now just my bad luck. 120min of airtime phoned out between these providers and nobody could give a damn.

Finally, I gave up and contacted Level-7 which got me up and running within a matter of hours despite issues on VUMA's side, even better I dealt with the same person and they kept me updated during the whole process. Hell, I am now paying less than I did with Cell C for a bigger line! (From 50/50Mbps to 100/100Mbps for R60 less)

Anyway, it gets better though, since signing up with Level-7 I am now trying to cancel all services with Cell C altogether which is the next part of the nightmare. First, they send me an email stating that they cannot cancel my services due to my account being in arrears - which, by the way, is for this month! A bill for a month which I haven't been receiving any services whatsoever, but of course, their excuse for this would be that it's due to the 30-day cancellation clause in their contract and honestly, it would have been a non-issue if I just cancelled on the 6th of January as planned before they came with their easy migration BS in the first place.

Anyway, I gave in and decided to take this one on the chin and made the full payment on Thursday the 13th from Standard Bank to Nedbank and sent them proof of payment. On Friday the 14th they sent me a second mail, again stating that my account is in arrears and that they cannot cancel my services. I ignored their mail since the money had been paid the previous day and I thought to myself that perhaps it just hasn't been cleared on their side as of yet and that I will give it some time to clear to which they will surely comply in my request for cancellation.

Well... yesterday afternoon I sent them another mail, yet again asking them for confirmation of cancellation and demanded that it should be backdated to the 3rd of this month since they have not provided me with any services since requesting migration of my services on the 3rd (which I paid for BTW). I gave them until the end of business yesterday the (17th of Feb 2020) to respond and warned that if my request was ignored like all of the support issues I had before cancellation, that I will make this story available to the public on hellopeter and other social media platforms (Facebook and Twitter is next) to warn off any other people of this, so as a man of my word, here it is.

If you have made it this far in my rant, do yourself a favour and DO NOT EVER SIGN UP WITH THESE ****S. Just another corporate bully.