Expect to be in the dark during outages.

My fibre line with Vuma went down on the morning of 9 September 2020. I immediately reported it, and a received a reference number. I called to follow up 48 hours later - a previously indicated turnaround time provided to me. The reason given was that the "CPE was off". There was no load shedding, and even if there was, I have a UPS providing the CPE permanent power. The agent promised me that they would dispute the closure and promised to call me back. That didn't happen. I called multiple times, and was given the same promise each time.

Not once did I receive any call or email providing me any information as to what was happening. I run multiple remote businesses from home, and these have been crippled for the last week. Cell C 3g is not an option as it is too expensive for my data intensive work.

I continued this until Monday evening when I requested an escalation to a supervisor, and was eventually put through to Mohamed. He promised to escalate this with Vuma and get the ticket reopened. And he promised to contact me back to provide some indication as to the level of failure that Vuma was experiencing.

On Tuesday morning, I received a phone call from someone (didn't get a name) telling me that technicians were still working on the problem.

I also escalated through Twitter and received a call on Tuesday late morning from Simphiwe. He told me for the first time that there was an area outage, and because my line was fine, Vuma would keep the ticket closed. I have no service, but the ticket is closed. This is not acceptable to me.

All I want to know is the level of damage that Vuma is experiencing so that I can make alternative arrangements getting online so I can make a living. Is it a few days? A few hours? A few weeks? I understand that third party contractors cut through fibre lines. I understand that things go wrong.

After a discussion with Simphiwe, I was told that the downtime was no fault of Cell C, and that I should just continue paying for a service that I was not getting. He logged a new ticket for me, ISP212080, which was immediately closed by Vuma as being a duplicate. Why is this my issue? It was not Vuma who sold me fibre, it was Cell C. But it's up to me to chase.

I am honestly tired of having to chase Cell C and CFibre constantly during downtime. In the last 2 years and a few dozen incidents of downtime, not once have I been impressed with the levels of support that CFibre has given me. After 2 years of asking and begging for some way to be informed during downtime, we still have to call CFibre support if we want any kind of update.

I even logged multiple requests through to CFibre's email support, and haven't gotten a single response. 2 days later I received my first response:

"Please be advised i called Vumatel and they would like to apologies for the inconvenience the Technicians are still busy with the query the fixing cables,as soon as it resolved they will advise."

I'm cancelling my account and will take my money elsewhere. The support is atrocious.