Terrible service, no communication and extremely slow

MetroFibre is a very large company. They are installing and maintaining fibre internet networks across South Africa. That is why their horrible service and incompetence is scary. I have read a lot of negative feedback on them before experiencing it for myself recently.

I am writing this in part to warn other clients, and in part to hopefully get Metrofibre to finally respond to my issue and send technicians out to my house. Its a shame that one has to resort to posting bad reviews on Hellopeter to get serviced, but here we are.

MetroFibre have been installing a new fibre network in our neighbourhood recently, the first for us. Being used to Telkom service level standards with ADSL (official worst company in the world), I was excited to at long last have a private company cater to our internet needs. It turns out MetroFibre is no better Telkom at all. And unfortunately, like with Telkom's copper lines, they are the first and only providers of fibre in my area. The ONLY reason Metro is still in business is because we as clients don't have any other choice but to use them.

On to specifics - I had a fibre endpoint installed by Metro last year. Took a team of 4 people almost the whole day to get the line to the study, which isn't far from the wall and the line runs mainly over-ground. If I didn't show them exactly where to run the wires or push them a bit to complete the job, they would probably still be at it. This installation happened only after Metro cut our ADSL lines twice, and also broke numerous water pipes (which took months to be repaired) while installing the network. Anyway, with the endpoint installed, shortly after this, just before the end of last year, I got a call from Metro saying our area is now live and I can subscribe.

I was in no hurry to subscribe and thought I would let them sort out their problems first, as I could see there would be many. Every day, I drive past technicians digging up and fixing lines and junction boxes again that have been "repaired" only the day before. One tech I spoke to told me that our area specifically in PTA north is a "mess". I waited for 4 months until now finally taking the plunge to try and get Fibre internet.

So I make the call, technician comes out, discovers my line is faulty. Big surprise. Gives me an ONT box at least - I was calling around before trying to find out who should be supplying this box and no-one at Metro could tell me. The technician tests other lines, the one across the road from me is working. He says he's going to check if the fault is inside or outside my yard, let me know, and then someone will come out within a few days to fix it. Technician disappears, I never hear anything from him again. Never hear a word from Metrofibre again. This was almost two weeks ago.

In the meantime, I have contacted Metro as well as my ISP (WebAfrica) numerous times to enquire about what is going on, when someone will come out to fix it, where the fault is etc. Metro, if and when you can actually reach someone to talk to, refers me back to Webafrica, since they don't want to deal with clients directly, and cannot give any specifics regarding repairs. Terrible communication on their part. Webafrica keeps on "escalating" the matter with Metro each time I call, with absolutely no results whatsoever. Makes you wonder if anyone even logs these calls or reports the faults. Anyway, it has been almost 2 weeks now and not a word from anyone as to how we can proceed to fix this. To be clear, this isn't Webafrica's fault since they can only request that Metro send out someone to fix the line. Luckily I didn't cancel my ADSL yet as we would be sitting without internet, which we rely heavily on for work and play.

What I don't understand is why Metro is so sluggish to repair this and other faults. Surely, everyone benefits when I start using a service that I pay for? My father lives in the same neighbourhood, it took 6 weeks for him to get someone out to fix his broken line, which took them literally 3 mins to solve - the line wasn't plugged into the box properly. This was one of the reasons I decided to wait a bit first for things to settle down, but that didn't help a bit. Every day I hear from people in our neighbourhood losing connection for 2,3 days at a time. It seems each time they connect someone new to the network, they break someone else's line. Why don't they use competent workers to install the network and do it properly in the first place, then there won't be any need to fix everything afterwards?

Terribly disappointed. At this stage I wish we had the choice of a different network operator, but unfortunately in South Africa you have to be happy if you have fibre installed in your area at all. There was even a petition in our area (which I signed) middle last year to keep Metro from taking over the fibre installation rights from Vumatel in our area, who were the first to announce plans for a network. I'm sure if Vumatel was the installer, I would have been connected now for months already. This isn't a new thing, Metro has had bad reputation for years, and we can only speculate how they get handed all the contracts. Metro employs *********** staff, has no clear system for managing faults, and are terrible at communicating with clients. And it probably won't change since they've got us by the nuts. Only way we might see change is if more people start complaining and bringing this issue to light. Maybe then, they either start improving their service, or municipalities think twice about granting them rights to installing networks and rather use someone else.