MTN, the Worse connection.

This company's service is atrocious at the best of times. I have been stupid and naive enough to remain a customer of this *****ed organisation for the the past 21 years or so. In that time I have upgraded numerous times from an Nokia 5110 to a number of phones. The handsets, except for two usually lasted the 24 month periods, but the cer*****y that my contract would increase ridiculously has always left a bitter taste in my mouth. But their latest *****ed trick, which is so on par with South Africa's SOE's so far as *******ion, greed, theft and dishonesty goes really annoys me endlessly. In December of last year I really wanted to move away from MTN, and even considered trying Cell C, and Vodacom, but I have never been a fan of Vodacom, and Cell C is going down the drain. Months after the Competition commission has instructed MTN to lower data tariffs, mine are still higher than they have ever been.

During level 5 of lockdown, MTN (or one of their affiliate "hanger ons") contacted me and managed to convince me to fork out a further R150 or so per month to get more data and more airtime each month. So now I pay more than I ever have for my cellphone account.

The past three months I have received a cellphone account (I have two phones on my name, and my sister uses one). The contract price per month is R627.44 excl VAT for my sister's phone and a whopping R775.27 excl VAT for mine. However, with the way they have structured the account, the payments and the statements, each month I receive an statement indicating I owe them an eye watering amoung of over R3000.00!!!! This, I immediately tried querying with the call centre, but there is no way on earth I can contact an agent via their 135 number, as there isn't even an option to speak to an agent (and we are already down to level 3 light -1 a of the lockdown). This smacks of poor business ethics.

I tried sending mails regarding this and to query these balances, but all I ever received was an automated response indicating that my query will be attended to by someone, but more than 90 days later, still no luck.

Totally *********,

I finally managed to logic the issue out, and if I am correct in my assumption, the statement is for the last day of the month, but payment is only processed on the 1st day of the next month. This shows that I am in fact a month in arrears, which isn't actually the case, but if there is a sunday or a public holiday on the 1st of a month, I will probably be subjected to a lawyer's letter for being in arrears due to automated rules set on the system, in order for the agents to sit at home and earn fat salaries for providing pathetic service. I do not enjoy the MTN call centre ever, so I only phone there if I feel I really have to.

If I could, I would really prefer not to use MTN as a service provider again. The other problem with this is that upgrades happen in month 20 of 24, and the urge to have a new phone often overrides common sense and I end up upgrading instead of moving my contract to a more reasonable, less greedy and less ******* service provider.

My advice to anyone having read this essay to this point is to rather stay away from anything that is MTN. If they can stoop to paying *********s for protection of services and to evade taxes, they will have no qualms in breaking any laws that will benefit them. As I have said, there is no real joy, pride or satisfaction in having my cellphone account with MTN.