Never use MTN Data for medical services or anything important.

We recently signed a 24 month MTN Business contract for 1TB of data every month. The business in question is a Medical Centre. We have 1x sim card in a router and 1x sim card in a mobile phone receiving data through the Data Share function.

The website promises that there is 5G in the area, however in the 3 months that the sim card has been active we have never gotten 5G on our 5G enabled devices. Our signal reflects as 4G or H+ but the speeds have consistently been extremely slow since day one. Opening anything on my "5G MTN contract" takes at least 5x the time than on my Telkom sim card. The speeds have been so low that our VOIP provider has advised us that it will not be possible to constantly run any VOIP system at the Centre or on our mobile phones.

Since the past Friday, the network speeds have been unusably slow. Our VOIP phones cannot make or receive calls meaning that patients, labs and other relevant parties cannot contact us. Our doctors could not connect to Zoom yesterday and missed an important meeting where attendance was required by the Department of Health. We cannot stream videos. We cannot open emails. We cannot view patients results. I had to borrow a Vodacom phone from a neighbour just to write this post as my MTN service cannot manage to get past the HelloPeter login page.

To make matters worse, I tried to contact MTN business and after failing for hours I contacted the normal customer care centre. They advised me that the Business Customer Care line has been shut down and that the only way to address my problem is to visit a physical store. I will not bother doing this as I know that they will not be able to assist me and I have wasted enough time on this issue. It is embarrassing that you do not have a business call centre but I am not surprised given the service received to date.

We expect 5G signal and 5G speed as that was advertised on the website and confirmed in store when signing the contract. Should this issue not be sorted out with the utmost urgency, we will be taking legal action to cancel this contract on the basis of a breach and will recover damages for all lost appointments. Furthermore, should the complaint not be sufficiently addressed we will be approaching ICASA and the Communications Ombudsman regarding the unusable Internet and the Advertising Regulatory Board for prima facie false advertising.

Please contact me on ***. The phones will probably be offline due to the poor Internet speeds but I expect that you should try until you get through. Thank You.