From bad to worse

I recently subscribed to the MWeb Rain LTE service. I previously had a Telkom LTE contract which I decided not to renew after it expired. This was because I found that the access speed had been getting steadily worse as time progressed, and whenever I contacted their help desk the only course of action was to do a hard-reset of my modem, resulting in me having to set it up all over.

The sales person assured me that their service did not suffer from the same maladies and that at worst, and depending on the network load, the access speed should not drop below 5 or 6 MBits/s. How big was my surprise when I discovered that this service is even worse than that of Telkom's.

When I first installed the router, I was very happy with the upload and download speeds, which were in the region of 15 Mbps. Then, from around the first week in March, I started noticing that the speed decreased significantly from about 20:00, onwards. When I say significantly, I means to typical speeds of 0.2 to 0.6 Mbps. With the Telkom service the lowest I got was around 3 Mbps... practically flying compared to this.

Of course, phoning the Technical Helpdesk is not an option, seeing that they operate until 20:00, So yesterday I had the great fortune to notice this happening at 18:00, so well in time to get hold of somebody. However, having gone through the whole infuriating telephone navigation process, I got the message that due to technical difficulties the call could not be completed. This happened twice more until eventually I could select the option for technical assistance. Then I sat in the queue, being caller no 2, for more than 7 minutes. When I eventually got through I was extremely frustrated. The technical person eventually had me do a hard reset of the router which brought back memories of the Telkom route of problem resolution. That resulted in the router being set back to the original settings; now I had to try and read the wi-fi key from 1mm high characters on the bottom of the router. I then gave up in disgust and told him that I would sort it out later as I was definitely not thinking clearly at that point. At that point, I already burned through 18 minutes of my prepaid voice time.

This afternoon, when I got home, I tested the speed (at 14:45) and got 7.6 up and 10.1 down. Not really brilliant, but acceptable. Lo and behold, while busy downloading some software updates (around 17:15), I found that it was taking extremely long; so I tested the speed. A blistering 0.11 Mbps. So I thought: I am calm now, let me call and see if I can get it sorted out. What do I get? "Due to technical difficulties, we cannot complete this call"

To top my frustration, I can find no way of contacting Mweb by email; ony the contact numbers which serve no significant purpose. I did notice that I could go through Twitter or Facebook, though I do not subscribe to any of these.

The only way to communicate, therefore, is through this platform provided by HelloPeter, which I have found is the most effective anyway.

What I need to know is: Why do I need to keep on paying you over R 1 300 each month when you do not hold up your end of the contract to provide me with an acceptable internet service, and then make me jump through hoops to get this resolved? Except of course if you think that dial-up speeds can be considered acceptable.