Very possibly the worst service ever. Avoid like the plague.

I've had an LTE-A account with Openweb for about two months now. Nearly a month ago my SIM stopped working - an understandable and an error beyond their control. The service that followed however was shockingly awful.

After about a day of troubleshooting on my side, and with my admittedly limited knowledge about these things, I'd determined that the sim was the problem. After informing Openweb about this, they advised a course of action that didn't address my sim diagnosis. Again, understandable - it makes total sense to exhaust the possible causes before taking decisive action. However after following their advice, I was repeatedly given the same advice and again, no dice. I was referred to their support department who again advised me to attempt the process I'd already done three times before. It was clear that there was zero communication between departments, as was evidenced by having to start from scratch with each person I spoke with. After a while they ignored direct questions and even stopped responding to my mails. It seems expecting a reasonable degree of service inconveniences them terribly and I'm guessing they had to sit down for three or four days with smelling salts and Elgar concertos from the sheer exertion. I eventually persuaded them to replace the sim.

The new sim arrived a few days later but it was someone else's sent to me in error. Inconvenient but again, an understandable error. After eleven days of no service, ignored mails and failure to follow up on directly expressed requests, unreturned calls and no confirmations of receipt, their tech support told me they had instructed their LTE department to activate the sim anyway and that it would remain activated until the first of July by which time my own sim should have arrived.

My sim had not arrived by the first and the temporary one was deactivated, as I'd been told it would be. Attempting to follow up on this, I called their support department requesting the sim to be reactivated until I confirmed receipt and activation of my new one. They told me the matter had been escalated which from experience over the last three weeks I've come to understand means 'lost in the ether'. I've also asked, and then later instructed that my fee for that month be adjusted to account for those eleven days. I was told that they couldn't tell me that.

Here's the deal - we have a contract. You provide me with a service and I pay you for that service. If you're unable to honour that contract in any way, it's entirely ********* for you to expect me to honour mine. There shouldn't be any reticence regarding the deduction of the period in which there was no service, especially as the error was on the providers side. Comply to the request with no question. Sort it out. We've established that the error wasn't due to user fault. Imagine your mom hired a cleaning service and they left the house messier than when they arrived. Would you expect your mom to pay for it? Maybe you hate your mom and you'd gain some satisfaction from that. Maybe you hate me.

It's been thirteen days now, an eleven-two split. My sim arrived today and hasn't been activated yet as there's a waiting period of up to twenty-four hours. I've requested again that the temporary sim be reactivated, both yesterday and today, but I'm not holding my breath. I've had to blow a fortune on mobile data this month and can't continue to do so.

If you work from home or at the very least expect an average level of service, avoid Openweb like the plague. There's zero impetus to address problems and communication blackouts happen until you surprise them with a phone call. At that point matters get escalated and we all know what that means, like when your childhood pet 'went to a farm'. There'll be no hesitation in responding to buying additional data though, so silver linings I guess.

Am I changing my service provider immediately? No. I'm holding onto hope that I'm that one customer who just happens to experience a string of errors, even though the poor service is a neon sign with the newborn messiah underneath it saying this is not the case. Also having something to fight against makes you live longer I've heard. I also kind of want to see how bad this can possibly get. Morbid curiosity. Hope is a thing with feathers.