My sunshine has come and there is no more rain in these clouds

With South Africa hit with such debilitating unemployment it is sad to watch this ISP meltdown and potentially ending up with all their employees adding to the unemployment.

I would have chosen zero stars as a rating but the lowest option is one star which from my experience with is still too much credit.

I signed up with Rain on the 6th of December 2022 after the ADSL in my area was permanently disconnected and fibre still not available in the area. I got my device a few days later. I activated the sim and connected without a problem. Soon I would discover the grim experience that many go through with this service provider:

1. Horrible support: The website, the customer portal as well as social media are all not customer focused. They take days to respond and at times offer no solution and then you have to wait more days for another response when you follow up. Even worse for someone with a speech disability you can't really call the only advertised other contact option (no email address, no chat tool in 2023). I thought Telkom was bad until I got to Rain and I really missed Telkom.

2. Intermittent service: Their website showed and promised coverage for my area. Then I received my device and the fun and games began, let me say I have spent more money on data on my cellular network service provider while paying for data access with Rain, which is always unreliable and almost always not available at the most critical moment.

3. Spam IP: I've had issues with sending emails since I received the device as the IPs assigned to the simcards are blocked by CloudMark Cloudfilter. This means I had to submit a reset request for CloudMark to unblock the IP that is active on my device at that time. The reset can take hours sometime to be enacted, this while I am unable to send emails. I never received any response from Rain on this both on twitter Dm's and email to ***.

3. Loadshedding: I have electricity backup at my house but the device disconnects from the network every time at the start and at the end of loadshedding because the towers lose power then the device has to find another available connection. This means I get a new IP when the device eventually connects which is anything between 3 to 15 minutes every time the loadshedding starts or end. Imagine the number of resets I send to CloudMark in a day during the 3 times of loadshedding a day (6), sometimes loadshedding hits before the IP is reset meaning I have to request another reset, and wait longer.

4. The service has been pretty bad but at least I would still have some internet in between all the interruptions as the towers suffer loadshedding and power up when the power is restored. On the 17 January 2023 I had, had enough of this pathetic Rain device and purchased a service from another ISP and then I cancelled my Rain service. For some reason I kept the Rain device connected and I noticed that the device does not connect to the internet anymore during loadshedding, it stays disconnected (no signal). This is something I read somewhere on social media, that Rain seems to limit or alter the service once you cancel even during the paid up period.

5. Having heard about people getting debited well after they cancel, I have gone ahead and cancelled the debit mandate with my bank. Now I wait for Rain to collect their device.

It was a frustrating experience and I will never ever ever ever consider anything or any service or product from Rain. A part of me wants to say Good riddance but I really hope for their employees that this company survives but as it appears, Loadshedding may persist for many more months to years and I don't see Rain surviving their current meltdown.