Rain - A ****!

Where do I start?

I've been a customer with Rain for quite a while now and although I later found out that the speed capabilities of their network weren't ideal for the initial purpose I had intended them for (Online gaming), I still kept the service seeing as it can at the very least serve as a data sim for my normal day to day browsing, 10 mbps seems reasonable when you're just browsing Facebook or the occasional stream right? LOL, you dumb naive little boy.

Well, firstly the advertised speed is a pipe dream and as much as they can pass the buck to the consumer it's not entirely true. Saying that coverage is slow in "YOUR" area, you'd obviously begin to believe that to be true... until the signal gets so bad that you consider relocating but before you pack up your sock rack you decide to actually use self-service to put those claims to the test:

Now, I've worked customer service for two of the top service providers in the country and even I, a firm non-believer in self-service (because cell phones are complicated enough on their own - imagine asking a 70yr old to troubleshoot their wifi connection or check APN settings), even I had to admit that Rain's self-service was pretty straight forward and would be pretty effective to the average consumer..... if it actually worked.

See, what happens is that on their mobile site (Rain app isn't available on iOS) the connectivity map distinctly shows you where your connection is coming from and exactly how far these towers are located. So how close do you have to be to achieve 10mbps? turns out you have to be dangling from the actual network tower because I have one 500 meters away, and another 2 within a 1km radius and I can barely achieve 1mbps..... as I type this my speeds have dropped to 75kbps, I have two tabs open on my browser and one of them is the Rain site. This is from a provider that's marketing their product as 5G ready yet has speeds slow enough to make 3G look like the pinnacle of modern technology. Naturally I think this has to do with my usage, maybe I've used too much and like on most ISPs I am now being throttled. I checked the website and was happy to confirm that Rain does not throttle your connection EVER! The speed you get from the get-go will remain consistent, this would be good news if my initial signal was great, all that managed to do was cement my fear of being stuck with a bad signal for close to R1000 a month. I log a ticket online and after a couple of days I get an email from them and the explanation is something along the lines of my device connecting to a tower that’s miles away instead of using the closer ones. My connection was then reset and I was asked to restart my device and all was well.... for a while, more like a day and it now happens every other week.

Alas, convinced that there is no way a tower 500 meters away is pushing out a mere 300kbps I disconnect one of my sims and configure my devices to use the bare minimum... turning important security and software updates off, turning data off for most of my apps and even changing my anti-virus to restrict as much background usage as technologically possible, at best the speed jumped to 1mbps between 2AM and 4AM - Yes, I literally had to wait until after midnight to use my internet because after like 7pm the signal is unusable, I'm paying R479 PER MONTH for this! AND up until this month I actually had TWO of these plans! Telling me I have to tolerate the internet speed of a turtle on Xanax because my connection just gets magically tethered to a tower over 5km away is just insane! And I would actually understand the customer service department's decade-long turnaround time if they're using the same inherently ****py internet connection.

What really grinds my nuts is that I honestly believed in this service, many underdog service providers had a shaky start, and this one literally being the first of its kind would experience the same problems but with Rain it's just been getting worse and that just makes no sense. If you go to their site right now you'll find an Ad for 5G home internet, these guys are literally advertising a far superior service while their mid-tier product does not even work, anywhere else in the world this is called a ****! You can manage "data traffic" all you want and even claim to be collecting payments for the whole month but nothing excuses inconsistency!

I have had it! I'll use whatever ****py connection I have now to search for alternatives and I sincerely hope one of the bigger service providers come with something more competitive because for the life of me I cannot bare the thought of taking on more month of this nonsense money grabbing ****!