STOP. Don't. Just don't.

Rain is a caucus of sneak ******* who hide behind honest employees and support staff to cover their ***** business practices and law skirting.

Why do I say this? Let me explain.

In late June, I was preparing to move to a new rental flat for employment purposes, and since they don't have a fiber connection, I opted to go for an LTE connection for work and entertainment. Cue me thinking back to the viral marketing campaigns Rain had been putting out for what feels like forever, and I opt to give them a shot since they promised very flexible deals with good speeds and competitive prices, and of course, the basic principle of business is that the client pays and the supplier delivers, right?

Little did I know.

So, I put in a call to Rain, looking to check my coverage and pricing, and the salesperson confirms that, according to the coverage map, which you can find on Rain's website, that yes, the area I was moving to has 4G coverage amidst not one, not two, but THREE LTE TOWERS. Well hey, that sounds pretty swell. Looking at the same map, seeing the same thing, I agree to purchase the plan and two days later a Simcard is delivered to my door and gets RICA'd. That weekend, on the 26th of June 2021, I move to my new place, unpack everything, go shopping for my necessities and, glancing across the waters at the CLEARLY VISIBLE LTE TOWER, plug the Simcard into a dedicated mobile router and decide to unwind to a nice relaxing session of my favourite NetFlix originals and youtube channels.

Except it didn't work.

"Well, that's unusual," I thought. Maybe I need to do a little tweaking with the tech. So I do. I fiddle with the router via the app on my phone, I check with the Rain website, I scour social media for anything that could tell me what's going on. Nothing. Frustrated and more than a little annoyed at this, I go to bed, having bought a data bundle from my cellphone provider to get something done.

The next morning, I go back to my router, looking to see if there were any new developments. And lo and behold, the icon for internet connection lights up! Hooray! Finally, my 10mbp/s internet is here and I can enjoy the conveniences of internet browsing and affordable data!

40kbp/s.

That number is the maximum speed I had, over two hours, with the floor being 5kbp/s and averaging out at 20kbp/s. ADSL lines would laugh at those numbers. I figure that it's enough to get my email, at the very least, but then, when those two hours ended, the line died. Dead. Nevermore to this day.

I send an email to their support stating my problem. A fiddly drip of an internet connection not even good enough to download minesweeper that gave a pathetic wheeze and died. This is not what I paid for. This is not even a loose approximation of an artist's interpretation of what I paid for. What's going on? The next day I received a phone call from one of their support staff, a lovely and very helpful man with who I find no fault and who I pray finds salvation from the hive of **** and villainy that is their current employer. We do the standard song and dance, go through the motions and follow the checklist to see if it's something small and silly I may have overlooked. Nothing works. He informs me, stumped himself, that he would be escalating the matter to their technical department and sends me an email confirming that he did so. Again, thank you very much for the help and understating, I find no fault with you, good sir.

And then, silence. For two weeks, dead silence, only broken by the quiet whistling of plummeting expectations. Since the line in question is meant for work as well as play, I begin exploring my options and looking at a local internet company so that I can stop paying the cell phone company I'm with their usual price-gouging rates every time I want to use the internet (R20/anytime GB, for those curious).

Cut to today, the 5th of July 2021. Long since having given up any hope on getting what I'd paid for, I receive a phone call at 10:00 AM this morning. Someone from Rain's technical department, to whom the matter had been elevated two weeks ago. From the very outset, the poor man sounded as though he expected me to bite his head off through the phone. Why you may ask? Simple. All he could do was confirm what a little research and other reviews had brought up. I only had one tower within the factual service range. Moreover, this tower was hyper congested. So congested, in fact, that the odds of me receiving even a fraction of the service that they'd been paid for, was effectively nil. He could do absolutely nothing.

I want to say here that I had no problem with the man who called me from Rain's technical support. They don't roll out the plans or make the packages. They simply help where they can, do their job, and he did his job well. You will be in my prayers because simply by dint of being a human being and not hosting dog fights, you deserve to work somewhere better and not be associated with Rain.

So, in short, what does this all mean? Simply put, Rain sold me a package, knowing full well where I would be going, without even considering, and most likely not caring, whether the infrastructure and systems there could handle the load already present and provide the service promised. This wouldn't have been a difficult thing either, since their tech support can ACTIVELY LOOKUP WHICH TOWERS ARE NEAREST TO YOU AND CAN SEE THEIR CONGESTION AND SERVICE DELIVERY, AS WAS DONE AS I WAS SPEAKING ON THE PHONE. I, as I would happily bet many others also are, am simply the stupid sucker who gave my money to them, expecting that they actually ran a business that worked on a standard model of delivering what they get paid to provide.

Don't give your money to these people. Whether you are a prospective client or an investor, these aren't people who believe in the exchange of services for payment. These are people that view their clientele as an unfortunate c**** in making ends meet, getting the balance sheet to look pretty, and blinkering potential investors. This is a cartel of sneak ******* who hide behind walls of competent but hopelessly beleaguered support staff who literally have no way of doing their jobs properly simply because they've been ****med as hard as I and many others have been.

There are many ISPs in this country, go use another one. One that, hopefully, actually ponies up and gives you the internet access you paid for. This is one that needs to be starved out of existence due to the sheer malicious indifference with which it regards fulfilling its end of the bargain.

You have been warned.

Have a wonderful day,

-Fine China.