Shocking sevice from Vodacom. 5-

I don't usually like to criticise service providers on such forums but I would like to warn the public to think twice before taking out a home internet contract with Vodacom. My father has been battling for around 10 months to sort out his internet service with no joy. He took out a contract for a 100mb/s 4G line at a Vodacom 4U store, but never gets above 35mb/s, and that is only in the early hours of the morning, when everyone is sleeping. During peak hours, when they stream series and movies, the line speed drops so low that they can’t even stream in SD, let alone HD. Sometimes it drops as low as 1 mb/s. This causes whatever they are streaming to freeze and/ or buffer constantly. Sometimes they lose signal altogether for up to ½ an hour. Since my father is 77 years old, completely tech ******** and hard of hearing, I have been assisting him to deal with this problem. We have made several trips back to the 4U store, as well as many calls to Vodacom customer care. At first we were sent across town to the Vodacom repairs store to test the router, which was found to be in perfect working order. After that the consultant at 4U submitted a service request to Vodacom and said I should await their call. A consultant called me the following day and asked me to test my line speed, which was particularly low at that time. After rebooting the router, upon his instructions, it appeared to be a little better, but still unacceptably low. He instructed me to make a couple of changes to the router settings and to wait for a couple of hours for it to settle, the we ended the call. The following day it appeared to be a little better and sufficient for SD streaming. About a week later the problem started again, this time I called Vodacom customer care myself and another service request was placed. The following day the same consultant called me and we proceeded to go through the same process again. He checked on his computer and said that it showed that the signal was good in our area. The line speed was even worse than ever and he said that he could do nothing more to assist me and would hand the case over to another department, would contact me soon. They never did! By this time my father was gatvol and decided to cancel the contract. The people at 4U told him that they cannot process the cancellation and I should call cancellations on ***. Cancellations told us that he would have to pay around R2000 to cancel the contract. I told them that was unacceptable and he should not have to pay a cancellation fee, since he was not getting what he paid for. From then on, we have been sent from pillar to post, department to department trying to cancel this infernal contract. Every department says that they are not authorized to cancel without the fee and passes us on to the next department. Eventually II was told to go back to 4U, who had previously told me that they no longer process cancellations, since the contract was taken out there. The consultant said that all she could do was submit a request for cancellation on our behalf, and we would receive a call from them soon, which never happened. I tried to call customer care to enquire about the case, but was greeted with a rude recorded message saying that I had called them too many times and they had blocked my number. Is this how Vodacom treats customers? I was forced to go back to 4U yet again, since I had no way to contact Vodacom. Even when I tried to email them, I got an error message saying that Vodacom’s email service was unavailable. The consultant at 4U looked up the case on the computer and found that it stated that the cancellation could not be completed because they required yet another service request for assessment. It said that they had attempted to contact me, which was a complete lie. So the consultant submitted the service request and told me that I should hear from them soon. That was two weeks ago, and I am still waiting, yet again. In the meantime my father is paying for a substandard product, and the monthly subscription is increasing again at the end of this month. What legal recourse do I have in this regard, since I can’t even contact Vodacom? Regards, Shane Watson Port Elizabeth.