Three weeks without signal

As I am writing this, I am so frustrated. I have been a loyal Vodacom customer for more than 10 years, but this experience is making me seriously consider changing service providers.

We have been without signal for 3 and a half weeks now, although our nearest tower is only about 2km from our house. We live on a farm in the North West Province. All the equipment e.g. the batteries, cables etc of the above mentioned tower was destroyed because of an electrical issue. When we first notified Vodacom about this problem, the response was that it must be our phones that are the problem. We finally convinced them that about 6 phones can almost definitely not be faulty at the same time. The Vodacom Call Centre has been extremely unhelpful in reporting this problem, and also seem to not understand the principle of not having signal. Although clearly stating that they should contact us via email (as we have wifi at home) they keep CALLING us (no signal...duh) to discuss the problem, and therefore cannot get hold of us. I cannot sit 10km from home all day hoping they will call me back. The tower equipment has now been fixed for more than a week and MTN have signal, but Vodacom is still not fixed, but we have to pay for a service that was off for most of January. I work from home and this is seriously unacceptable as it affects my business. Furthermore we have now been notified that our case is not attended to anymore and that we should lodge a new complaint, so we are back to square one.

At this point I will seriously advise people to not make use of Vodacom at all.

This is my last resort, after which I will have no option but to change service providers.