Vodacom is the worst

The saga continues, yes a Vodacom representative contacted me on the 2nd at just after 16:00, he said he would log a fault and have someone from the technical side contact me, nothing heard as yet, except earlier today, Friday the 5th, a SMS came through with the message that the service ticket has been assigned to a support specialist. The tower outage in the area continues, of course. "Spare parts have been ordered", but they do not know what is wrong, hmmm, ok,, that's like the Rolls Royce needing replacement, since the ashtray is full... how can you order spares without know what spares you need? Also the issue of my number being blocked by Vodacom, has still not been addressed or explained to an even remotely acceptable level.
Of course, these guys operate at a speed that implies communications is of near 0 importance and if your issues are resolved in the next 6 months you should count yourself lucky, after all, this is Africa, use smoke signals, having cell and cell data handy is a total luxury and not the norm you should get used to.
Asking for cell tower locations tied to Cell ID data has mostly been met with the idea that this is not available and it has vandalism implications, really? if someone wanted to vandalize your infrastructure, they would not need a map to stumble across the towers. A lady earlier from Vodacom said she would SMS me the tower locations in my area, which might help me point the LogPeriodic antenna to a tower that may be better for this location, but I'm not holding my breath that this would help.
(Maybe time to start an open source cell tower location database including the Cell ID, not just for Vodacom, but all, this could be of value to someone contemplating service from one provider, but possibly seeing that another provider may cover his area better and thus, the other provider might be the better option to go with.)

Ok, so, the lady was the "support specialist", not technical, but somewhat good at calming down customers that are about to blow their top, but not really resolving anything. Great the Karos tower location, hell, had that, that is Cell ID ***, but this one ain't exactly totally stable since it is not a line of sight path, hence at times 18dB SINR drops by 20 or more dB, then the device may switch to:
Cell ID *** (-87dBm RSSI/-3dB SINR), where is this? or
Cell ID *** (-89dBm RSSI/-1dB SINR) , again where is this tower? or
Cell ID *** (-85dBm RSSI/-8dB SINR), same question. Basically I had to relocate the indoor repeater and its Logperiodic antenna to try and minimise the switching away from Karos, but it is not nearly perfect, multiple times a day, I need to power down the repeater, so as to connect back to Karos, else the connection would be improved if it was a dialup link.... and not knowing where the other Cell IDs are located isn't really helping to try and minimise the switching away from Karos to a worse signal source. Get Gariep fixed and don't try and make excuses, outages like this should not take weeks to fix and keeping infrastructure running without Eishkom, should be par for the course and not something exceptional. Telkom operators used to by default not have a reliance on commercial power producers and they sure as heck should not have this now....

Another follow up, Gariep Cell ID *** came back last night, probably around 18:00 or so. Two weeks down, not good, lets hope it stays up and running. With this tower, even though it is not a line of sight path from here (a hill in the way, half way up my 30m antenna tower would be a clear line of sight path, fresnel zone might still be impacted, though), but with a distance of just over 3km from here, I see a RSSI of -77dBm and a 13dB SINR, without the indoor repeater running, so as long as this remains up, this should function fairly well.

Now only the account upgrade issue and the number blocking isssue, which maybe I should put into separate reviews, the upgrade (not) is also a doozy, promises not kept (mail me the conditions, sure, that was more than 3 weeks ago, I think, where are they?), delivery within 72 working hours, ok, how many hours per day do these characters work? Which I guess begs a review of the courier as well, who can't seem to read and promises high and low he only got our phone number the day of delivery, last Thursday (lets work this out, quickly on the 14th I was told 72 working hours... lets start counting from the 15th of March and assume 5 day week and 8 working hours per day, thus 9 working days, Friday 15th, then week of 18th to 22nd minus public holiday, so 4 days, then the week of 25th to 29th, again minus public holiday, then we have 9 days done, so delivery should have been Thursday the 28th of March, yet they take another few days until the 4th of April and since they delivered only around 18:40-odd I wonder about the working hours...), but the Vodacom paper dated the 13th of March clearly had my phone number on it and instructions to the courier to call...