Vodacom Tower (Likweti) Near KMI Airport Constantly Down – Business & Safety Risk Ignored

I am lodging this complaint regarding a chronic Vodacom tower infrastructure failure affecting the Likweti Bush Estate area near Kruger Mpumalanga International Airport (KMI).

This is not a handset, SIM, or individual account issue. It is a repeated tower-level fault that has been occurring over months (and years) with no permanent resolution.

Location: Tower services Likweti Bush Estate / KMI Airport area

Area of the Kruger Mpumalanga International Airport

±10 - 15km from White River and Nelspruit

Area includes farming businesses, lodges, tourism operations, and online businesses and businesses operating at the KMI airport.

This is not a remote or rural area and should not be deprioritised

The towers go down frequently, with long waiting periods to be repaired.

When it fails, there is complete loss of signal and internet connection. 1 to no bars at all.

Each report follows the same scripted response: “Your report has been escalated and the technical team will respond within 4 working days” the costs of the service gets increased however the turn-around times and customer service delivery depreciates more and more. How are we paying for service we don't even have access to?

No permanent fix is implemented, and the outages continue to recur.

Serious Business & Safety Impact: > My property includes multiple online businesses that depend entirely on connectivity.

> Outages result in loss of income and operational downtime.

> We live on a farm, and having no signal at all is a major safety and emergency risk. Especially with farm attacks in South Africa, you would think this is a much more pressing issue.

> Even our backup provider (Rain) fails during these outages, as it uses Vodacom infrastructure, leaving us with no connectivity whatsoever. And other mobile service providers don't cover this are such as MTN or Telkom, so we are forced to stick with Vodacom.

> A 4-working-day turnaround for a known, recurring infrastructure fault in an economic and tourism corridor is unacceptable.

Me and my family members constantly report each outage, and this had also resulted in us being blocked by Vodacom, so if you contact them too many times they block you! They dont fix problems they try silence the people making their problems known. I tried a different route, and escalated this issue directly via email to a Vodacom regional contact on: 13 December 2024 - No reply, and the issue happened again and I followed up with another email on 16 February 2025, I received no response again.

Call centre and WhatsApp bot reporting has proven extremely ineffective, very frustrating process, long winded call processes, with some calls not even logged on my profile. I know this cause I went to the VodaShop in iLanga after all the calls being logged, and they confirmed nothing had been logged on my profile. So all that effort was a waste.

I want confirmation that this is logged as a network infrastructure fault, not an individual Sim issue, The tower/site ID and a master fault reference, A clear explanation of why this tower repeatedly fails, Confirmation of preventative maintenance or permanent remedial action, A realistic SLA aligned with non-rural service areas

I have now escalated this matter formally and will be submitting a complaint to ICASA if Vodacom cannot provide a meaningful response and resolution.

This area supports tourism, agriculture, and businesses — it should not be treated as expendable infrastructure.

I expect Vodacom to engage at a network operations level, not with generic call-centre responses.