⭐LONG TERM REVIEW⭐

It's important to educate yourself on reliable services. In South Africa you will often find that you only get a partial return on some services you pay for. Things like loadshedding is very disruptive on one's lifestyle, but Vumatel a different kind of challenge. Most of the time you'd get schedules for something like loadshedding, but Vumatel always manages to catch you off guard and halt any planning you thought you had.

After COVID many of us started working remotely, and in some cases having internet can be even more important than electricity. When there are job deadlines, you don't have a choice (you have to finish your work). With Vumatel being offline so much, you're forced to buy data for high-bandwidth tasks. This means that you might end up paying the same price that Vumatel charged you, if not more.

Without considering their services for 2022, let's give them the benefit of doubt. If we start 2023 fresh, they've been offline for 7/42 days of the year (on 4 different cases/issues), which brings them to 98.08% functional uptime for the rest of the year. It looks good on paper, but this is not just dips in speed... This is downtime on the promised services, and due to poor communication (even with ISPs) you have no idea if they'll make you wait many days while you're offline. Maybe you buy data, and the internet comes back on, just to find out you wasted your money. Or maybe you're offline for 4 days and it has devastating effects on your workflow.

So, should you consider Vumatel?

Let's have a look: - You might have to buy extra data to compensate for their incompetence - They take their time to fix an issue - They especially take their time with issues if it's just 1 customer and not 'urgent' enough - They closed their call centres and the only way to contact them is through your ISP. Many times your ISP has an issue communicating with them, efficiently - Vumatel has the budget and time to innovate in other sectors but leave their support quality in a dormant state while allowing their internet services to get worse

Finally, just because Vumatel provides fibre and there's hype around the idea of high-speed internet, doesn't mean that they're doing it better than anyone else, because I can't currently find another fibre provider that's worse.