Vumatel, Britelink, Fibrehoods, and the long chain of broken promises

After spending an average of 2 hours per day on the phone between these various companies in the past 3 weeks, I'm beyond frustrated with trying to deal with these companies.

Previously, when I stayed in Bryanston in Johannesburg, Vumatel was really great in terms of installation and service, but now that I've moved to Randburg and have had to deal with the circular communication hell between Vumatel, Fibrehoods and Britelink I have to say that my opinion of the service has changed completely.

We started this process about a month ago when trying to schedule an installation for our new apartment, where we were told we had to speak to some arbitrary company called "TPS Marketing". This is where the broken promises started. Nobody ever bothered to return our calls or e-mails. After refusing to continue speaking to TPS Marketing and escalating this through Fibrehoods, after a week of attempting to get them to schedule an installation (with no joy) it turned out that Vumatel had it on their systems that our complex was live, while Fibrehoods kept saying it wasn't live.

After finally facilitating a conversation between one of Vumatel's managers and Fibrehoods, they scheduled an installation. Not only did the installer from Britelink rock up an hour late for the installation (where I had to phone Britelink to find out where he was), he installed the ONT into our apartment and claimed he was going to make a phone call, and promptly just disappeared (he packed up and drove off without even telling me).

Apparently, this technician also forgot to note down that there was no power to the fibre termination unit (to which my fibre is connected). This I discovered after several phone calls earlier this week, where the Britelink people had to hound their technician to extract this information from him.

Britelink then scheduled someone from their maintenance department to come out at 7am on Wednesday morning. As expected, nobody pitched, and their phone lines were only open from 8am. Thus, they only rocked up around 08h30.

This team helped Britelink and Fibrehoods and myself come to the realisation that our complex's fibre is divided up into 2 sections - of course, my section is completely dead and inactive.

It's now day 3 since they discovered this, and not only has this not been resolved yet, but I cannot even get any information from anyone (Vumatel, Fibrehoods or Britelink) as to what is being done to resolve this. All I keep getting is promises that they'll get back to me and apologies, but this isn't good enough. I need to know (1) what is being done to practically resolve this issue, and (2) when will this issue actually be resolved.

Fibrehoods keeps telling me to talk to Britelink, and Britelink keeps telling me to talk to Fibrehoods, where Vumatel just shrugs and says it's with Fibrehoods right now (which they apparently own, so Vumatel is saying it's with Vumatel and they can't seem to talk to Vumatel to resolve Vumatel's own issue).

Effectively we're being held hostage by these companies' gross inability to resolve their internal communication issues, because I'm stuck with Fibrehoods now and they can't seem to deliver the service they've promised me.