Ten Years of Loyalty, Two Years of Ongoing Issues, and a Frustrating Exit

After ten years as a WebAfrica customer, I feel compelled to document my experience in full.

For much of that time the service was acceptable, but over the last two years I experienced regular connectivity outages lasting up to 10 days at a time. Every support interaction followed the same script — unplug, wait, replug, check connections — despite the fact that I had always done this before making contact. There was clearly no record of previous interactions, meaning I had to start from scratch every single time, no matter how many times I had called before.

On multiple occasions, support blamed the outages on a fibre provider issue. However, since I am the only person in my neighbourhood experiencing problems, and there is only one fibre provider in the area, this explanation simply did not hold up.

After six months of repeated outages, a technician was finally sent to my home. He replaced a connector on the ONT device, mentioning that there was a known fault with that component. If this was a known issue, why did it take six months and countless support calls before anyone acted on it? That fix lasted only a month before the problems returned. Another week of outages and the same support cycle followed before a second technician replaced the faulty ONT device entirely — by which point I had already decided to cancel my service.

The cancellation process was equally frustrating. WebAfrica requires six weeks' notice — well above the 10-day to four-week norm I found across other ISPs — and insists on the return of the router, even though mine was over 10 years old and had never been upgraded during my entire time as a customer. Notably, the responsiveness and helpfulness of their support team increased significantly the moment my cancellation was processed. That level of service throughout my contract would have made a real difference.

On my final day of service, WebAfrica terminated my connection as expected but failed to release the line to my new ISP. When I queried this, I was told it could take up to 48 hours. After two years of intermittent service, this felt like an unnecessary parting gift.

On a technical note: WebAfrica continues to use PPPoE for session management. While functional, this is an outdated protocol compared to IPoE, which offers better performance for high-speed connections and a simpler experience for the end user — removing the need for individual session control and manual bandwidth management. For an ISP operating in an increasingly competitive market, this is worth addressing.

Ten years of loyalty deserved better. I would not recommend WebAfrica to anyone seeking reliable connectivity and consistent support.