I have been a Vodacom direct customer since 1995 (except for a brief stint of stupidity with Nashua Mobile, who make Vodacom SP look like angels). I have always had a Talk 500 contract or superior. Like a religious nut, I'd upgraded every two years, allowing a new handset to buy my loyalty and put up with ever increasing bad signal quality, network outages, rubbish data throughputs and perpetual price increases and value deflation for 12 years. This, combined with dropped calls at three distinct points on Cowie Road in Bryanston that hasn't been fixed in the 10 years I've complained about it has resulted in no loyalty from me.
I used to pay R899 for this privilege a month, without a handset, with no data and 100 SMS'. I have now ported to Cell-C, which was a painless / smooth experience. I am now paying effectively R500 for the same voice bundle, and receive 300 extra SMS' and 400MB of data included. In my books, thats about half the price. I plan to take the savings and use it to build a contract that suits me, whereby I'll get a new phone every year now. So, for the same money, I'm getting a phone every year as opposed to two, 400MB of data and 300 additional SMS'.
I've used the network now for 10 days continuously, as my primary voice and data provider. The service has been, from a voice perspective, superior to Vodacom. The data service has been great in almost all locations except underground parking locations. And because of VitalityMobile, my wife has cancelled her contract with Vodacom as well, and we'll be phoning each other for a fixed fee per month.
Goodbye Vodacom; hello Cell-C!
