Vodacom rip off - Faulty Z10 3 times and they refuse to change phone type

[SSS100]

I took a blackberry Z10 when doing an upgrade on 18 May 2013
To date, 18 June 2013 i have taken the phone back to shop and given repalcement phone (same make" Z10) twice

Yesterday (monday 17 June 2013) took the second phone in as it was also faulty, and have been booked in for repairs

That means I still don't have a working phone for about 3 weeks in the contract and I still pay full pay
I asked the store and vodacom customer care to change device as I have lost all hope and trust on the Z10, but no...vodacom refuses to change devices.

This is a rip off...what can I do here?

[Dave A]

Which Vodacom package deal did you take?

[ians]

You sign a document as part of the contract at vodacom, they clearly indicate that they do not do out of box replacements for water damage, you can however return the phone within 7 days, it will be sent away for an "assessment" if the phone has so much as a blemish on the body the case, they tell you it is not cover because it has been dropped, so you claim is rejected they will then quote to repair. So you are so screwed unless you keep your phone in a glass bowl wrapped in cotton wool. Wake up people they have us by the balls and squeezing. The issue I had with Telkom I was left to the wolves, I think even Wendy Knowler was tooo scared to touch it. According to Vodacom, they have "put her in her place" on numerous occasions. For me to take the issue any further was just a waste of my time, so like most people I have had to step down and just accept the crap that is dished out to me. But lucky for us we have the internet and social networks, I do believe there have been many case where people have read the crap with telkom and Apple and swayed their decision, for example I know of a few people who have chosen the S4 over the iphone5 after reading my post on all the forums.

[Blurock]

This is a rip off...what can I do here?

All the South African cell phone companies rip you off. That is because the South African consumers do not do proper homework and allow them to fool us with fancy packages that you can not understand head or tail of. Report them to the ombudsman and the consumer council.

I do not SMS, twitter or whatever people do with their thumbs, but I noticed today that MTM charge you 50c per SMS. Vodacom charges 80c!!! How do they justify charging 60% more!!???

Just check out the cell phone rates and what you pay per minute, even with per second billing. It is shocking, but we all just accept it because we are mesmerised by fancy smart phones and social media.

[SSS100]

Big rip offs,
I'm on the Smart Large (L) package, my problem is the faulty phone more than the package itself

[Dave A]

I see there is an identifiable handset fee on the Smart Large deal for the Z10.

[Blurock]

So you pay R499 for 500mb data & 250 minutes @ R1.50 per minute! (Cell C charges 99c per minute and bills you per second) Still costs you 51% more.

I am not a Cell C fan, but if one operator can reduce their fees, the other can too. Telkom has gone the other way - they have increased their fees to be in line with cell phone companies.

[SSS100]

Yes,
And how can one deal with the matter of faulty phones?
Changed twice already

[ians]

Learn to live with it, like I did, as apple's response to my problem with the iphone5, you don't like it take it back and get your money back, we don't even support 7 day out box warranties because we are so confident in our products. 500 million people are happy with our phones it must be a all in your head.

I can only hope they manage to fix the defect in their software in ios 7

Telkom have dropped their rate to 95c to compete with cell C, if you have singed a contract recently at their old rate of R1.50 per minute you will be charged at R1.50 for the duration of the contract, in my case 24 months, that fine I got caught, my argument is then why when I recharge once the bundle is use up do I not benefit form the reduced rate. So what smart people are doing is just removing their contract sim card as soon as their bundle is up and inserting a pre paid sim and reloading airtime this way, the only problem is the cellphone number, so what I do is switch all caller ID, so the number comes up as a private number, catch with that is most people don't answer private numbers. So now with all this modern technology I am actually going backwards because I am back to carrying to phones again, what a pain in the butt.

[SSS100]

yep, so "untouchable" are these phone companies