Monday 28 February 2011

Vodafone is Vodafail for many Cairns mobile users

Hundreds of North Queensland Vodafone customers have received a letter admitted abject fail from the mobile phone company.

"I’m writing to you because over the past few months we have let down some of our customers," Nigel Dews, Vodafone’s CEO said in a letter on Friday. "Recently our network and customer service performance, particularly in December and January, fell well below the standards we have set for ourselves."

"Some have experienced issues including dropped calls, delayed SMS and voicemails, slow data speeds, inconsistent coverage and long waits when you called us. I am truly sorry and apologise both personally and on behalf of everyone here at Vodafone."

Nigel Dews blamed all the problems on the company's growth.

"The simple answer is that we’ve been growing fast, and when problems came, we responded too slowly," Dews said. "When more people joined us and some of our customers started using lots more data than they had before, we didn’t keep up, and some technical faults added to the issue. When you contacted us to talk to us about network problems, too many of you waited too long to speak with someone who could help and give you the answers you needed."

Interesting that they failed to mention the four million customers whose private was made public when Vodafone breached the Privacy Act by "failing to take reasonable steps to protects customers' data."

In January Vodafone's billing and call records were available on a publicly-accessible website protected only by a password. It was discovered they did not have the appropriate level of security measures in place to "adequately protect customers' personal information."

Time to hang up on this phone company.


1 comment:

Al said...

Got a mobile contract with Telstra? Arbitrarily, Telstra have decided to increase call timing from 30 second increments, to one minute (effective 20 March). Result: fifty-percent of all calls made will be more expensive, eg: A call of two minutes and 15 seconds will cost $2.77 instead of $2.37. Stiff cheddar if you have just entered a two-year binding contract, it's all worded in Telstra's favour and you cannot exit without penalty. Apparently Telstra's small print conditions state they can change the call rate or timing increments whenever they wish. On a positive note, I suppose customers are lucky the billing increment hasn't been increased to five minutes ... or thirty minutes. If it were so, you would have to cop it until your contract expires. I'll lodge a complaint with the Ombudsmen - and I'd urge other to do the same. It won't change the outcome, but it might piss Telstra off, and that will make me feel better.