Sorry isn’t good enough – government to investigate Vodacom’s disappearing data ‘glitch’
The Portfolio Committee on Telecommunications and Postal Services will investigate why many Vodacom users’ data suddenly disappeared this week.
According to a report by htxt, government has decided to move forward with the investigation despite Vodacom offering to reimburse every effected customer with a 500MB bundle.
“The Portfolio Committee on Telecommunications and Postal Services strongly condemns the incident involving Vodacom earlier this week, in which the company deducted millions of rands worth of airtime and data from customers,” the acting chair of the Portfolio Committee on Telecommunications and Postal Services said in a statement.
“Although the company has apologised to the customers and committed not only to refund them, but also to give them a 500MB bundle valid for three days, the Committee feels strongly that the matter should be investigated by an independent body,” the statement said.
“South Africa ranks fourth out of 17 African countries with high costs of data, and to have millions of people robbed of their airtime and data in this manner is a serious concern,” said Dikeledi Tsotetsi, the acting chairperson of the Committee.
“Having received inputs from individuals and organisations during the cost-to-communicate public hearings held in Parliament last year, the Committee has tasked the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa) to investigate the matter further.”
Tsotetsi said while the Committee is awaiting reports of the ongoing investigations by Icasa and the Competition Commission, the mobile network operators have a responsibility to conduct business in a manner that is just and lawful.
Many Vodacom subscribers complained that their data was depleting for no apparent reason on 21 August.
Vodacom acknowledged the problem and corrected the issue before working to reimburse customers.
The provider later confirmed it had reimbursed all affected customers and apologised for the inconvenience – which was caused by a billing system issue.
“We are allocating FREE 500MB data valid for 3 days to those customers, for the inconvenience caused,” said Vodacom.
“An error of this kind has never happened before and we’ve taken steps to ensure it never recurs. We’d like to assure all our customers that this was simply an error caused during a configuration change and nothing more than that,” said Vodacom CEO Shameel Joosub.
Read: Vodacom says sorry to customers with 500MB of free data
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