It takes six weeks to get Vodafone mobile Internet courtesy of Expansys!

COLTRANE · (#1 (**permalink**))

At last â€“ I managed to get connected. It feels like a major achievement. Before you think I am writing from a third world location â€“ let me assure you: this is England in the 21st century, and it is appalling what large telecom companies get away with. The customer is king? Forget it. Here is my tale:

I once was a Vodafone customer for many years. They are the most expensive mobile network provider in the UK, but their network is also the most reliable. I used a GPRS datacard with my laptop and charged the airtime to my phone account, swapping the SIM between phone and datacard as required. Then 3G datacards came out and I asked for an upgrade. The treatment I got from customer services was so frustrating that I cancelled my Vodafone contract altogether and ported my number to Hutchison 3G. Vodafone sent me a bill for a cancellation charge exceeding Â£400 which they later had to retract as my contract was well past its minimum duration. In fact, they owed me money. Good try though!

In the following months I kept my eye on the various 3G cards on offer because I was now reduced to getting online access in internet cafes when on the road which, besides the quickly mounting cost, can be extremely inconvenient. When I spotted a Vodafone Connect 3G Connect card at Expansys.com free of charge (sold everywhere else at no less than Â£129), and with the monthly fee by now considerably reduced as well, I went for it and applied. This is where my nightmare started: I must have spent the equivalent of several working days in trying to sort out the mess they got me in.

It started innocently enough. I received an email that my credit card had been charged with Â£0 and that I needed to supply documentary proof of my signature and address. I did so immediately. I was told by return that my application had failed because Vodafoneâ€™s credit check on my details had returned negative. Iâ€™ve never been late in paying a single bill, so I enquired further and discovered that they had run the credit check on my PO Box address which I use for business, not wanting trade visitors to knock at the door without appointment. A credit check in the UK involves a check against the electoral register where, of course, I am listed at my home address. A stupid mistake, I thought, and easy enough to rectify. Wrong: Nothing is easy in todayâ€™s bureaucratic unpleasant England.

Expansys UK Ltd. stated that they had no control over Vodafoneâ€™s decision to approve a contract. I was welcome to re-apply at a later date. Could I re-apply straight away, so they could advance my application with the correct details to Vodafone? It wouldnâ€™t be wise to run another credit check within the same month in case it gets turned down as well and my credit rating would be detrimentally affected, they said, only having my best interest at heart. I sighed and waited. A month later I applied again.

Once more I received an email that my credit card had been charged with Â£0 and would I submit my documentary evidence of signature and address. I did so, stressing that the check should this time be run on my home address. In reply I was told that considering my application had been turned down previously it was company policy not to accept a new application for at least three months. I smelled a rat and an angry exchange followed.

The companyâ€™s refusal to correct an obvious mistake and suddenly imposing a three month waiting period raised the suspicion that this free-of-charge product was not really intended for the general public but reserved for preferred customers only, so any excuse to refuse a customer might be welcome. This smacked of non-competitive practices to me, considering that a similar deal was not available anywhere else amongst the thousands of Vodafone retailers in the country. I decided to persist and also sent a complaint to Vodafone via the internet.

Meanwhile I contacted my local Trading Standards Office after having spoken to a solicitor who confirmed that there might well be a breach of competition rules and that I could potentially sue both Expansys UK Ltd. and Vodafone for negligence. Trading Standards replied that seeing I had not entered into a contract with either Expansys or Vodafone, there was nothing they could do in the matter but I was free to contact the Office of Fair Trading. I argued that given that I had an order confirmation with my credit card having been charged Â£0 there was an unfulfilled order, but never got a reply to that. Needless to say that the Office of Fair Trading did not even bother replying to my complaint. I suppose they have more important things to do than investigate alleged unfair trading practices submitted by an ordinary consumer.

Vodafone did reply and suggested I contact their â€œCollection Departmentâ€?. This is the branch that pursues people who owe them money. I didnâ€™t owe them anything, but called the number anyway. It connected to a completely unrelated company who told me that a lot of Vodafone customers are being put through to them because Vodafone give out the wrong number. You deal with a lot of numbers when you are a telecom provider, so it is somehow understandable that you get mixed up, I thought, and as the other company had kindly given me the correct number to call, I tried again.

I was greeted, as is the case almost everywhere these days, by a machine. The recorded message asked me to key in my mobile telephone number. Well, the whole point of my call was that Vodafone had not signed me up on a contract, so I didnâ€™t have a number to put in. I managed to get through to a real person in the end after ever so many button presses for various useless options followed by further useless options whilst being charged for the call. The real person I finally spoke to told me that there was nothing they could do for me since they only deal with missed payments. I was persistent enough, however, to extract another contact number from them.

Calling that number I was greeted with another recorded message telling me to press 1 if I was a reseller, 2 if I was a retailer, 3 if I was selling online, and 4 if I was from the Carphone Warehouse. Great! I pressed 3, after all, whilst I was not selling anything, there was definitely an online element involved. Further options followed, but I rejoiced at getting through to another real person fairly quickly. At least they donâ€™t let their dealers hang on the phone as long as their customers, I pondered.

Explaining who I was and what I wanted, I was told off for calling this number which was only for trade partners, but I defended myself by stating that it was after all the only other real Vodafone person I had managed to speak to who had freely given this exclusive number to me. In the end, the lady at the other end must have taken pity at my plight and promised to look into the matter and â€“ I couldnâ€™t believe my ears â€“ within minutes she put the correct address into her screen and told me that the original decision was now overturned and my account application approved. All I had to do is get back to Expansys and tell them so.

Having little choice, and knowing that I wasnâ€™t going to throw the towel now after this major accomplishment, Expansys declared their willingness to finally sign me up and send me the free datacard, not, however, without asking me to phone them and re-supply them with my credit card details so that the card could be charged once more with Â£0 to conclude the deal. I couldnâ€™t possibly argue with that. After all, you have to do things properly!

(Keywords: Expansys.com, Expansys UK Ltd., Vodafone, Vodafone UK Ltd., 3G datacard, datacard, Vodafone Connect, GPRS data, mobile internet)

Dr Sahib Bleher