I have had my home phone, broadband and mobile phone business with Spark for the last 7-8 years, mainly because I live in a rural area and VF mobile coverage where i live is patchy, and SPark were the only ones in the game for BB when I signed up.

About a week ago after using my 40GB limit on spark for the 5th month in a row I started looking at BB prices, and  saw that VF offered a pretty comparable price for unlimited BB, phone and with SKY TV as well. And there was an additional $10 discount if I had a on account mobile as well. All up was around the same price I was paying for only 40GB through spark. If I bought one of the VF Femto cells then I would solve the coverage problem, for a small additional investment!

So I started the signup process online, entered all the data and got to the summary page at the end and noticed they were going to charge me a $100 connection fee, which hadn't been highlighted prior...

so I called the VF customer service help line... I should have taken this as a warning and realised what I can expect... after a 40 minute wait ( Why cant VF at least have a callback system like Spark so you dont have to wait so long?).. I spoke with a CS rep who took all my details, and confirmed there would be no connection fee, and that I would be entitled to a free modem as well.. great!

Then the confirmation email arrived and the price was $10 higher than it showed on the website,.. so after another 30 minutes on hold listening to the same music... I gave up and sent an email querying the prices.

Next step was to change over the mobile, which cannot be done at the same time as the fixed line stuff for some reason so I decided to go into a shop and pick up the sim card at the same time,.. all went smoothly and a very pleasant VF guy got me all sorted, and kept in touch to confirm when the number would port over... However... iMessage wasnt working.. so call 777 and after 40 minutes on hold waiting spoke with someone who passed me on to another tech expert who suggested to try a few things, which meant I couldnt stay connected on the line with them so they would call me back in a few minutes.... anyway the suggested changes didnt work... and after 30 minutes waiting didnt hear from them so went to sleep. Next day called them back,.. and yes another 20 - 30 minute wait...they said it was a problem porting my number over and would be fixed by the end of the next day... guess what it wasnt.. but this time it was only a 15 minute wait...

Then.. back to the BB issues.. I checked online and see that they have invoiced me for the "Free Modem".. so called them again.... this is just not acceptable, I should be charging them for my time that they are wasting.


They really need to do something about their customer support contact mechanism, and they need to make less mistakes!.. I would prefer to have stayed with Spark and for $10 extra a month could have covered my BB requirements and saved on the stress and wasted time.

PS I should also mention that all the VF people I spoke with were pleasant, and helpful.... no reflection on them personally I believe it is the system!