I went to get a mobile broadband plan with Vodafone in November last year. Service was alright until I had 1 bar 3G signal, incredibly crap speeds, & it has stayed that way since beginning of January 2011. So much for a network maintenance, which some foreign customer service guy claimed would not take longer than a week. Must be some lying generic response, just an Indian version of Lara. The towers seem to be unable to handle the amount of users they are constantly attracting and taking in using their misleading marketing. Vodafone emphasizes their 'good' coverage and 'speed', which is so abysmal that even a snail can travel faster than the data that reaches my usb modem. Im living in a suburb with 3G coverage, but the connection dropouts are just appalling. It happens every few minutes. There is no point in using GPRS mode, since it's even slower than the oldest person alive. These days I seem to be paying monthly fees for nothing. You get several GB of usage and you can't even use it. This is seriously epic fail. It all started with me reading Vodafone's ad clustered site for technical information regarding coverage, speed, & service. They claimed to cover metropolitan areas, which included the suburb I live in. They claimed a reasonable speed range that most other telcos quote and boasted about their service. Then I waited an hour at the store to be served, the dealers seem to rather enjoy chatting with one customer at a time very slowly until their shift is over. To me, it felt like days. Finally I got my plan set up. After sorting out the VMC software problems, the product worked (yes I know strange as it may seem, it actually worked for a few glorious weeks) until it struggled again. Here I am, poor signal for weeks, 0-20Kbps 3G, & almost non-existent service. Even if the network tower is not far away & there is nothing major blocking the signal. Heres where the pain begins that customers have endured. I called Vodafone technical support 35 times, 30 of them were Lara transfer problems leading to call cut offs. WTF is the point of Lara's telemaze if it leads to cut offs. It's like having to solve a f*d up maze only to reach a dead end. The other 5 times led to horrid patchy musical hold up times equivalent to a theatrical length film. Finally I got to a foreign guy who told me these lame responses, which I, a pc expert, would have already tried. He still insisted me to try his troubleshooting even though I told him 10 times I've already done it. Ranging from reinstalling the device & software to deleting browsing history. Lame. Still got crap speed & signal. I really need to 'troubleshoot' someone in the head. Then he rambles on about a network upgrade in my area. Another generic response in their agenda. AND they always say there is no deadline for these upgrades. I hope people don't have to wait a lifetime's journey to get full signal again. Knowing their call centres are foreign these days, I gave up because even maintaining a call with them (that is prone to dropouts) will take blood, sweat, & tears. Now we have 12000+ Australians lobbying for a lawsuit against Vodafone, for reasons similar to my woes. I wouldn't be very surprised. We also have a recent issue involving customer data security breaches over the web. All Vodafone does is tell us that everything is fine. IT IS NOT. Whirlpool forums is packed daily with unheard complaints of Vodafone's services. In fact the threads are so vast it could form a large encyclopedia or a Lord of The Rings novel. As for the Vodafone staff seeking sympathy, think again. You are the cratered face of the company, so you must deal with the aggressive amount of recent customer woes. It is us customers that have all the power in the end. We can choose, in the extreme case, to do a mass exodus rather than put up with Vodafone's recent incompetences. We suffering customers (which seems to be a majority of Vodafone's customers in Australia, looking at how many complaints have plagued across the net) could all leave Vodafone & go to Telstra, Optus, etc. That will leave Vodafone Australia dying out of business, which will mean the Vodafone staff will lose their jobs. But then heres another issue. When customers attempt to cancel their plan & account, the customer service person attempts to hold on to the already dissatified customer for dear life like a leech, offering lame discounts & bartering. We shouldn't have to pay the remaining cost of the plan if we get slow unusable 3G net for weeks on end. We shouldn't have to rely on TIO and other full blown agencies to get our word across. This Vodafail site clearly indicates the last straw for the telco. It's just ridiculous, seeing that 'Vodafone' is an international business. If Vodafone doesn't fix these customer & network services, then too bad for the future. There won't be much for the telco to fix once its over. Not to mention the irony of 'gain sharing', I can barely post this using my Vodafone mobile broadband.