MATE Reviews 1,911

This company completely abandoned my small business after cancelling NBN and phone with another provider. Stated I would need to reconnect with them for them to retry and take over the services. Completely irresponsible, resulting in no internet of phone service for several days. Absolutely irresponsible attitude. Never use this company

Unethical, unprofessional, disrespectful and inconsiderate conduct towards customers experiencing financial hardship.
Despite knowing of financial hardship-they state that they will retry a failed direct debit in 3 days but dishonour that with daily attempts that incur a penalty fee, along with an SMS and email to remind you of your "INSUFFICIENT FUNDS".

Do not join this Internet Service Provider. Paid for 500/50, get 70mbps speed in NON-peak hours.
Constant disconnects mean online gaming is unenjoyable as you lose progress every time it randomly disconnect.

They will say it's YOUR fault, it's your modem etc. But with my previous ISP, I never randomly disconnect outside of NBN planned maintenance.

Letsbemates is GARBAGE, don't be sucked in by the cheap prices, pay $20 more for more reliable internet services.

"You get what you paid for" couldn't be a more true phrase here.

I was on Mate’s No Worries 500/50 broadband plan for 12 months. Good value for money & service for the first 6 months ($60/month & no lags); more expensive ($90/month) for the next 4 months but the service was still good (no lags); then a credit card surcharge ($0.90) was added for month 11 and the service declined (lags whilst streaming); then the cost went to $96 with a $0.96 surcharge for month 12 with significant lags whilst streaming. Added to this was their poor support via telephone (very long wait times & seemingly non-existent call back option), inaccurate billing/online balancing; and their cancellation process - you can’t cancel via e-mail or using the app/online account when convenient for you (can only cancel via telephone or LIVE CHAT when it’s operational).

MATE were swapping my home ph, internet, x2 iPads, x4 mobiles much cheaper & faster than telstra, once agreed they swapped internet & home phone only, internet lags, home phone doesn’t work & charging me far more than quoted SCAMMERS

i phoned and cancelled my service with letsbemates and be aware they just keep taking money from your bank account anyway ,i have found out first hand just how dishonest they really are

Trying to cancel service as I moved, revoked direct debit authority in writing - still deducting and still refusing to cancel service - TIO now involved

Extremely dodgy. I sign up with them on the 6th pay $35. So I always thought its been prepaid but not until I want to change to another service provider, they kept sending messages and text everyday stating I own them money, what worse is they add 0.70$ for everyday late while you emailing them to sort things out. At the end guess what, they point out an email when I first bought the sim saying this is the post-paid plan. So why do I have to pay $35 on my first day. What more messed up is they dont charge on the 6th, they charged on the 20th each month and on their tax invoice they do a little bracket (eg. 06/10-06/11) implying you have paid for that period. IF YOU WANTING TO TRY THIS, BE EXTREMELY CAREFUL AND READ ALL OF THE REVIEWS.

I made a review about two weeks ago but ticked the box to allow Mate to try to fix the issue, which was a mistake.
I have an ongoing issue and spend another 20 minutes to talk with the Mate rep who was completely unhelpful. Unfortunately, I have another 11 months and 2 weeks of a contract to run. i have been with Mate for years. They are great at selling a product but there is no support. I am not sure if there is a better company, but I have some time to find one now by reading reviews.
DO NOT SIGN UP WITH THIS COMPANY

If you want constant outages, slow speeds at various times and a dud service for your money, this company is for you! Have to be one of the worst "blow in" internet company's around! Make sure that if silly enough to connect with these (all I care about is my paycheck staff), that you cancel, get confirmation in writing as they will continue to suck funds from your account... All the while, smiling with a Cheshire grin. Hopefully my bank sees right through this pack of parasites and I'm sure the telecommunication ombudsman (next stop) will see right through their FAKE MATES BS

Has been problematic from the very start. I set the account up in our business name with my partner as the primary contact as the SIM was for her. I could then no longer do anything on the account. She 'authorised' me more than once but this never seems to be recorded. You also cannot update your email address in their web portal, and it does not show you full account details such as your current credit balance etc. It looks like it was made with an early version of ChatGPT, and the lack of proper 2FA (TOPT) supports that!

Now on to the crux of it; we changed banks, so updated our payment details. Payments would then frequently fail, for no reason, resulting in the service being suspended. Eventually we had to change to another payment method to fix this (for what it's worth, they just appear to have issue charging ANZ debit cards, and we tried multiple!). We then tried to pay the outstanding amount via direct debit, but the 'make payment' option does not actually take the payment out of the account. We tried two different banks for this, but then ended up having to put a debit card in to make payment and unsuspend the service.

Now the very 'fun' part; a month later we get a pile of SMS notifications about attempted payments; their system has tried to direct debit us for 3x the invoice value, it also tried to direct debit another account for 2x the invoice value, and finally charged our debit card for the actual invoice value. That is all WHILST WE ARE IN CREDIT, which our invoice for those payments even shows! As best I can tell, those attempts at making payment of the outstanding amount saved the direct debit details, including the amount it was trying to charge, and this does not seem to get removed when you add a new payment method.

On logging in to the web portal, we cannot cancel or stop these direct debits, nor see our credit balance, nor add authorised contacts or change our email address. Given this, we don't know how much MATE owes us in credit, and even though they clearly do, it does not seem to get applied to invoices or even give us the option, so the credit is just accruing each month of incorrect billing. Raising an email support ticket and providing all ID verification details was no help, they said my partner has to phone them or use web chat (we've tried, not worth it) during business hours to authorise me (again) on the account.

If I could give less than 1/5 stars I would! Most posts on Reddit appear to support this, as they do on other review sites too. I can only imagine that they try to send happy customers here to keep their rating artificially inflated.

I am a lawyer by profession, not a professional keyboard warrior. I detest writing bad reviews about businesses because of the potential negative effects that may follow. However I must also consider my civic responsibility to let others know of the pitfalls when dealing with a company like Mate.

I signed up with the company on 17 SEP re a 500/50 plan. Since signing up my problems with the company has taken up all my time. Imagine I am now having a download speed of 60-80 Mbps instead of the promised 500 Mbps have been emailing the Support Team and sending them the test results to no avail. They have refused to answer or acknowledge my emails.

I suspect that the problem might be the NBN Modem. As my connection is a HFC, the Modem is supplied by NBN through your Telco. This modem is more than 10 years old and the connection goes dead every now and then. I requested Mate to organise a changeover for me but despite reminders from me, they turned a deaf ear.

Frankly, there is basically NO support from the so-called Support Team. I tried to CHAT with the support team , but after one hour waiting, there was still no response to my query.

Mate tries to portray themselves as local having local support staff. But this is of no use if you do not have the staff to play the roles.
My advice to everyone... Go ahead and sign up with Mate if you are attracted to their promises and competitive prices. But be prepared for a scenario of NO CUSTOMER SUPPORT.

Was planning overseas travel, tried enquiring with LBM, got through to a person day before leaving who said there is no overseas option. I replied that will not work for me I will be cancelling. Couldn't transfer across before departure but get this, every time we landed in a country there was a LBM welcome message and go online for a travel pack!!! No link no support, and the best part no emails or banking to receive a OTP via text, what a ridiculous joke. AVOID AVOID and they've put prices up

Constant dropout, zero support available when you need it. Uncompetitive prices. Now they are increasing prices and adding a surcharge for CC payments. Do yourself a favor and avoid at all costs.

Get internet dropouts every single night at the same time outside of support hours. Contact support via email and they respond the next day saying they ran tests in the morning and it is fine, just for it to drop out again in the evening. No resolution after months of communication and contact with them. They just tell me to power cycle the modem.

Expect 1/4th of the advertised speed. To top that you will have to wait for hours to get to their customer service. Best not be a MATE.

Ive been having internet issues for months now and have called Mate many times. Often the wait time is really long up to an hour and although the technicians were helpful many had limited capacity to help. Eventually I received a new modem but was stilling having issues so they sent an nbn technician who said the nbn was fine and its most likely is a faulty modem. Have just called again and the automatic interent checking service detected a fault and has organised an nbn technician to come out but this was checked only a few weeks ago. Feeling very frustrated and not wanting to get on the phone again and go through the whole process including very long wait times and no resolution. Next step is the Ombudsman.

I got charged 3 times in one month

Issues was resolved

Do not waste your time! An internet speed test test may show a good result, but doesnt show actual network congestion or server issues!!

My hubby (always chasing a good deal) switched us over to Mate without mentioning it. The rest of the family noticed within hours. Terrible internet. Online webex meetings would crash or boot me out, the kids couldn't connect using PCs and PS5. All streaming services buffer without connecting. Is it reliable? I can definitely rely on there to be no connection. I can also rely on this service to disconnect more than 10 times a day. Sure this is a 1st world problem but everything that required the internet would not work. Called Mate 3 times in a week. Every single time they said "we've just run a speed test and it's showing excellent speed." Speed tests dont account for actual issues such as network congestion or overloaded servers. It's just a small ping of data. 1 guy said apparently the wrong port was connected and said he'd fix it. Nope. As you can see from the screenshot of a speed test, it looks like a decent speed, but in the top right corner, my mobile phone cant find the wifi.... The 2nd photo of the Google home was taken within seconds of the speed test... Tomorrow after just a few weeks, we're going back to our old provider as we had no issues at all.
It wasn't a wifi modem issue, nor one with my mobile phone as the modem worked fine beforehand, and after we switched out to another provider it worked perfectly. My mobile phone also didnt have any problems before Mate, after Mate and in other locations such as at work. We followed all the troubleshooting steps provided by the people at Mate when we called and they also agreed the modem appeared to be fine.

Mates don't rip off mates. There's something fishy here. Either their network is garbage, overcrowded or they are actively throttling advertised speeds but leaving speed tests unfiltered.

Streaming results in horrendous buffering everyday, everytime. Tried to change every setting in pfsense, omada controller and clients to get better results and nothing helped until churning to another ISP at half the speed. 25mbps with flip previously was better than 100 on Mate.

Now streaming is instant and perfect. ACCC needs to get involved with this as forums are littered with similar comments.