Is Vodafone fibre any good?

mdaw

mdaw

mdaw

Associate
Joined
18 Apr 2013
Posts
606
Hi all,

I'm currently with Sky for broadband at the mo and have had no issues with standard broadband speeds. On my desktop windows regularly shows download speeds of between 10-16mbps when updating games etc. I would like to get fibre unlimited as I'm going to be doing more streaming but have seen Vodafone offering 76mb fibre for the same as Sky's 38mb fibre.

Question is do I stick with what I know that seems reliable or take the plunge and risk things changing for the worse. I've seen horror stories where this has been the case when people change companies?

Not sure how far from my nearest cabinet I am, so whether that makes a difference or not with certain providers I don't know.
 
The distance to the cabinet will make a big difference to the available speed (but the same for all providers).

Use the availability checker here https://www.dslchecker.bt.com. It'll give you a good indication of what speed you should expect on VDSL.

If your line is with Sky you'll probably need to use the Address Checker instead of your phone number.
 
Yeah I did need to use address rather than phone number. It says I'm using cabinet 32. Just not sure where that is. The numbers did look good. Think it said I could get 80mb.
VDSL range A clean- downstream: high 80, low 80. Upstream high 20 and low 20
VDSL range B (inspected)- downstream: high 80, low 65.4. upstream high 20 and low 19
 
No idea how good/bad Vodafone fibre is.

Your connection should definitely be fast enough to make choosing 80/20 over 40/10 worthwhile.

It's worth talking to Sky and telling them you're thinking of moving your broadband to Vodafone. They may do you a deal on Sky Fibre Max.
 
ov_sjo said:
Why wouldn't you just upgrade your existing Sky ADSL to VDSL (fibre)?
Click to expand...

Simple. Vodafone's deal is better than sky. With Sky I would pay about £28 for 38mb and I would pay the same with Vodafone for potentially 76mb. So I might as well get the best connection possible as long as they aren't going to be rubbish. If people are able to tell me their experience with Vodafone then I can make an informed decision as to whether it's worth the move. Also I think Vodafone's router is more upto date than the sky hub. Think I have the sr102. I would be more interested if they would give me a sky q hub. That only has 2 ethernet ports though from what I have seen.
 
KIA said:
Sure, if you'll be happy using Vodafone's router.
Click to expand...

Yeah I would use it as long as I'm not told it's total rubbish. Then I wouldn't bother with Vodafone in general. I'm not looking to buy a super router. Companies own supplied routers have normally worked ok for me. I can't get virgin where I live so it's not possible for me to go over 100mb which my sky router can go to so I don't necessarily need a all singing and dancing router. As long as wifi distance is decent and ethernet connection to my computer is near what they state for speed I will be happy.
 
You have no choice over using the Vodafone router. It's OK but has few advanced features and it is underpowered if you have a lot of devices. I have to sit another router behind it, offload the workload and double NAT or else performance is woeful on its own.
 
Just ordered this yesterday and just seen the limitations of there router, not to fussed about performance (lived with a sky router for some time now and it works well enough for me). But lacking the ability to turn off dhcp seems pretty dumb!
How does it handle NAT?

I'm now very likely to cancel my order over that.
 
bremen1874 said:
Why would you want to disable DHCP?
Click to expand...

manageability & setting own dns etc without having to use static ip's (ie opendns for parental controls), i could stick a router behind it but id rather keep the number of devices to a min.

such a simple thing as well :confused:

unless of course it allows you full control of the dhcp options, but if its anything like BT/Sky's setup the lack of proper control is quite frustrating.
 
I can''t remember if the new firmware now enables the disabling of DHCP.

There are two other options:

1. Nag their online customer support to try and get your username and password to use your own router. Some people have had success but equally I'm hearing that was in error and they're clamping back down

2. If double NAT doesn't bother you then do what I do and set a static route on the Vodafone router to a second one and configure that how you like and get everything to connect to it, switching off everything you can find on the Vodafone router. I used to do it with an Asus 68U thing but moved to a Ubiquiti setup with an ERL and 2x APs and it works just fine. VF connect used to constantly be maxing out on CPU and memory load when I tried it on its own and the ERL barely breaks a sweat.
 
So what sort of speed are you getting BigT? Also how many devices did you find it took before being slow? I don't tend to use more than 3 things at once, 4 at a push if things are left on and sky is downloading a programme. Could potentially have PC and ps4 gaming at same time I suppose that might be an issue. What do you think?
 
I'm not a good candidate to measure speeds. I live so far from the cabinet that I only get 4-5mbps on a 76mbps fibre package. To be honest it was comparable to BT.

Are you sure only four or five connected devices? The devices rack up easily. For me 2 x laptops, 3 x NAS , 2 x phones , 2 x tablets , printer, 2 x airports , 2 x Smart TV , 3 x Amazon sticks , Hive , kindles, IP phone etc. etc.

The poor performance was not every device active using lots of bandwidth all the time, it simply didn't cope with more than a dozen on the network doing what a router does to keep chattering to the devices. Router CPU load constantly high and it seemed to reduce wifi speeds and had random disconnects. Tried two connect routers and they were the same. New firmware seems better, but I gave up and run a dual router setup now with the Vodafone needing to do nothing other than use its modem to connect and use a static route to my router, no wifi enabled, no firewall etc. That's all done at the next router in the chain.

If you really have four devices only and don't need advanced router features I'm sure you'll be fine.
 
No we don't run loads of devices at once. TV can connect but never seems to anymore. Never use the smart functions on it anyway. So that leaves my computer, 2 phones, sky box, ps4, android box and occasionally my Mrs work laptop that actually connect. Very unlikely that we would ever have all on at the same time. So 5 is the max really if we were being lazy and not turning things off when not being used.

Judging by the availability shown on the specs I posted above does that mean I am probably pretty close to my nearest cabinet as it shows 80 to 20?
 
Yes you must be reasonably close. To give you reassurance, the checker says 4.1 - 10 as the downstream range for me. Every time they do a line reset it syncs at about 9 and then when DLM kicks in it slowly works its way down to about 4.5 on each disconnect at which point it remains stable.

See if you can physically find your cabinet to give yourself reassurance. There's a guide here: http://www.kitz.co.uk/adsl/cabinet-lookup.htm

And this is a pretty good graph to give you a rough idea of how VDSL degrades over distance from the cabinet: http://www.increasebroadbandspeed.co.uk/2013/chart-bt-fttc-vdsl2-speed-against-distance
 
Vodafone have a pretty good network, I've done design and consulting work for them previously - they currently have a lot of spare capacity, so if you move to them - you're unlikely to experience any congestion for quite a while, they're well funded and have good equipment and UK support
 
Their backhaul network is great, but IME as a fibre customer the limitations are always with Openreach owned infrastructure between the exchange and home via the cabinets. Thus speed is pretty much consistent into the home no matter what provider and then it comes down to stuff like wifi performance of the router in the house if you stick with the supplier's equipment.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom