Any experiences of Vodaphone Broadband?

mattyfez

mattyfez

mattyfez

Soldato
Joined
12 Apr 2007
Posts
12,209
Currently on Plusnet 38?mbps + phione line, FTTC

It works fine for me but they jacked the price up from £23 to £26 per month a few months back, ...and won't do me a deal.

My contracts up next month and I see Voda are doing twice the speed for £25 per month - that would actually be usefull as I don't need the speed day to day, but it would be nice for downloading 100gb+ games.

My street has recently been kitted out with what looks like fiber to the telegraph pole, but presumably the Voda deal I'm looking at is still FTTC as it's less than 100mbps and comes with a digital landline number, but I have more options now.

I don't really need crazy speeds, and really don't want to spend more than £25 per month. I also don't care about having a traditional phone line, I only have one as a means for internet connectivity.

Any Vodaphone customers care to chime in?

Cheers!
 
Lots of people with bad experiences here, I'm sure they'll chime in shortly. Their routing is particularly bad and support terrible from what I remember others have said. I think it depends where in the country you are.
 
Last edited:
I swapped from BT to Vodafone about 6ish months ago.
I was paying £60pm for (iirc) 300 mbps and they wanted to jack it up to £65pm for the same, so I had a look around for cheaper.
I originally tried to set up with Talk Talk, but it was an absolute disaster from start to finish, I set it up online and was waiting for a confirmation email that never arrived, then had to keep chasing it up via phone, but kept getting through to an Indian(?) call centre who were hopeless even when I could understand them.
I eventually got through to some woke uninterested halfwit in the UK who then (i'm not kidding) accused me of assuming someones race when I mentioned the call centre.
So, that was me done with Talk Talk.
At the time Vodafone were offering 500mbps for £30pm so I set it up online and everything they said they'd do they did, and I've never ever had a single problem, nor has it ever dipped below 500mbps and is usually around 550/560.
Couldn't be happier with them.
 
And I had broadband 60mbps from Vodafone.. Unimpressed, thou must say I did got speed I was paying for. Firewalls on Vodafone were too aggressive.
Traditional copper phone is fading and a: you really don't want to go that, because providers will have even less incentive to go full fibre in your area and b: it is being faded gradually across country anyway, believe in 2025 they will completely abandon copper as new installs connectivity medium across country. So sooner you'll incentivise theym to go fibre, sooner you'll get proper speed for whatever money you pay now..
 
Not exactly confidence inspiring...

I just logged into my Plusnet account... wow

But I can upgrade now to full fiber '74mb' for £25.99 a month... guess i'll just do that then, seems as good a deal as any.
:eek:
:confused:
:rolleyes:




But I can upgrade now to full fiber '74mb' for £25.99 a month... guess i'll just do that then, seems as good a deal as any. :eek::confused::rolleyes:
 
Last edited:
I have vodafone 900/900 via cityfibre

The speed is always great except for steam which maxes out at 70-100MB/s whereas origin, battlenet, epic all hit 117MB/s. They don't use CGNAT and you can get a static IP for free.

Customer support is pretty terrible. They don't really assist beyond basic troubleshooting (reboot, use a wired connection etc.). Installation communication between them and cityfibre was terrible, wrong times given to myself and the installers. They did honour a broken referal by just crediting my account with the money.

Routing is also bad. I am in Edinburgh, there is a gateway in Edinburgh. My traffic all goes through Leeds. It's not too bad as most traffic goes/comes from that direction anyway but there are numerous stories of people on the South coast having their traffic go through Edinburgh.

They only seem to do 2 year contracts with the stupid CPI + 3.9% price rise which was 14% last year.
 
Disco_P said:
Routing is also bad. I am in Edinburgh, there is a gateway in Edinburgh. My traffic all goes through Leeds.
Click to expand...
Out of curiosity what do you ping bbc.co.uk in? I can get about 15ms east of Edinburgh on BT FTTC.

Most English people I see on Vodafone forums complain about getting routed to Edinburgh for what is likely due to congestion problems so lowkey if you're in Scotland, Vodafone might be a good choice.

Then again I don't understand why Vodafone route people to Edinburgh and the like. Aren't most servers based in London so you have to always push that bandwidth to already congested servers anyway right?
 
Currently with them for fibre, although I have been with them for FTTC before a few years back and the one time I had an issue, an engineer was out the next day to sort it, their support was fairly standard, not great, not terrible.

With regards latency on my current fibre connection, it's essentially identical to my previous BT fibre connection.
 
Last edited:
GregI said:
Out of curiosity what do you ping bbc.co.uk in? I can get about 15ms east of Edinburgh on BT FTTC.

Most English people I see on Vodafone forums complain about getting routed to Edinburgh for what is likely due to congestion problems so lowkey if you're in Scotland, Vodafone might be a good choice.

Then again I don't understand why Vodafone route people to Edinburgh and the like. Aren't most servers based in London so you have to always push that bandwidth to already congested servers anyway right?
Click to expand...
I get 7ms to bbc.co.uk, so definitely not bad but it should be 2-3ms. There is a lot of servers in Edinburgh and Manchester for the huge networks so not all traffic has to go to London.

Regardless, I did get this gem from Vodafone support when I asked to leave:

ZHdYo12.png


Guy was just terrible, would not recognise that Zen, Brawband and Brillband (all who are available to me and have no price rises) exist and just kept copying and pasting from BT, EE, Virgin and the like.

He disconnected in the end without processing my request.
 
That's pretty terrible, what a sarcastic ****!
I mean CPI increaces are built into most broadband contracts now... so they are technically right but it's just an excuse to squeeze every customer for an extra bit every month, which if you have millions of customers, is a vast amount of cash.

It's partly why I almost left plusnet, as they hiked my ~£23 per month bill for a 36mb connection to ~£26 per month... and the renewal was going to be £30 per month ???

Signed up now with plusnet again for 74mb for...£26 but its a 24month contract rather than 18 months, and no phone line any more...

And I don't really need the speed, I'd be fine on a 36mb connection for £20 per month, but that's not really a thing, it seems...always feel like your getting ripped off a bit.
 
Last edited:
Had Vodafone before and found them very good, 1st time I used them no problems very helpful done what they said. I then switched to a cheaper supplier a year later (remember 12 months contracts).

Then went back to them, year later left for a better deal, the. When moved went back to Vodafone but they couldn't get the speed I paid for so cancelled the policy let me keep the free Sonos deal, and refunded the couple of months I paid for. A year and a bit went back to Vodafone, was great but then their firewall started blocking my heating system which caused a fair amount of aggravation, so switched to now TV .

Now broadband isn't great, the router is a heap of junk. Needs regular resets as the WiFi slows right down.

They've now also jacked the price from £25 to £40 per month, so trying to go gigaclear now, but there playing silly buggers so we'll see.

I rate Vodafone tbh.
 
Dazzy said:
Do you know whether this routing issue is specific to the City Fibre connection or also an issue on Vodafone Openreach lines?
Click to expand...
I'm on the 500 mb/s Pro service from Vodafone but sitting on Openreach since March last year.

I had 4 month stint of being routed through Edinburgh (I'm 30 miles south of Birmingham), this eventually sorted itself out and I now breakout through London (though if I geosearch my IP it thinks I'm in Newport (South Wales) which though better than Edinburgh still isn't local to me.

Vodafone seem to prioritise bandwidth over latency I gather from my interactions with them. So I have always got the bandwidth I pay for but only so so latency for a fttp connection.

Having said that it's been a reliable and even with the mid contract price rise I'm still paying <£37 (I originally signed up at £32per month with £150 Amazon credit and 4G backup).

Overall verdict is they are "OK" for the price I pay, support does seem pretty bad (even though on the Pro package you're supposed to get a higher quality of support (UK call centre etc)) but certainly no worse than BT whom I was with before.

Come renewal I've got to decide if to pay the extra for a boutique ISP (like Acquis) or go for another mass market provider and accept the limitations that brings. Voda certainly haven't been bad enough to want to leave if they offer a decent renewal though.
 
Last edited:
Another thing to add about Voda is the supplied router has a ridiculously slow UI and as mentioned above certain foibles to it's operation.

I've actually ditched it the last 3 months or so and am using a Raspberry Pi4 running Openwrt (it was originally just to experiment with SQM) as it performs better and is just as reliable! (I use a separate AP for WiFi so that isn't a consideration).
 
Last edited:
I had VF broadband (VDSL) various issues with line (openreach tbf did turn up and run tests and sort a couple of issues out the best they could), their CS left a fair amount to be desired, forums help was useful, and the router (VF pro & wifi hub rectangular grey thing) dropping for an hour or longer overnight & sometimes couldn't reconnect without reboots, could never solve. Moved to plusnet (rock solid so far), roughly 4 weeks before CityFibre starterd upgrading with FTTPole :o:(
I'd be interested to see how FTTP with VF gets on, as they were advertising 900mbps for £25/6 last week, as a mobile customer I'd be tempted to try next year, though comments above still don't make me want to

@OP: if you haven't already, you wish to enter your details on CityFibres website to see other providers options in your area, though you will get junk mail through the door, does have unsubscribe blurb somewhere on it.
 
Last edited:
I had dsl with them and left asap. Was slower than Sky, router needed rebooting, support was worse than useless.
 
Disco_P said:
Routing is also bad. I am in Edinburgh, there is a gateway in Edinburgh. My traffic all goes through Leeds. It's not too bad as most traffic goes/comes from that direction anyway but there are numerous stories of people on the South coast having their traffic go through Edinburgh.
Click to expand...

Laughably, after much BS i managed to somehow get some service today and i'm in Sheffield and my gateway is Edinburgh. Want to swap gateways lol?
Jumping ship from this, can't be dealing with nearly a 100% increase in latency because of bad networking.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom