Vodafone broadband any good?

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So it seems that Vodafone has the cheapest broadband at the moment, at just £25 for 40 mbit. Does anyone have them? How are they in retards to connection quality, latency and speed?
 
It's FTTC, the connections don't vary that much I find between providers as they all use Openreach to get to your home. I'm with Vodafone and up until recently there was no way I would have renewed. This was because their Connect router couldn't cope with the number of devices I connected to it, there was no way to swap it for your own and it locked down so many features that you couldn't do much to bypass it.

This has changed now and they give out credentials so you can use your own kit and the newer firmwares have opened up some features. I still think it is a vastly under powered piece of kit for a modern connected home.

Thus one can judge it on price and support on how it differentiates itself. I've had better experiences with support compared to BT. The headline price is obviously very keen but be warned there are a lot of charges that are more expensive than other ISPs if something goes wrong and it's your fault or you want to change something. Credit to @MissChief for pointing these out in another thread:

Vodafone Connect Service & Maintenance charges
Description Charge
Missed engineer appointment charge £110.00
Amend Order (prior to install) £15.00
Late cancellation of order - any time or day after 12pm (noon) two working days before your scheduled visit
£60.00
Connection Charge ( new line provision) £60.00
Connection Charge (for Fibre only) £30.00
Fault within customer premises - first hour charge £115.00
Fault within customer premises - hourly charge (chargeable after the first hour) £52.00
Customer requested service visit - phone socket relocation £130.00
Customer requested service visit - additional phone socket relocation £65.00
Replacement Vodafone Connect router £130
Failure to return Vodafone Connect router (for cancelled orders) £130
Vodafone Connect router returned in a damaged state (other than fair wear and tear)
£55
SureSignal discount removal (for cancelled orders) £40
Special Fault Investigation £150.00
and/or + Special Fault Investigation - Internal wiring issue £35.00
and/or + Special Fault Investigation - Internal equipment issue £22.00
Transfer of account ownership £20.00
Home phone number change £25.00
 
BigT said:
It's FTTC, the connections don't vary that much I find between providers as they all use Openreach to get to your home. I'm with Vodafone and up until recently there was no way I would have renewed. This was because their Connect router couldn't cope with the number of devices I connected to it, there was no way to swap it for your own and it locked down so many features that you couldn't do much to bypass it.

This has changed now and they give out credentials so you can use your own kit and the newer firmwares have opened up some features. I still think it is a vastly under powered piece of kit for a modern connected home.

Thus one can judge it on price and support on how it differentiates itself. I've had better experiences with support compared to BT. The headline price is obviously very keen but be warned there are a lot of charges that are more expensive than other ISPs if something goes wrong and it's your fault or you want to change something. Credit to @MissChief for pointing these out in another thread:

Vodafone Connect Service & Maintenance charges
Description Charge
Missed engineer appointment charge £110.00
Amend Order (prior to install) £15.00
Late cancellation of order - any time or day after 12pm (noon) two working days before your scheduled visit
£60.00
Connection Charge ( new line provision) £60.00
Connection Charge (for Fibre only) £30.00
Fault within customer premises - first hour charge £115.00
Fault within customer premises - hourly charge (chargeable after the first hour) £52.00
Customer requested service visit - phone socket relocation £130.00
Customer requested service visit - additional phone socket relocation £65.00
Replacement Vodafone Connect router £130
Failure to return Vodafone Connect router (for cancelled orders) £130
Vodafone Connect router returned in a damaged state (other than fair wear and tear)
£55
SureSignal discount removal (for cancelled orders) £40
Special Fault Investigation £150.00
and/or + Special Fault Investigation - Internal wiring issue £35.00
and/or + Special Fault Investigation - Internal equipment issue £22.00
Transfer of account ownership £20.00
Home phone number change £25.00
Click to expand...

Do any of those extra charged actually matter, don't think it's likely will even run into any. Also there is £0 one off free, where does that connection charge come from? Is that router you are complaining about their latest router, because from what I see it is quite decent, gigabit Ethernet, ac Wi-Fi, and are there any issues with firewall, network settings, firewall etc...? I know all providers use Openreach, but do they all share the same internal network capacity, so if an area didn't have enough bandwidth would all providers be affected equally or would each provider have separate capacity (so for example a budget provider could suffer lack of bandwidth are therefore throttling compared to a decent provider).
 
Dark Light said:
Do any of those extra charged actually matter, don't think it's likely will even run into any. Also there is £0 one off free, where does that connection charge come from? Is that router you are complaining about their latest router, because from what I see it is quite decent, gigabit Ethernet, ac Wi-Fi, and are there any issues with firewall, network settings, firewall etc...? I know all providers use Openreach, but do they all share the same internal network capacity, so if an area didn't have enough bandwidth would all providers be affected equally or would each provider have separate capacity (so for example a budget provider could suffer lack of bandwidth are therefore throttling compared to a decent provider).
Click to expand...

No I don't think those charges matter as I've never done anything to need to incur them, but you should know them in any case.

Connection charge I would guess is if you need a new line provisioned - most people don't.

Router I have is 14 months old, no idea if it is the latest but it has all the features you describe. What I do know is that with 50 devices in a large home, it doesn't cope well. Less devices close to the router was fine, for my use case though it wasn't. To be fair that's probably true of all ISP provided routers, so if you have no issues with your current router with your current service provider then I'm sure you won't have any problems with the Connect router either.

Can't answer your question on internal network capacity, but since they use Cable and Wireless's backhaul infrastructure then I'm sure it's fine. Given the modest speeds I can achieve (physical limitations and nothing to do with ISP) then I'm probably not a good barometer on things like throttling etc. but I've never had any problems with downloads or latency for example.
 
Brilliant, switched over from BT earlier this year, over £30/month cheaper.

Had one small issue where the speed dropped below the promised level, had an engineer out the next day and back to my full speed a day after that.

Got straight through on the phone and the operator actually listened to what I had to say when i explained what i'd already tried.
 
Ayahuasca said:
@SixTwoSix No fee for the engineer callout either?
Click to expand...

Nope, I clarified on the call before if there would be any charge. They implicitly stated there would be no charge regardless of the outcome, even if it turned out i'd inadvertently done something wrong.

The only charge I would face was if I wasn't around at the pre-arranged time slot and they had a wasted visit.
 
@SixTwoSix Good to know cheers. I've placed an order and the above had me a little worried that the deal may not turn out to be as good as hoped if charges ever occured for things like that, as one callout fee would pretty much cancel out any savings over another provider.
 
£16.33/m and then knock the Quidco or TCB off and it's stupidly cheap. I've not looked to see what the price difference on going 80/20 would be or even if it's an option, but the £5/simdiscount means you also get decent sim only deals for £2-3/month after cash back and offers.
 
Avalon said:
£16.33/m and then knock the Quidco or TCB off and it's stupidly cheap. I've not looked to see what the price difference on going 80/20 would be or even if it's an option, but the £5/simdiscount means you also get decent sim only deals for £2-3/month after cash back and offers.
Click to expand...

What is Quidco\TCB? Do you get £150 off plus another £110 voucher?

Sounds like it could be a good deal, although Vodafone does offer a free static ip.
 
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