Vodafone Broadband Rant!

[2004typer]

Hi All,

Just need to vent off at the incompetence of Vodafone!

TLDR : Vodafone are an incompetent shower of *****. Edit: I'll take this back, got through to a helpful Vodafone rep. today (10.05) - see post no. 4.



Back story first of all - have put an order in for BT FTTP, was due to go live on 19th March, but due to the eldest daughter having Corona Virus symptoms at the time the engineer wasn't able to attend - cue a panicked phone call to Vodafone to cancel the line takeover. All went well, Vodafone did this and implicitly stated that my service will stay live until BT do a subsequent line takeover request - as far as I thought all was then sorted, 5*'s to Vodafone.

BT have rebooked for 22 June due to the COVID situation.

Come 4pm this afternoon the connection drops. Did all the usual checks on router but no joy, so gave Vodafone a call, only to be told that I've now been fully disconnected due to a disconnection request, and there is sod all they can do.

In no circumstances had I, nor BT put a request in for disconnection (spoke to BT after my chat with Vodafone to query this).

After going round in circles on the phone for an hour with Vodafone I eventually relented and thought what the heck am I going to do for the next 6 weeks without an internet connection.

My backup plan was a 4g router or tethering, but the speeds are dire (only getting about 3 megs inside), so basically pretty much stuffed for working from home as of Monday.

Just after this though, got talking to the neighbours - also been having connection issues today (they are not with Vodafone) - so my initial suspicion that there are issues with the Openreach network was actually correct.

Surprise surprise - come 9pm, my connection with Vodafone is back on.....even though I was told unequivocally that I had been disconnected and was no longer a customer.

Clearly - I'm relieved it's back on, but I'll be back on the phone tomorrow to ask what the heck is going on.

Note - no issue with my bill, always paid on time by direct debit, with last payment being only just over two weeks ago.

Seems to me that they don't know their a**e from their elbow, and the departments clearly have no internal communications.

Looking forward to speaking to them to see what the next fairytale is.

Sorry for the long post - had to get this off my chest (and if any peeps here work for Vodafone might be of interest to you).

 

[steve5424]

Can't say I'm surprised.

I used to work for Vodafone and was part of the 100% UK based HBB team. Everything from beginning to end was based in Glasgow. About 2 years ago they decided to start shipping off some backend stuff to Egypt and then eventually the care and support teams too. I moved to customer relations for mobile as that was becoming more UK based. We ran a great department and were there from the beging of the companies HBB service. We could easily access all systems and speak with our tech team on the floor above us.

Any problems or issues could be worked out and easily tracked or indeed if we found a process that didn't work we put in to have it changed.

They actually sent a few of our guys to Egypt to train them on everything! The issues with ceases or connections not going to plan we could also work out by logging into Openreach and tracking all sections of the order. I always felt that shipping broadband support offshore was a bad idea as they were a lot further away and also not likely to be using a similar network so also not having English as a first language may not fully comprehend everything. Eg sometimes on our systems the order to transfer out would cancel but the Openreach order on their system would stay active. Or vice versa if a customer jointing us was changed or cancelled. I did the job for 3 years and have a vast knowledge of Openreach and how the network and services work.

Anyway I got made redundant last may when eventually all our customer relations roles were then moved to Manchester. The company really knows how to take something great and royally mess it up.

 

[Avalon]

Vodafone are generally not the best, but the issues tend to be the Vodafone core network/CS, not the OR side of things. Your issue seems to be OR actioned the request exchange side, despite Vodafone cancelling the request, OR then realised the error or acted on the cancellation and you were re-provisioned, not ideal, but it happens. As to the wider OR issue you mention, it’s highly unlikely to be an OR network issue, they do exist, but generally speaking they are relatively few and far between. It’s much more likely to be a CPE issue - eg the bits after the master socket up to and including the big bag of water that usually lacks the ability to correctly diagnose the issue or understand the variables involved (some refer to them as customers?).

 

[2004typer]

Cheers for the replies.

All sorted - have just spoke to Vodafone and now have confirmation it will stay on, so have no idea what the Vodafone rep. was reading yesterday.

I know they record their calls, thus have stated a clear instruction not to do any disconnection until I phone, or BT put the request to confirm this (I'm not even bothered if it means I pay for a month that I won't be using after the BT connection goes live).

As above - I think it very much depends who you get through to. Pretty sure I reached a UK call centre today, but an outsourced one yesterday.

Kids are happy too.......as you can imagine lol.

 

[steve5424]

Just FYI not every call gets recorded.

 

[Caged]

They actually sent a few of our guys to Egypt to train them on everything!

I appreciate that people might not have felt they had any other option but if you get asked to do this then you either find a way to get out of it, or you do a terrible job. I was doing work experience nearly 20 years ago with the IT team at Tesco who were being asked to assist with offshoring their jobs and the entire team there were basically engaging in sabotage.