Vodafone Connect broadband

Thinking of taking advantage of the fact we can ditch BT 12 months into our 24 month contract because of their price hikes.

Vodafone connect look ok, the router in particular seems quite snazzy. Prices are significantly lower than BT.

Vodafone are quite new to the landline broadband business – does anyone have any experience of them?

Google here for Vodafone customer service :-)

Yes but most large companies have terrible cs. BT cs is truly, utterly horrendous. They took 7 weeks to connect us when we moved house and I almost got a hefty bill from my employer because I was’t able to dial in from home so couldn’t work my on-call shifts.

My experiences of VF cs has been fairly positive

Watching with interest, they offered me unlimited fibre broadband for free for a year when I took new phone contract.

Yeah, I’ve had it for about 6 months. Spoiler: I work for them.

And yes, its been fine- on LLU super fast in my area, getting about 30Mbps down, which is good for where I am.
The router is pretty nice, all a domestic user could ever need.

I’m aware of how much work has went on internally to get this up and running, and the core of the network has had billions spent on it- it will also be the focus of business access as well, and has had an interesting build of 10Gbps rings (dual diverse) built around major nodes, so should be reliable.

Like most, if the last mile is LLU, then we’re unfortunately in Openreach’s hands, but they’ve beefed up their SLAs recently so uptime/fixtimes should improve. Service centres are onshore and well-trained and motivated (one centre is based in my local Glasgow office), better than many.

Hmmmm that all sounds very positive. VF must be fuming that Ofcom chickened out of splitting up BT and Openreach!

Am I right in saying VF bought up the old Cable and Wireless infrastructure?

Vodafone DO NOT HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH THEM or you’ll regret it

TBH, VF are being a bit cheeky re OR, but I can see where they are coming from.

Yeah, I was part of that CWW crew (actually predated that) and got subsumed into VF.

Many of the headaches that undermine the ‘business’ part of the business at present can be laid firmly at CWW’s door btw, and the practices that VF have inherited, IMHO. I’m no fanboy- but the domestic angle should be as good as, say, Plusnet, at the very least.

That’s all very well to learn that VF have invested lots of time and money into their broadband landline business, but where does that leave their investment in their mobile network?

Or are they one of the same?

Yeah, thats had billions spent on it too.

The VF mobile network has always been pretty good because the emergency services are significant contractors, so there has been a fair bit of investment into rural reception, signal strength etc.

I’ve been with VF for my mobile since 1998 and never had an issue. Probably been lucky! 4G is lightning fast – I get 50mbps+

Re mobile:

One thing: about 3 years ago, VF ditched the 20 or so systems the retail side used and used a new system based on Siebel.

It was a total disaster. Thats led to a huge jump in complaints- it causes billing issues, service issues, all kinds of crap. Bad ratings all round.

Its being ditched, and in about 6 months time, should be fully consigned to the past and a new system put in place.

Backhaul from the masts well on the West side of the country at least is on the same IP network as the broadband. Same as Cody I was part of CWW.

4G Masts are usually on 1Gig fibre bearers back to a local IP node, where it connects onto the 10Gig rings. BT Openreach FTTC handoff is at the same location.

What does this mean? It means that a lot of ISP’s utilise BT to backhaul their customer traffic to a number of interconnects to the ISP’s own network, as such they are at the mercy of BT and a finite amount of bandwidth shared across a large number of other ISP’s customer traffic as well as their own. In Vodafone’s case as the handover is at the local exchange direct onto the Vodafone IP network then a lots less customer traffic fighting for space on a large amount of bandwidth.

Yes the investment is the same up to a point, well at least from the mast back to the core. Mobile signal coverage and speed is dependent on a lot of factors other than just the backhaul bandwidth but that IP network is seriously beefy and one thing I don’t ever hear about is any congestion on that core.

I’ve been a user of the same broadband since it came out, router works well enough, never had any issues with variable throughput. But always remember you are still at the mercy of BT Openreach and their local cabling performance.

^ what Russell said (we probably know each other Russell…)

FWIW, my broadband was out between 12 on Friday and late last night- the core was fine, immediately locally all was ok, but PPP was failing due a big OR NGA outage. As he says, we’re at the mercy of OR, so we don’t live in perfect world.

But I like the onshore help- like Plusnet, they’re local, and well-trained- in the world we live in, this makes a difference.

Only my experience they are rubbish we moved to new premises in /feb and still on 0.6 download on twisted pair ADSL.fibre line tested and working on phones at last.VF couldn’t wire a 3 pin plug.
fantastic Pinocchio’s, haven’t told a true word yet.When trying to set up was asked numerous times to take photo’s of back of router ? it wasn’t even connected to anything.Lying toerags.Wifes mobile been told about upgrades then sent out Wrong phone every time.We will not use them again on renewal.
Back to the business set up worse than the old dial up.VF not sending any one out to check but last week have said they will send out new Fibre router programmed up for us to swop over to.
You have been warned,also have had problems with the new phone system, had to be reprogrammed at least 3 times and cannot get the main unit to accept any call.
Terrible company to deal with.
The fibre line has been checked and ok from OR for 8 weeks as it was previous company that had it in.

I’m getting 74mbps downstream with BT now (just checked) so the LLU infrastructure seems ok – I just fancy paying a bit less. I suspect BT rely on a huge section of the customer base taking the easy option and never shopping around.

Changing email address is a pain but I planned ahead years ago and forward all emails to my main gmail address, so switching ISP shouldn’t be too traumatic. I’m certainly not paying BT £5/month just for the privilege of keeping my email address!

Please no more BB bragging – 1.5Mbps here, no chance of fibre or Vodafone. Middle of nowhere? No just S Cotswolds 3mi from Stroud.

Quick update – decided to switch and very glad I did!

It took four phone calls to BT, including one where I waited 15mins to get through, to cancel the contract. Even then BT have sent me emails, letters and texts to say I owe them the remaining value of the contract, which I clearly don’t. Shambles.

Vodafone – a single, 7 minute phone call to arrange everything, router sent out by DPD, everything works as planned. Regular text updates & reminders (to plug router in) during the wait for switchover day

My only issue is the fact the Voda router is slightly limited with advanced features, so sorting US Netflix might be a challenge (can’t see how to manually set a DNS server). I’ve also heard that the Voda router network switch isn’t brilliant and can fall over with heavy traffic (I use a netgear 8 port switch anyway), and Voda won’t publicise the router login details which means I can’t upgrade to a better router.

Go to Advanced Settings/Firewall on the router control panel page and turn off secure DNS

Give it time Vodafone are shambolic, there’s a reason emergency services actually don’t use them.