Vodaphone Broadband

[billytheghillie]

Anyone use Vodafone for there broadband?  if not who is a good supplier, currently with B.T. and its carp. P.S. I stay out in the sticks.

[Bazooka Joe]

I'm with Voda atm, I haven't got any complaints with the service they supply with the BB, unlike what I have regarding their mobile network, kicked into touch lately.

I live in a village on the outskirts & get 40meg hardwired, 20-25 wireless,

IIRC you can check on their website what you'll get, sure they guarantee speed if not you get a refund, & one of the cheapest around the £20 mark.

[Ttfjlc]

I'm hoping you get good replies as we're changing to Vodafone's broadband on the 26th! 

[Salmo9]

Just 'upgraded' to EE rural broadband.. Seems OK at the moment with circa 37Mb download and 28Mb upload speeds. I'm waiting to see if there's any potential degradation once the leaves start sprouting. Go to their website and watch the rural broadband video..

Ordered the EE house hub over the phone and for an extra £100.00, their contractors fitted an external antenna..Dropped a bit of a clanger  though and only signed up for the 10Gb package but now realise that's not enough.. Can't upgrade till August so they're charging me twenty quid for an extra 20Gb..

Edited April 22, 2018 by Salmo9
Gigabit Megabit mixup..

[JohnfromUK]

There are two restrictions to speed (bandwidth) on wired/fibre systems;

1. Infrastructure.  Unless you live in a 'fibre to the home' connected area, you will probably get a 'fibre to the cabinet' system, with a copper 'old style' phone wire from the cabinet to your house.  This is supplied in almost all cases by 'Openreach', a BT subsidiary who own the cables, cabinets, fibres etc.  If you are close (low 100 yards) to the 'cabinet', you may get approaching 100 MB, but as the distance from the cabinet increases, the speed you can get will reduce.  If you are a long way from the cabinet, even low !0s of MB may be optimistic.  Some (few now) may not even have access to 'fibre to the cabinet', being dependant on a copper wire all the way back to the exchange.  This will be slower still.
2. The Provider.  If you are fibre to the home, you can get lightning fast speeds, but understandably, faster speed packages cost more.  For the majority on 'fibre to the cabinet', the speed may be limited by the system, or the provider may (on some packages) restrict it further.  This enables them to 'share' bandwidth, and so offer lower cost.  No provider can deliver a real speed faster than the infrastructure can support, so unless you have 'fibre to the home', that will limit what any provider can actually supply.  Unfortunately, it doesn't stop them offering "up to xxxMB" deals that can never deliver anywhere near the quoted limit.

I have no experience of wireless (i.e. radio/satellite) based systems.

Edited April 23, 2018 by JohnfromUK

[krugerandsmith]

10 hours ago, billytheghillie said:

Anyone use Vodafone for there broadband?  if not who is a good supplier, currently with B.T. and its carp. P.S. I stay out in the sticks.

I am in the process of switching away from Bt they have ripped me off long enough. they do not look after their loyal customers.   Going over to Plusnet   ( Who in all probability belong to BT ).

[oldypigeonpopper]

2 minutes ago, krugerandsmith said:

I am in the process of switching away from Bt they have ripped me off long enough. they do not look after their loyal customers.   Going over to Plusnet   ( Who in all probability belong to BT ).

hello, i found plus net just as bad, so i changed to SSE, phoned to advise on a bad connection, after 30 minuites with no answer i gave up, i shall find another provider when contract ends

 

[KFC]

Interested to see what others recommend.

I've been with EE for years and, because their broadband copper service had been stable and good at 17mb then I decided to stay with them when I upgraded to 38mb fibre in March.

It started off good at 38mb but, within an hour, it dropped out and it has been like that, dropping out once or twice an hour every day since and is down to 10meg down 1meg up.

EE sent out an engineer who said it was an Openreach fault. Openreach sent out an engineer who did a lift and shift but said he couldn't find a fault. EE kicked it back to Openreach  who sent out a 'specialist' engineer' who also said 'no fault found'.

EE sent out a new router. No change so they said they would kick it back to Openreach and it should be sorted within 3-5 days.

I've given them a week but heard nothing and it's still carp so I'm going to knock it on the head today but not hopeful if there's still a fault on the line.

Credit to EE in that I can go straight to their service centre and speak to someone who has a full set of notes on the problem and they are trying to help but I do wonder if there's a fundamental problem with their 'Smart' hubs.

Being a conspiracy theorist I wonder if there may be an advantage to BT if their competitors don't get perfect broadband through Openreach.

[JohnfromUK]

15 minutes ago, KFC said:

I wonder if there may be an advantage to BT if their competitors don't get perfect broadband through Openreach

EE is owned by BT anyway.

https://ee.co.uk/help/ee-is-now-part-of-bt

 

[KFC]

58 minutes ago, JohnfromUK said:

EE is owned by BT anyway.

https://ee.co.uk/help/ee-is-now-part-of-bt

 

Yeah, I know John but BT  probably had to convince the Monopolies and Mergers Commission so they might have given an assurance that they would be run as separate companies.

However, if customers find that their EE service is not stable so they voluntarily change to BT which then proves to be stable, well, it helps bring it under one brolly, so to speak.

Told you I was a conspiracy theorist

My thinking though is that, according to the symptoms, it would appear to be a fault between home and the exchange so I could be out of the frying pan into the fire if I change ISP's. At least it's possible to talk to EE.

[oldypigeonpopper]

hello, so BT owns EE and plusnet ?

[JohnfromUK]

1 minute ago, KFC said:

My thinking though is that, according to the symptoms, it would appear to be a fault between home and the exchange so I could be out of the frying pan into the fire if I change ISP's. At least it's possible to talk to EE.

I am with BT, and a couple of years ago I had a problem, poor broadband speed (was on ASDL not 'Infinity' then) and phone playing up (incoming calls only giving one ring, noisy line).  It came and went - being bad in poor weather.

Fault reporting was useless (they couldn't fina a fault remotely) - and after a great trial of patience from me in dealing with their call centre, they eventually sent an engineer (Openreach).  He arrived on time and was excellent and soon spotted cable insulation where it came down the outside of the house was cracked and letting water in.  This meant that when dried out in the sun, all was well, but when wet, it caused a partial short circuit and a 'rectified loop' (which was causing the single bell rings).  Cherry picker summoned straight away and whole cable replaced back to the pole same day.  Been good ever since.

I know people have lots of problems with BT and Openreach, but once I got through the initial 'firewall' at the call centre, they were very good in my case.

[Eyefor]

We were with PlusNet for many years but the customer service deteriorated from excellent to dire since they were taken over by BT.

Recently we switched to John Lewis (phone & broadband - strangely, provided by PlusNet) who were much cheaper (even PlusNet refused to match their price) and they have a dedicated customer service team with service that you would expect from John Lewis.

Vodafone moved the mast in our village and the signal went from full strength to near zero so all of our vodafone calls are now routed via WiFi which is really good. Problem solved.

 

 

Edited April 23, 2018 by Eyefor

[KFC]

Update on my previous posts.

BT engineer spent 3 hours here this morning checking everything from the exchange to home. He eventually found some errors on one part of the line and he said that these were not normally significant enough to cause the drop-outs that I'd been plagued with. However, he did some tekernickel twidderlee tweekee bits to the line ( I was a mekanick not eelecktrishun) and he could no longer detect the remote errors of which he spoke.

The line has been back up for 6 hours now without fault and it's back to running a solid 40down x 10up so, hopefully, it's all fixed now.

I'm not too bothered about things going wrong but it's the service I get when it does that counts for me. I was always able to talk directly to a service rep at EE. Although the length of time it took to find the fault was a bit frustrating, it was a process of elimination, it was a UK help desk and they didn't try to fob me off.

Of course, as I suspected, there was no point in me changing ISP because the fault would have persisted.

As for my  conspiracy theory? That's well and truly debunked

For now I'm happy to stay with EE.

 

[JohnfromUK]

Firstly, I'm glad you have it resolved - and hope it stays so.  Secondly, the actual engineers, when you eventually get one to your site are (in my experience anyway) always very helpful and keen to get things fixed properly (I speak as a retired engineer!).