Data Throttled Abroad

[jsmyth16]

Hi all, first post here. Took out a vodafone contract around 2 months ago to be able to get proper, unrestricted 4G in France this summer. Was previously with Three and 3G roaming & throttling was awful, so I switched. 

I've arrived in France via Eurotunnel, and a group of 5 of us have driven right down to the south of France. 2 of us are on vodafone, 2 on giffgaff, and 1 on BT mobile. The problem is, the 2 vodafone phones are getting awful speeds, on both 3G and 4G, while all other phones work perfectly.

Friends on giffgaff can easily load pages, maps and Spotify easily, all on 3G. Friend on BT Mobile gets 4G and is getting 40+ Mbps. But myself & the other vodafone phone, have not once seen a speed above 0.2 Mbps.

I have tried SFR, Bouygues and Orange, all are the same. The other phones have tried all networks too, and they all work fine.

Vodafones website literally says "We never throttle abroad, so you'll enjoy full speed roaming". This is clearly not the case? I have a Global Roaming plan, and 20GB of data. Could anybody help me?

As an example, I've just taken my vodafone phone and friends BT phone and put them beside each other. Both are connected to exactly the same Cell ID, and using 2600MHz 4G on Orange F. Speed test on BT gives 45Mbps consistently, and loads everything flawlessly. Speedtest on vodafone, gives 0.15 Mbps, and things like Maps, Facebook etc take a few minutes to load. What is going on? :smileysad: I'm going to have to buy a local SIM at this rate, I'm so disappointed in vodafone. 

[amh13]

Yes, I am having this issue con both 3g and 4g. Upload speeds are regular, as you can see I easily reach 20-30mbits on 4g, but download speeds are extremely low. All afternoon I have been barely getting 2-3mbits on both 3g and 4g, and later on in the evening internet completely dies (both 3g and 4g). 

As said, this is not a problem with Vodafone Italy, since with a local sim I easily get 100-150mbits on 4g in the same location. 

4g speedtest today

3g

[JOHN-1970]

Hi amh13. I concur that it is unlikely to be the 3G or 4G local network. 

Once again can we get a confirmation/validation from Vodafone UK please?

[JOHN-1970]

In my opinion Vodafone is failling to deliver a service that is in keeping with 4G data throughput/performance and customer expectation.

What are your thought on this based on your experience of the Vodafone data roaming service?

[PedroC1999]

I am back in the UK having spent nearly two weeks roaming with my Vodafone UK SIM. I visited France, Belgium, Germany, Austria and the Netherlands and performance was absolutely super in all of them, I was regularly sustaining over 100mbps on many of the high spectrum sites.

[JOHN-1970]

Well Pedro good for you but I do not share your experience unfortunatey for me. It appears that I am not the only one either.

[amh13]

I recently spent a week in Bulgaria as well. There, I also noticed that performance dropped heavily in the evenings, even though I had full 4g signal. Speeds dropped from 65-70mbits in the morning to about 5mbps in the evening. I never complained about this, because it was still perfectly usable. 

Here in Italy, however, my speeds are consistently over 100 Mbits in the morning, and then drop off to about 2-3mbits in the afternoon before completely dying around 8 o'clock in the evening. At the moment I'm using WiFi. 4g/3g is completely dead, the speedtest won't even start and all webpages time out. 

This is not an issue with local network, because as said before, testing a local Vodafone SIM consistently gives me results around or over 100mbps regardless of the time of the day

[Alex]

@JOHN-1970 @amh13 We may be able to look into this for you - so we're able to check this, please answer the following:

- How long are you abroad for?

- Are you around the same location for the duration? 

- If so, which location are you in? 

Please also try to complete a manual roam and flick airplane mode on for 10 seconds and then off to try and reconnect to the network. 

[amh13]

Hi, I have been abroad for a month now and have been having these speed issues for the past 3 weeks.

I have travelled in Switzerland, Bulgaria and Italy, and the problem has been present in all of these locations, with Italy being the worst (in italy the connection often completely dies or is under 1mbit, in switzerland and Bulgaria speeds dropped to about 5mbits in the evenings but never below). My account has 2 numbers, and both have been having the same issues.

I also have a spare Vodafone Italy sim card and tested this in Italy, Bulgaria and Switzerland (on roaming) with no issues whatsoever. Speeds never dropped below 50mbits in any of these locations, even when my UK sims were not working or very slow.

I have tried resetting my phone, doing a manual roam and also resetting the network settings on my device; however the problem persists and is present on all of the roaming partners.

[baz03]

100 % throttled here in France Vodafone connected to orange f and SFR during the evening max DL speed 1.02 mbs.

Daughter on 3 network connected to the same network orange f DL speed 7.8 mbs which is not great but usable.

Now 01.02 am and Vodafone now showing 5.6 mbs

We used it on Orange f in June no throttling at all.

We have 3 accounts with Vodafone 1 business and 2 private will be cancelling them all very soon if this is not explained and resolved immediately.

[JOHN-1970]

Thanks Alex

- How long are you abroad for?

Due to return to the UK on Aug 24th 

- Are you around the same location for the duration? 

Staying at the same local - yesterday I was at the Lascaux site. Very strong RF signal there. I took the opportunity to run a speedtest. The result was consistent with all other test results at about 3Mbps    

- If so, which location are you in? 

 Mauzac et Grand Castang in the Dordogne

Coordinates are 44.87237701119776, 0.7770549997138312

Please also try to complete a manual roam and flick airplane mode on for 10 seconds and then off to try and reconnect to the network. 

- I have done the following;

1. Hard Reset

2. SW Reset 

3. Manual search and switch from 3G to 4G across SFR and Bouygues. Got a reject on Orange 4G due to poor signal strength probably. I did not try to connect to Free.

4. Inserted local SIM in my E5573 (17Mbps DL) 

5. Vodafone SIM in E5573 speedtest

5.1day time data throughput (3Mbps DL)

5.2 Night time data throughput (16 - 18Mbps DL)

Alex it would be amazing if you could help improve our experience of the Vodafone service.