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. 

[JOHN-1970]

Thank you Alex for the explanation. 

Regards,

John 

[donnyguy]

Swisscom - ZürichI just wanted to add a quick note to say that it does look like the issue has been resolved.

I did a speed test whilst roaming in Switzerland and the speeds were consistantly good so no issues there.

I'm currently in Greece and as you can see from the screenshot taken whilst roaming on Vodafone Greece, the speed is good there as well.

For good measure, I did a side by side test using my Vodafone GR sim card in another handset and the speeds were pretty much the same.

So all good - glad this issue is resolved. 

Vodafone Greece - Kifisia, Athens

[Alex]

@donnyguy That's great to see 😁

[ticex]

Just came across this thread after experiencing issues with Vodafone UK's roaming data speeds. Much the same story with me as many others - I travel around Europe a lot and while I have an EE line from work I also have a 25GB Vodafone SIM primarily because over the past years Vodafone's roaming always worked perfectly.

Like one of the other posters I'm in Cyprus just now (I visit often) and the 4G data speeds on Cyta-Vodafone are highly erratic. Prior to the EU roaming legislation coming into force I never had an issue. Local SIM's on the same network get consistent fast speeds (15-60mb) download on 4G whereas my UK sim in exactly the same location seems to struggle to get over 10mb in exactly the same location with speeds sometimes dropping to an unusably low level at certain times of the day.  Clearly there is some kind of traffic shaping going on as the speed is neatly capped to 10mb and the upload can be more than double at 20mb when downloads stick to 10mb.

Very dissapointed and will likely ditch this 2nd Vodafone line as it now makes EE look good despite their own roaming issues (no call waiting, no call divert facility and throttling which seems to now be sorted).

[ticex]

Further to my previous post speeds this morning dropped down to 0.5mb and have just recovered to the usual “shaped” level - note the clear evidence with the upload being substantially faster than download. Local sim on the same network downloads at 42mb right now. See attached Speedtest screenshot....

[Gemma]

@ticex - Thanks for providing all of that information.

Please post the results of a speed test while using 3G.

[ticex]

Thanks for the reply @Gemma.

I've done speedtests just now on 4G and then 3G in the same location. Ironically the download on 3G is actually slightly faster! 4G was 7.4mb Down / 17.9mb up and 3G 7.6mb down / 1.3mb up. Also checked my friends local Cyta-Vodafone using the same speedtest server and it acheived 38mb on 4G 1st time and then 42mb on the 2nd test. 3G was only marginally different to my handset which I guess could be down to the APN being in the UK for my sim. Thanks again. See below for the speedtests:

[ticex]

Further to my previous post here is a screenshot of the local handset in the same location. Just for completeness I've eliminated the chance of it being something to do with the handset as on the previous tests we swapped the sims from my iphone 8 to my friends Android handset and vice versa. It made no difference so it's 100% the UK Vodafone SIM that's the issue. EE sim is also delivering 40mb++ speeds on their preferred 4G partner network MTN. Overall, very dissapointed in the Vodafone sim....

[Gemma]

@ticex - Thanks again for running those tests and coming back to us.

We can get this looked into, if you’re still in Cyprus.

We’ll need to take some further details from you, please send us your details by following the instructions in this private message.

[ticex]

Just following up as despite sending through all the information requested by email I haven't received any further updates. I went to another country for the past week and data speeds were perfect. However, having just returned to Cyprus the speeds are slower than ever with moments where they are unusable. EE phone working perfectly so I'll stick to using that for now and if this drags on for another month or longer will probably move our Vodafone lines over to EE - pity as some aspects of the Vodafone roaming service are more attractive than EE but like this it's just not usable.