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. 

[Gemma]

@ticex - We’ve chased an update on the fault we’ve raised with our Network engineers (fault reference INC3128504).

We’ll be back in touch as soon as we’ve any news.

I’m sorry for any inconvenience this is causing.

[Tash]

Hi @ticex, I can see that our dedicated team have since been in touch regarding INC3128504.

Should you experience any further issues in the future, please don't hesitate to let us know.

[amh13]

The Italian Vodafone network is also considerably faster than the UK one. LTE advanced is pretty much available everywhere, even in the smaller villages. Most sites aggregate band 20 (10mhz) and band 3 (20mhz). In the more touristy areas I find a lot of band 7 as well (15mhz). With my local Italian Vodafone SIM I have never seen speeds below 70mbps and my phone is a simple cat.4

[chgokev]

Hi Jenny

Could you please also get in touch with me.  I am having similar problems. (As per my posts higher up in this thread)

[Jenny]

Hi everyone,

@chgokev – I’ve sent you a private message with instructions on how to get in touch. Apologies for not doing this previously, 

@JOHN-1970 – I can see we’ve received your email (ref: #16715354) and we’ll be in touch as soon as we can.

@baz03 – We’ve also received your email (ref: #16716137) so will be in touch shortly.

@amh13 – If you can email us by following the steps provided in the private message, we'll look into this further.

[amh13]

Hi Jenny,

I sent the email last night, hopefully you recieved it. This is my reference number from the autoreply: #16721938 .

Thank you for your help!

[JOHN-1970]

Thank you Jenny for your continued support

Regards,

John 

[JOHN-1970]

Hi Alex. 

Yes it is the same. My assumption is that the Cellular Network is not the variable in the equation here. The local networks in my case are peforming well within the expecation of 3G or 4G data throughput. For testing purposes I have placed my SIM & a local SIM card in 2x sets of devices and repeated identical tests. Vodafone Roaming systematically performs at a fraction of the local operator's SIM in all scenario. The only variable is the equation is that since on Vodafine my data traffic is routed to the UK. My conclusion is as follow:

1 - Congestion inherent to the internet potentially exerted by the fact that a lot of people are roaming at this time of year

or 

2 - Traffic shaping or throttling induced by Vodafone as a control mechanism to limit usage

Any thoughts ?

[hammy434]

Hi, I'm in Austria now. After the numerous issues I had in Italy which other members here were also having, and which were eventually solved (at least for me), I'm now having trouble with throttled 4G speeds on the network A1 in Austria. Luckily, Vodafone also has 4G roaming agreements with 3 and T-Mobile, so I've been using 3 to avoid the throttling. However, it would be nice to be able to use the preferred roaming partner of Vodafone which is A1. When I do a speedtest on A1 (4G), it shoots to 30Mbps, then instantly goes down, and hovers around 5-10Mbps. The upload shoots to 17Mbps, and then also instantly goes down to 5-10Mbps. This happens on every test. Can you please remove the throttling on A1 Austria and fix this issue; you claim to be the best network for roaming and to never throttle, yet you constantly have roaming issues and are always throttling roaming. It's really not ideal to have to manually select a different network to avoid Vodafone's throttling on this network. Thanks.

[Tash]

@hammy434 So we can take a look into this for you, I've sent you a private message with details to contact our team. We'll then be in touch as soon as possible.