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. 

[donnyguy]

Just as a side note, I travelled to Cyprus yesterday and having checked the Vodafone website, I was advised that Cyprus wasn't a 4G destination.

I was therefore really surprised (and of course pleased) to see that Vodafone got it wrong it seems!

I have 4G roaming with Cytamobile-Vodafone and decent 4G speeds. Compare that to others in my group who aren't with Vodafone who are stuggling to get 3G coverage with MTN Cyprus.

Well done Vodafone - sometimes I like it when you're wrong :smileyhappy:

[JOHN-1970]

I've been running more tests. In the last few days the data throughtput has been around 2-3Mbps DL on SFR 4G. It's 4:30am at the time of writing this entry. My data throughput has been around 16-18Mbps on DL for the last 2 hours. This is the sort of performance I expect to have at my location. I'll run some test again later today during normal hours. 

[JOHN-1970]

Throughput is now back to the 2-3Mbps; could it be down to network congestion then ?

I've noticed that the IP address used by Speedtest is Vodafone 148.252.129.171 and the Server is always in the UK. Does this make sense ?

Thanks

John 

[amh13]

A couple of hours ago I was getting 115mbits in download here in Italy with my Vodafone UK sim. Now, this. In the same location.

[JOHN-1970]

The part I am unsure about is I appear to have a UK public IP address whilst my physical location is France. Does this mean all of my traffic is routed to the UK before it breaks out to the Internet? The other thing is that with a UK public IP address access to UK based service that would otherwise be barred from abroad is fully enabled. Any thoughts ?

[PedroC1999]

Yes, when roaming your mobile data is routed through the UK which is why you get a UK IP address. 

In fact, a lot of your home network's infrastructure is used even when you're in another country.

[JOHN-1970]

Thanks PedroC - I thought so; it could contribute to the degradation in performance between day and night time. Is there a way to obtain a local public IP address and breakout locally rather than going back to the UK ? 

[amh13]

The whole evening roaming has been COMPLETELY dead here in Italy. Speedtest won't even start, netperform shows 0.0mbps in download and not a single webpage will load. I'm using WiFi at the moment. You can also see the speedtest i did this morning on netperform (almost 115mbits download). 

[JOHN-1970]

Same scenario here in France. The data throuhgput has gone sub 1Mbps and pretty much unusable for anything beyond emails. The performance is the same whether on SFR 4G (full bars i..e. optimal radio signal strength) or on Bouygues 4G (4/5 bars radio signal strength). The common denominator is Vodafone UK traffic going back to the UK.

Can someone in Vodafone confirm what the issue is ?   

Thanks

John 

[Alex]

@JOHN-1970 @amh13 Is this issue consistent across 4G and 3G?