Vodafone Connect - Broadband Service Level Agreement (SLA)

[DARYAH]

Hi All

First post here!

Currently with Virgin Media (VM) Residential Fibre and have made an order today to join VF Broadband. As I use the service primarily for telecommuting and am a freelancer I have been able to purchase the Unlimited Fibre 38 service as a Business customer, and on the same account as my VF business mobile service.

More then the headline access speed I am most concerned about an assured available and performant service. 

Availability

Can someone confirm what are the minimum availability assurances of Vodafone Broadband? 

VM have a service status online page for customers for area faults and where one can see if one's specific area currently has an ongoing fault. Does anything similar exist for Vodafone Broadband?

Minimum Performance

This guidance from Vodafone is absolutely great in clarifying between access speed and throughput. However, on throughput it states "........throughput speed will always be lower than your access line speed, though often not by much." Now if my minimum access speed is 32.4Mbps what can I expect from throughput? Can one say that if I regularly get less then 80% of this (26MBps), then this is an unacceptable level of performance and I have recourse?

Cancellation / Refunds

I apparently have 30 days from service activation to cancel my contract. However, given poor performance and availability do I have the same rights? Are there any gotchas here?

With VM I understand that if I have been out of service for 30 days, I can cancel my broadband contract. However, the gotcha was I could not cancel my landline service contract as this was deemed to be fully working. However, as I cannot get any other broadband service to work with a VM landline I regarded this simply as an awful con by VM. Hopefully Ofcom will close this down at some point. The VM retention agent was actually trying to defend this policy with me today!!

Modem / Router options

On the chat and phone with an agent I have been assured that I can turn the Vodafone router into a modem only device and connect my own router. Also, on the chat I have been assured I could connect my own modem if I wanted to. Not sure if this is a recent thing as a number of forum posts seem to indicate this is not possible?

Cheers all!

Hiro 

[BandOfBrothers]

Hi,

To answer one of your questions > Currently Vodafone will not release the settings in order to be able to use ones own Router. 

[DARYAH · Accepted solution]

I talked to two agents this evening and they confirmed that for both business and consumer customers there is NO OPTION that is supported to either go modem mode or connect their own equipment. Unfortunately this seems to be a naive service design decision on the part of VF, and something they will have to change to be a success in the market. In any case, this is the deal breaker for me as I have no faith in any service providers ability to provide a fault free router. 

sidenote: I use an Asus router running Asuswrt-Merlin. This is not VDSL and would need a separate modem e.g. an Openreach modem. The firmware on this device is (another) testament that equipment manufacturers only get 80% of the software right. You need real software individuals to fill in the remaining 20%. 

On the topic of service level assurance there is a VERY handy writeup in the way of the Voluntary Business Broadband Speeds Code of Conduct (available here) last published this year. Its a bit of lengthy read but fast forward to principles 2.18, 2.19, 2.23 for what all operators need to do regarding defining and communicating speeds to the customer and principle 4 on what recourse a customer has against the broadband provider. Alas, it looks like I will NOT be experiencing Vodafones service on this and will be talking to Virgin tomorrow.  

[PeterGMc57]

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@DARYAH wrote:

.... Alas, it looks like I will NOT be experiencing Vodafones service on this and will be talking to Virgin tomorrow.  

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Good decision not to sign up with VF. The starting point of the Connect router is rubbish. The WAN connection may be great but who can tell when the router doesn't let wireless devices (laptops) talk to wired devices (printers, NAS drives) consistently?

When you say you will talk to Virgin Media, do you mean VM Consumer / Residential? There is definitely no SLA on that service.

If you mean VM Business Ultrafast service, as in (Removed by Moderator) be aware there is no SLA. 

I think you may be looking for (Removed by Moderator)I will speculate you won't pay the cost.

[DARYAH]

VM business for Superfast Broadband only (no landline)
The link for the code of conduct available from this page
(Removed by Moderator)

where it states

"We’re very proud of our broadband service and confident that customers purchasing the service will love it too which is why we had no hesitation in signing up to the Voluntary Business Broadband Speeds Code of Practice. You can read the Voluntary Code of Practice: Business Broadband Speeds (2016) here"

The regulator has done a light touch (for now) making the facts of what operators should do clear but not requiring them to do so. Presumably market forces will help the operators do the right thing and propel this country upwards from where it is on the broadband scale! 🙂