Vodafone Connect router crashing several times a day - how to resolve?

[sirvelo]

I moved to Vodafone from BT about a week ago, just to save money. The BT service, using my own Asus router, was faster than its advertised 80Mbps speed, and was 100% solid. Zero downtime logged.

Since moving to Vodafone (having said to the sales person that I'd be using my own router - he never said I couldn't), I now find myself forced to use the Vodafone Connect router, which:

1) Connect router crashes at least daily. This is not WAN down, this is some kind of router reset. The intranet (LAN/wifi) still functions, yet the router web interface (192.168.1.1) is unavailable (indicating probably nothing wrong with WAN), and there is no Internet connection while it restarts. Also of coure the WAN infrastructure is all the same as it was when BT provided the rock solid service.

2) The Event Logs only show me the last 60 or so entries, so at least effectively, restarts on every reboot. AND, the timestamp of the logs reset to Nov 2016 every reboot until the reboot completes. Hence I can only really say the router reboots "at least" daily - the logs never get as far as showing a full day without a Nov 2016 reset. It's 11:53am now, and I know it's crashed at least twice since 08:30. But with no logs from the crashes, no way of identifying the cause. Which is 90% what logs are for!

This post relates to firmware 5.4.8.1.291.1.30.1.6, but from reading around, this lack of reliability has been around a while, exact same symptom, so likely no hardware fault with my specific router.  Is there any way of getting the logs to show more entries so I can try to resolve this, or at least feed those logs back to a tech team to try to resolve it? Last night's crash was mid-paypal payment, never a compfortable time for an outage.

(Ideally of course, I'd rather just be allowed to use my own reliable Asus router... I do believe I was miss-sold this contract by the sales rep saying nothing when I said that was my intention...)

[EricMears]

Thank you Becca_P  .  Many years of dealing with Vodafone had shown me that the 'ordinary' complaints procedure is worse than useless and I do not believe that the high level faults team would ever have been involved in my problems unless they'd been asked to by the CEO's office.  Having said that,  I cannot praise the high level complaints team highly enough.  There have been several issues with the condition of my line and it took 4 visits by Openreach to resolve them all;  I really can't imagine anyone outside the high level complaints team bothering to keep on at o/r.

sirvelo :  Not sure when you would have tried to contact the CEO's office but it's not unreasonable for them to have shut down for a few days over Easter and may take a few more days to catch up with their backlog.  I assume you have used my link to ceoemail.com and sent a friendly email direct to the VF CEO ?   Just asking anyone in VF else to refer your complaint(s) upward is never going to work !

[sirvelo]

@EricMears, yep, I used your link (thanks) to send a constructive email to the ceo directly. They got back in touch, and the converstaion included something like that they had recently been told to stop handing out authentication details. So time for this unhappy customer to leave.

[EricMears]

I guess you were unlucky as to which of the CEO's staff you got.

The chap dealing with my case had to make two attempts to get me the PPPoE details but got them OK on second attempt (28th March).  No idea if their policy has changed again in the last three weeks or you just got someone who didn't want to try harder.

VF seem obsessed with security - but don't stop to think through the implications that their security policy has.  For instance,  every time someone from VF calls me they insist on going through their 'security routine' - oblivious to the fact that by doing that they make it so much easier for fraudsters to ring up and ask a customer for their security details !   Also rather silly when the same chap calls me several times a week, almost certainly recognises my voice (I do his) , knows that I haven't reported my mobile stolen but still has to go through the pantomime of authenticating my ID (and apologising that he has to do it !).

No doubt that is ther 'thinking' behind trying to enforce the use of their own routers ?  Someone somewhere in VF has mused "what if some international gang of hackers gets hold of a valid set of PPPoE credentials ?  Let's try and make it harder for them"  without bothering to check that every other ISP manages to run their business without such 'precautions' (which almost certainly don't protect their network against hacking anyway).

If VF_BB isn't going to work for you when using their router and they won't let you use your own then I agree that you have no choice but to leave - but I'd suggest that you give your notice of leaving directly to the CEO and explain why.

BTW,  it's now almost 12 days since my 'local' Openreach cabinet was reset and more than 10 days since it & my router negotiated a speed in excess of the VF MGS and the only break in service was that when the speed was increased.  Anyone who tells you that several disconnections per day is 'normal' is severely out of touch with BB industry standards.

[Jacste]

I have tried the form before but have still not had a resolution. Also don't really regard this as an account specific problem as many other people appear to be having the same problems. Last night it dropped 7 times within 90 mins so this is not acceptable and it dropped about 10 mins ago. 

[EricMears]

I've been with Vodafone for approx 6 weeks now.

My house is 3.5 miles away from the local exchange and it's even 2.5 miles away from our 'local' cabinet so I wasn't expecting an ultra high speed connection.  However,  Vodafone guaranteed me a minimum connection of 5.13 Mbits/s for their FTC service which compared favourably with the 1.5 Mbits/s I had been getting from Sky's ADSL service so I accepted the offer.

I've never yet seen a connection speed anywhere near my MGS.  VF have sent Openreach engineers out to check out my line several times now and on one occasion the o/r engineer measured a line speed of 5.9Mbits/s using his own equipment.  That resulted in the router showing a speed of 4.5 Mbits/s when it was plugged in but repeated spontaneous disconnect / connect events dropped the speed slightly every time - at one point speed was down to 1.1 Mbits/s !

VF have sent me a replacement router - using that the symptoms continued to get worse so I've reverted to their original one.  My current speed is 2.1 Mbits/s - i.e 50% better than the Sky ADSL service rather than the almost four times as fast I was led to expect.

I've always been convinced that my problems stem from the Huawei router but am finding it very difficult to convince VF staff of that.  Finding that two different Huawei routers have similar but different symptoms only confirms that belief.

With previous experience of VF's 'customer service' I emailed my problems direct to the VF CEO and my case (#15547471) is currently being investigated by the DirectorsComplaints team.  I have been given my pppoe credentials and attempted to enter them into my Sky router but it was asking for a "host name" which I hadn't been given.  A 'VF Chat' session resulted in the advice that I might find "vodafone.connect" worked but I'm afraid I still couldn't connect.

My immediate queries are therefore aimed at anyone else who is using another router  :-

1.  What 'Host Name' are you using ?

2.  What model(s) of router have you found will work ?

3.  Have you persuaded VF to supply a different model of router ?

[EricMears]

I'm now using a TP-link W9970 router in place of the Huawei.  It wasn't initially permitted to access the internet but using its "Clone MAC" function means that it's now 'pretending to be' the Huawei.

[paulcormack]

@EricMears Hey Eric - glad things are working on your TPLink.   I am very interested in how you luckily got your credentials given the recent vodafone stance that the will not give it to anybody and not budging from that stance.

Did you speak to a partiocular team or were they quite forthcoming with this information ?

[EricMears]

Many years of experience with VF "customer services"   (it's only my BB connection that's new, I've had a mobile account for 10+ years) have taught me that the only way to get a complaint resolved is to take it to the top.  BTW that also works for many other organisations !   You can use this website :-

http://www.ceoemail.com   (or if it gets moderated out Google for ceoemail) to find an email address for the CEO of most companies.

Detailing my complaint to VF's CEO brought instant response from the "directorscomplaints" team and a thorough investigation of the circumstances.  We're not actually fully resolved yet but when I pointed out that Openreach would be unlikely to show much interest in the complaint unless we'd also tried an alternative router they (reluctantly) agreed to supply the PPPoE credentials.

Since connecting the TP-link router,  I haven't had any more disconnections (though to be fair I hadn't had any for the previous 3 days).  Speed increased slightly (from 2.1 Mbits/s  to 2.2) although it has since dropped again to 2.0.  With the Huawei router,  every change in speed followed a disconnection & reconnection;  with the TP-link the speed seems to have changed without a disconnection.  It's too early to say whether the change in speed since last night was another example of the original fault that's been driving speeds down or if the system had just detected that it wasn't being used so slowed down and might (hopefully !) speed up again now that I'm using the connection again.

VF have agreed to send along another Openreach engineer (prob next week ?) to reset the cabinet which should increase speed to somewhere near my MGS of 5.13Mbits/s and we'll no doubt be able to see what speed my router and the DLM manage to negotiate.

[paulcormack]

Cheers.  I have just send an email off to the CEO.  Seems ridiculous that he has to be bothered with such things, but I suppose if customers aren;t going to make noise at that level then he'll be getting told how great everything is, when its really not.

[EricMears]

Although it appears to be an email address for the CEO,  I'm pretty sure that it's actually intercepted by one of his minions (though even they considerably outrank the 191 & chatline ops).

But,  as you say,  a lot of traffic to that address is a very good way of him finding out that not all VF customers are quite as satisfied as the customer services statistics probably show.