I originally placed an order for a full fibre upgrade to my existing broadband connection on 26 June this year and was told that the upgrade would happen once the cables had been laid in my Close by Openreach. On 6 September OpenReach carried out digging work in the Close and put in fibre in the road as far as the house next door to mine but stopped approximately 2 metres short of my house. I also discovered that day that my order had been mysteriously cancelled by Vodafone.
After trying several times to establish what had happened, I placed a new order for the upgrade on 12 September. I again had Openreach engineers visit to establish where the fibres needed to be laid. They could not understand why the previous fibres had stopped at the house next door. Since then the work has been postponed every month and each time when I contacted them I was fobbed off with a variety of excuses. Mainly that Openreach were too busy or that they needed permission to dig in the road.
This morning I looked out my window and saw that there was an Openreach van and a lorry with digging equipment in the Close and they were installing fibre to the house opposite mine. I know the family and was aware that they had placed an order for fibre broadband no longer than 6 weeks ago. They were with a different supplier before and were therefore a new Vodafone customer.
I have now been given a new date of 29 January 2025 from the Openreach engineers for work to be carried out but I also received an email from Vodafone saying my activation date is today - 23 December. Obviously this is incorrect because no fibre has been installed! I have come to the conclusion that new customers are obviously being given priority and existing customers are ignored. To make matters worse my current broadband has always been intermittent because of problems with the existing external cables - hence my desire to have fibre broadband.
Is there anything you can do to help me resolve this with Vodafone? Can you advise who I need to contact? Also I keep being told I will get compensation but I am not convinced this will happen. I am 71 years old and this is causing me a lot of unnecessary stress.
