Any positive stories about broadband service?

[Paolovee]

I've just signed up to Superfast 2 and the activation date is not until late September.  I'm a little nervous having read all the negative posts here and on Twitter, but then again people are usually quick to complain but not so much where credit is due. I really would be grateful - if you had a good experience so far - to share your feedback here before I commit for 18 months! Nothing too detailed, just to confirm if you're happy with the service and if you're getting the speeds you were expecting, that's all.

Many thanks!

[TJ]

Hey @Paolovee, we're glad to have you on board! You're right, social media is notorious for people complaining and sharing their grievances; rather than talking about positive experiences they've had. 

We have 19.5 million customers in the UK and most of them are probably happily getting on with their services 😊

Please continue to keep us updated and let us know how you get on when your service goes live. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to get back in touch either. 

[baker21823]

It's fine for most but if you're one of the unlucky ones the customer service is terrible.

Like waiting over an hour on hold to support and still not getting through. 

[Televisor]

"You're right, social media is notorious for people complaining and sharing their grievances; rather than talking about positive experiences they've had. "

Risible...    I'm somehow minded of a certain late 70s court case in which the Rumpole author John Mortimer proved that a certain word - that some might find profane - was not, in fact, obscene but had legitimate meaning... One that might well be applied here! 

- Technically the service you are buying comes from Openreach, and it what it is; much of a muchness whoever resells it to you. 'ISP' are just midddlement, and add nothing really by way of value.  It's a case which is the least roguish at the lowest price.  - Personally I've had Vodaphone apparently re-sell my personal data which has placed my family at risk and breached out privacy.   In the week or so since I doscovered them responsible, it's been a catalogue of errors... 

So far I've experienced serious security breaches, broken promises, essential services withdrawn without authorisation – unauthorised attempts to raise telephone responses despite an original insistence on keeping maters in written form  - and now today racist complaints-handling staff with dropped-calls (to get rid of you) added in for good measure!  - To be fair TalkTalk, from where I migrated, had no customer service AT ALL despite their blurb! they just didn't answer letters! 

Nighmare! I'm looking forward to the expiry of my 18months - and may well wind up taking them to court as they've done us some serious harm!  SO, no, I'd not recommend them!  None of these services are 'good pers se though. Come back GPO Telephones, all is forgiven!

[SueDeNimes]

I've been with Vodafone for about 18 months. I've had hardly any issues with the service. I get a rock solid 72Mbps connection and really low latency. 

I've had maybe two outages in the last 18months. One of them about 11pm one night and it lasted 15mins or so. I had another issue maybe a year ago, I can't remember the details but I managed to get it resolved quickly and efficiently with Vodafone tech support.

I have had the following issues :

1. The WiFi from the supplied router is very flaky.

2. Actually getting through to the broadband helpdesk is an ordeal for me. I have a business mobile account with vodafone and a personal home broadband and that seems to cause their systems all sorts of issues which they seem to have been totally unprepared for. 

[Paolovee]

Great, thanks for taking the time to reply.

Cheers

[chazzo]

@Paolovee I've been with Vodafone for just under a month and I'm pleased with the service.

Handover from my previous ISP (Post Office) was on the day Vodafone promised, and I was without broadband service for less than 15 minutes. I lost dial tone briefly several over the first couple of days but it sorted itself without intervention.

I'm 1km from the cabinet and currently synced at 73 Mbit/s on fast path (no interleave), so latency can be as low as 10 ms depending on where it's measured to (13–17 ms is more typical). I've had a few line resets, as expected, but no significant dropouts.

Measured bandwidth has been up to 69 Mbit/s downstream but is normally about 60 (and 17–20 upstream). There's definitely some contention or crosstalk that often reduces speeds, but I don't find it a big deal, possibly because this is a small market town with not too many Vodafone subscribers. Many people on this forum report much worse problems with speed drops, so that's one of the things that would worry me in a heavily populated area. I hope it doesn't get any worse here.

I'm using my own modem and router. The Vodafone-supplied router seemed pretty good, though I was not impressed with the Wi-Fi range.

Getting my login credentials from the support staff was a bit of a struggle and on first try I didn't get signed up to the phone calling package I asked for. Customer service is clearly not their strong point, but from anecdotal evidence I think that applies to pretty much all the budget ISPs. For maybe 90% of people broadband works fine, and for the others  – some of whom have technical problems that are beyond what an ISP could reasonably be expected to solve – it's a nightmare.

Hope this helps a bit. Keep us posted.

[Paolovee]

Thank you Chazzo, that was really informative and good to hear. I made the switch about 10 days ago, and apart from one evening when the speed dropped to less than 3 Mbps for about an hour, everything seems OK. Thanks again for taking the time.

[chazzo]

@Paolovee Glad to hear it's working for you so far. Funnily enough I'm having a slow evening: 35–48 Mbit/s downstream. But as long as it doesn't get any worse I'm not too fussed about that.

Previously I was on ADSL with 17 Mbit/s downstream, and that in itself was perfectly fine. What annoyed me was the low upstream bandwidth – 1 Mbit/s or so – which made large uploads a pain and also seriously affected latency whenever I was uploading large backups, requiring messing around with QoS on the router. Now I have 17–20 Mbit/s upstream, and although under heavy load the latency can go to 40–60 ms it never bogs down like it did with ADSL. Anyway if you've moved from another fibre supplier you'll know what to expect.

Sniffing the Wi-Fi breeze here in Norfolk I can see three other Vodafone routers, one BT and two unknowns. Fingers crossed that no more of my neighbours sign up.

[KXL]

Went LIVE on 17th September.

Started off syncs speeds of 62, 74 a week later, and now 80MBPS. Real world max speeds on speedtest, just approximately 2-3 MBPS off the mark. So I'm getting more than as promised.

For best speeds use 5GHZ wireless AC. On the 2.4Ghz Wireless N only tops out at 40ish MBPS for my devices.

I'm lucky in the sense that majority of my apartment blocks are using Hyperoptic, which are fibre to the premesis, so very few use fibre via the BTOpen Reach route. But as VF had a very good deal on Superfast 2, I jumped, despite not convinced they can reach those speeds via BTOpenReach, but I was wrong!

So far so good. Only once did the service drop, but that was planned as the BTOpen Reach engineer already called me to expect no internet for 15-20 mins.

If you live in a congested area, you may not get anywhere near the 'promised' speeds.