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Oversubscribed broadband service unusable, cannot get through to anyone!

richardc1983
3: Seeker
3: Seeker

I am writing as I cannot get through to your call centre yet again, your live chat is busy. In these difficult times Vodafone need to spend the money on their network in my area. My home broadband is not usable and I phoned last week to complain about this and was hung up by operators and told there was nothing that could be done if I wanted to leave. I am in Leeds and they are digging up the street at the moment to do gigafast!

 

Let’s just say you pestered me with your emails to bring my home broadband from Plusnet where I had 15 years of good service to yourselves. At peak times with plusnet the broadband service was never affected and was always receiving about 6mb down load speed. Since myself and my partner already have our mobile phones with you and had good service I thought this would be a good move.. how wrong was I.

 

Since I have moved to you the broadband during the day is usually usable up until about 3pm. From then on until about 0100 in the morning the broadband speed drops to the point that I cannot work from home or even have video calls. The speed during the day is about 49mb then at night it drops to about about 1-3mb.

 

I have not even been with you a month yet and it has been like this since day one, I have had the run around by your advisors and to make matters worse I cannot even tether on 4g any more as that is also slow, indeed 3g is faster than 4g. Instead of developing 5g why don’t you fix 4g?

 

I am told by your tech team that my options are to leave because you can’t provide good service because the Vodafone kit in the cabinet that my home broadband connects to is running at max capacity and there is no plan to extend this. The internet is essential to me working at home and I am quite disgusted at the moment that you have done this to me knowing the poor network capacity. Not only that we are now having poor service during the day as the world works at home, please can you do something?

 

It is also very dishonest with your Broadband Guarantee. What a con, so you don't guarantee throughput, you guarantee sync speed, which isn't the problem. I could be sync’d at 500mb but if your network is running at max capacity then I would still experience poor service. Before I got the honest answer some of your advisors have blamed my devices at home saying that I have too many connected! RUBBISH I have minimal items and my computer is wired to the router.


In 15 years of being with PlusNet never once did I have poor speeds or interruptions to service.

 

Can you please prioritise and upgrade the kit that I connect to provide the capacity required as during this coronavirus we are now essentially reliant on your services. If I can’t do my work from home I don’t get paid then I cannot afford to pay my bills and feed my family.

8 REPLIES 8

Tash
Moderator (Retired)
Moderator (Retired)

@richardc1983 Please send our team a message on Facebook or Twitter and we'll be able to take a look into your service at home with your broadband and 4G. By including your Community username and a link to your post, you won't need to write out your query again and we'll get to the bottom of things for you. I understand how important it is to stay connected, particularly in times like these. We'll work to resolve this for you!

Hi Natasha, 

 

I have been dealing with customer relations and I am told that there is nothing that can be done, your network is oversubscribed in my area which doesn't help me does it. This weekend has been the worst yet and it is literally unusable. Look at the latency on the line… from 12 midday until midnight… Check out this live graph of the performance of my connection… 

https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/quality/share/18c2e7e772e8c4136908acc0d456b1f9dc...

 

As Vodafone have put me in this position, I was in a rolling month by month contract before with PlusNet paying £23 a month and then Vodafone pestered me endlessly to come to your wonderful broadband and bring it in line with my mobile phone package. I was also told I could upgrade to join gigafast when that goes live (however told this won’t be opening until August at the latest even though all the cables are laid).

 

As well as not being able to work at the weekend we could not even stream Netflix or youtube as the connection was about 0.5mb to 2 mb at best.

 

I’ve been told I can leave without penalty, however for me to leave and go to someone else I will be starting as a new customer and as I want to be free to upgrade to gigafast when that goes live I will have to do a 1 month contract which carries a £65 setup fee. We cannot continue like this and I feel that Vodafone should be covering that cost. I have even been in touch with plusnet and they said I would have to start as a new customer.

 

I can go to now broadband and it is £30 a month with the above fee. Why should I be out of pocket for Vodafones greed and knowingly selling over subscribed broadband. Vodafone should be picking my costs up.

 

Also I was promised the 4g speeds would be sorted but this is still poor and not resolved.

If the cabinet your on is oversubscribed to the point of not being able to use the connection then I would ask if they can entertain a lift and shift to a new cabinet. Or they could spend a few grand and upgrade the DSLAM.

What is a lift and shift?

 

It's a process of re terminating your connection at another cabinet. 

I suspect that a lift and shift won't help in this situation given that he had no issues with his previous provider.

 

Seeing as he moved from Plusnet to Vodafone this is merely a software change carried out by Openreach to essentially change the VLAN for this connection.  No physical work is carried out on a migration from one provider to another like this.

 

Therefore I suspect the line card in the fibre street cabinet is not suffering from any congestion.  The issue is most likely further downstream, probably at the handover point in the exchange where the fibre links from the cabinet terminate.  

 

If this issue was in the cabinets DSLAM, then it would be Openreach's responsibility to resolve this, and this should be done before it affected end users due to the fact that a line card facing congestion would affect any service providers customers on these circuits.  Which is probably why Vodafone aren't in any rush to fix this as it will cost them.

 

 

 

This will not always be the case some ISP"s will use ther own kit if it's LLU. If Plusnet has their own equipment but Vodafone use BTW  for instance a lift a shift to a quieter cabinet might not be such a bad idea since most of the time it's BTW being used by everyone. But agreed if it's BTW to BTW this would indicate something else. But it sounds like this person has already been told the cabinet is at capacity. 

GJDUG
3: Seeker
3: Seeker

I have the same problem , ref fault FLT09762118 , whilst you can blame demand, other providers dont seem to have this problem from a poll of friends that have a mix of providers