Poor Vodafone internet connection

[khatinsek]

Has someone successfully got their vodafone contract terminated earlier due to poor internet connection?

I have been trying to complain for the last six months about this really poor internet connection from vodafone, they always come up with reason like "there is a breakage in your area, please wait we order someone to fix it", or "someone will check shortly your connection plese be patient".

Now I am really sick and tired of these excuses. I also mostly work from home and I had so many times that I got disconnected from a virtual meeting https://9apps.ooo/.

I asked around the vodafone forum and someone told me that in the contract, vodafone is only required to have 95% of the time internet working and this 5% is dedicated for maintenance work. Which sound really like crazy to me. I have been trying to ask them to terminate my contract because of the poor service, but they always say it is not possible and I have to honor the 24 months contract.

Is there anything I can do to get rid of this contract? It really affects now my professional work.

[Ripshod]

Wow. Given that vodafone claim 8million customers that means up to 400000 customers with no Internet at any one time. Totally unreasonable.

I went through similar problems as you, with slow speeds and packet loss, and frequent disconnects. I put up with it for 14 months of to-and-fro with customer support. But I took a punt and upgraded to Superfast 100 (FTTP) with a new contract and no penalty. If I'd gone with anyone else for FTTC I'd likely still be stuck on the same poor copper (with all the same faults) for another 24 months. I resent having to put up with the poor circuit I had for so long, but I regret nothing now. 

[Jayach]

Lucky you, if only we all had the option to upgrade to FTTP. 😒

[Ripshod]

I posted that then I noticed my ping has gone from 8ms to 22ms at 10am. If it's not one thing it's another. Traceroute to google UK and other UK sites shows I'm being routed via USA IPs.

I've powered everything down for 30 minutes, see if that changes anything. 

[Gerry_Atric]

You're the only other person I've seen reporting a similar issue with pings being higher than normal. It's been like this for me for the last few days, and reconnecting on multiple occasions hasn't fixed this. Neither has rebooting the ONT and router. 

I did a reverse trace route to my IP address and found that the connection is routing through Crewe/Manchester and I live in the South! It was fine when it was routing via London and I'd like to have that back!

I've also seen sporadic packet losses causing my connections to temporarily freeze. 

CityFibre are supposed to be investigating this further so we'll see what happens.

[CrimsonLiar]

Today at least there have been major outages on the internet leading to not only higher latency, but to many sites not being available at all.

That said, I have my router set to perform a number of speed tests in the dead of night which get used to calibrate (Cake) QoS.  I'm noticing that upload speeds have been limited for the last couple of weeks from Mon early AM thru Fri early AM which left unchecked bork the QOS calibration (yes I've ruled out local activity such as Plex, ResilioSync and other servers).  So maybe there is some work being done on the network in the small hours!

[Jayach]

@khatinsek 

If you get the connection sorted, there should be no need to leave. If the standard support isn't working I suggest raising a complaint. If unable to resolve your problem, they can allow you to leave without penalty. (But you do have to go through the whole process, takes up to 8 weeks)

Complaints Code of Practice | Vodafone UK

(Edit: don't take the option for hardware problems, that will just take you to the standard support, make sure you get through to the complaints team)

If you tell us more about the problems, we may have some suggestions.

It may also be helpful to show us what Openreach think your line capable of. BT Broadband (btwholesale.com)