Thank you community members

[Ping_Too_Long]

Was looking at the keenly priced Vodafone Broadband deals.

Having dreadful CS Vodafone experiences over the years, I checked here to see what's going on with Broadband from Vodafone and see that it is as I expected a bit of a dog's breakfast.

So thank you all the folk who have consistently been posting about the routing issues which are a total dealbreaker for me in terms of switching.

[Ripshod]

The problem with looking at forums like this one is people generally post only when they have a problem, so it's not really a true reflection of the service.

To add a little balance can I suggest you nip over to the thinkbroadband forums and see how small the vodafone section actually is there. 

Also have a look at other isp's forums and see how many problems there are on those. 

[Jayach]

As @Ripshod says, forums will always give a poor view of the the ISP it is for, few satisfied customers will post to say so.

Personally I currently have no problems with routing, but I was routed via Manchester instead of London for a while, which was adding 10ms to the ping, but caused no other problems. (I'm not a gamer so low pings are not necessary for me)

[CrimsonLiar]

I'm now with BT, and I'm on their forums too.  I'd have to say these forums are friendlier get more things fixed, and don't tend to be filled with anywhere near so much "out of date" information.

[prs1000]

On the whole, I'm happy with the broadband. I am on the 900 fibre and get full speed upload and download. There have been a couple of bumps in the road and dealing with VF customer service can be frustrating and has been for the last 20 years or so.

Reading these forums and seeing what issues some people have makes me think I have either been lucky or things aren't as bad as they're sometimes painted.

No one comes on support forums just to say, "Hi, everything's fine. Bye".

If you have a little common sense and can work around some issues yourself, you'll probably be fine.

[purrbox]

Thought I'd add this for the benefit of newbies.

The latency issues are the result of load balancing which is live across the whole network. Load balancing is the act of moving users onto a different gateway. This adds latency to the connection. It's performed automatically depending on the conditions of the network.

Despite what the social media team are posting, reporting the issue will not fix the "problem" as the network has been designed to operate in this manner. A business decision this monumental will not be reversed just because a small minority of users are unhappy with the load balancing. Not having load balancing would mean hundreds of thousands of users would be suffering network throughput problems at peak times due to overloaded gateways.

Vodafone Gigafast is better than Virgin Media (even if you're stuck on Edinburgh). By better, I mean lower pings and a more robust connection during peak times with no traffic shaping. You can torrent at full blast during supper if that's your thing. VF has much faster upload speeds than VM.

First hop pings on VF will seem high to people coming from BT. 10ms first hop is common, 20ms for people sent miles away (i.e. Edinburgh) You may get sub 5ms pings if you win the "gateway shuffle" and connect to your local BNG.

Today (August 2023) load balancing is not the monster it was a few years back. Most of the people who are load balanced experience great performance, myself included. 

If your connection is unstable and suffering from slowdowns, phone support as it's likely to be another issue unrelated to load balancing.

[Jayach]

---

@purrbox wrote:

VF has much faster upload speeds than VM.

Only if you are on CityFibre, Openreach uploads are pretty dire. (in my opinion)

[GMAN73]

Im very happy with the service, its far superior to virgin media.  Pre-installed Starfield on my Xbox Series X it took 16mins.