YouTube terrible speed and buffering

[Alecmac007]

I am on Vodafone fibre so just under a year and no problems getting 10mbps but over the last 5 days I am getting terrible performance on YouTube on wifi on all devices. It either buffers, doesn’t play video and occasionally I get a period of a few minutes with no problems.

I have rebooted router and reset firmware and spoke to  Vodafone but no solution. If I connect to mobile data all is good, and all other streaming video sites work fantastic and my wifi speed is always good. Any ideas?

[mmotti]

Sorry mate - That sounds pretty much exactly what happened to me.

Unfortunately I missed a call from the complaints team on Friday following on from my previous conversation with them.

I have just listened to the voicemail though and they wanted to "run some tests and hopeful resolve the issue for you" so now I'm not so hopeful. If it's line tests again and "let me just make some changes on your router" I'm going to scream.

This whole thing has been an absolute joke.

[Mark]

I'm sorry to hear you feel this hasn't been raised correctly @mmotti. I can assure you this was raised to our Tech team and the rest of our social media team have been briefed on this matter. I'm sorry the member of our Customer Relations team you spoke to gave a different impression. I'd also like to address the point regarding the delay in messages from us via Twitter/Facebook. We don't offer an instant messaging service through our social channels and reply to messages as they're received. This means when we're busier, it may take a little longer than usual to reply. If your query requires a more immediate reply, our Live Chat team are always happy to help. As our Customer Relations team are our highest escalation point, once an issue's been raised to them, we're unable to intervene. Please continue to wok with them towards a suitable resolution. 

[Mark]

To all who've not raised a complaint regarding this matter, please pop us a message via one of our social channels and we'll be more than happy to add your details to our case regarding this.

[mmotti]

@Markthanks for your response - much appreciated. Hopefully I'll know more about the status of the issue after Monday afternoon.

I think part of the issue here is actually the process of communicating this with support. People are being sent round and round in circles by various different departments if they can even get past the social team.

Is there any kind of internal reference to this issue that others can provide a "me too", too?

[Dtkwong]

Mark, 

Thanks for the message. 
If you haven’t spoken with the customer relationship team members, I suggest to reach out and do so. You might well find out how much they really know (and don’t know) about this particular issue. 
I spoke with your customer relationship team member this morning, quoting the ticket number, yet your customer relationship agent simply continued to run through the script, after verifying the security, proceeded to ask the very same questions (i guess as stated in the script) and tried to repeat the very same trouble shooting steps (that were run a few time with different customer relationship agents on previous calls）

By now, I would expect you and higher management, to recognise there is a serious performance issue and a few customers are affected. I can understand the issue might well be a rather complicated one and therefore the issue has been escalated to the right experts to work to resolve.

instead of asking customers to file a complaint, it would be more productive to send an engineer to go on site to perform a deep dive, to figure out what is causing the issue and more importantly, have the issue fixed. That’s exactly what I have been asking the customer relationship agent to do but he kept getting me to follow his script. 
The issue has been going on for more than a month, and to date, no one seems to be taking the issue seriously. 

mid all failed, customer would simply go looking for another supplier who doesn’t have the same issue, or at least deliver a much more acceptable customer services. 

feel free to contact me if you can arrange an engineer to come on site to deep dive the issue, serious about getting it fixed !!

[4pack]

lies lies and more lies...

have just been called by level 2 technical support who said they had my complaint about slow access to websites unless using a vpn, (I would advise anyone using the Vodaphone network to perform a speed test with and without a vpn to see the difference). 

He told me that he would do a firmware update on my router. (I have already checked there are no official updates publicly available). I ask what he was doing to the router but he wouldn't be any more specific but he said I am doing the update now as we spoke on the phone.

Its very impressive as the the Vodaphone router is currently unplugged and sat on  my dining room table!

So first things first Vodaphone why don't you actually try being honest with your customers huh whats the problem?

[4pack]

I also note it would be unbelievably bad security practice as well for Vodaphone support staff to be able to access my router / network without authorisation which you would require as I have obviously changed all the default passwords on the router. 

And it would be even worse if such support staff could gain access to a router via an undisclosed security back door.

As then it would only be a matter of time for such an exploit to be available in the wild and then all Vodaphone customers could be exposed to threat of having malicious software installed on their routers and networks...

[Jayach]

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@4pack wrote:

I also note it would be unbelievably bad security practice as well for Vodaphone support staff to be able to access my router / network without authorisation which you would require as I have obviously changed all the default passwords on the router. 

And it would be even worse if such support staff could gain access to a router via an undisclosed security back door.

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It's not an undisclosed back door, and you would have accepted that they can do it by agreeing to the T&C's when you joined. (You did read them all, I presume)

Most ISP's use the same method for keeping their routers correctly configured.

Look up TR-069 Protocol (CWMP - customer-premises WAN management protocol).

[jstott1070]

I asked the question about a reference /case number also…this was the response 

“we only use case references for individual customers. With a wider know issue like this it's just dealt with by our back office Tech Team. I can assure you though that they're well aware of issue and actively working on it. Really sorry about the disruption, we'll get it sorted as soon as we possibly can.”

[4pack]

Even TR-069 Protocol (CWMP - customer-premises WAN management protocol) can't update the router when its fully unplugged.

I expect if I make a note of the firmware version now, and then actually plug it back in I would be surprised to see any changes. The only useful change I could foresee would be to give the router a new set of routing tables.