cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 
1

Ask

2

Reply

3

Solution

Aberdeen - dreadful speeds tonight - line congestion?

jellyman
4: Newbie

On CityFibre 900 and speeds are near unusable. Switched to the mobile dongle and they were even worse.

What is going on?

248 REPLIES 248

Antyone
3: Seeker
3: Seeker

I've had a couple of days of worse connection in the past week but funnily enough it seems fine today

user99
4: Newbie

Over the past few months I have (and others too) been getting up to 90% drop in speed (I was on 900Mb and, at times, was getting 9Mb, with 100Mb not uncommon) in the evening hours (from 6pm to 12pm), with an associated increase in packet loss -  peaking at 20% packet loss.

This has happened 3 times over the past few months, each time it gets fixed for a few days or weeks then the fault returns. The last time this happened I called Vodafone - yet again - and reported the fault and Vodafone were quite dismissive, almost rude, and said there's nothing wrong with my connection, so I said "Goodbye", and I'm now with Zen. Funnily the day after I started the migration to Zen, 10th September, the fault went away and did not return during my last couple of weeks with Vodafone, but my confidence in Vodafone had been damaged, and there attitude during my last call put the final nail in the coffin, so I still moved to Zen. I've now been with Zen (on there 900Mb package) for 5 days and the connection is as good as Vodafone is on a good day - no problems. My idle latency has improved a bit, from 20ms to 15ms, but otherwise everything is the same, tests on speedtest.net, thinkbroadband.com (Broadband Quality Monitor) and packetlosstest.com give similar results to what I was getting with Vodafone.

The only problem is that I need my landline and asked Zen/Vodafone to port my number to Zen; Vodafone have been dragging there heels and have yet to release my phone number to Zen - I think they hope I might come back.. Anyway, as the number has not been ported when it should have been I'm due £6.10 compensation for each day of delay - nice, but I'd rather have my phone line.

Nice, thanks for this info - did you manage to get out of paying the cancellation fee?

Nah, exact cost TBD, but will be around £50 - a little bit more than what I've been paying Vodafone for 1 month's connection - had about 2 and a half months left to go with Vodafone.

RebelRose
7: Helper
7: Helper

You guys considered putting up a Trustpilot review for Vodafone UK? Saw some of the guys having the issue in Leeds did that.

It may spur them on to try to fix the capacity issue if it becomes more public, and at the very least, it would put off some more potential victims lured by the seemingly good-value packages.

Ripshod
16: Advanced member
16: Advanced member

Don't forget, for every member here having problems there's many thousands that aren't. Overall Vodafone are a pretty good ISP, with few problems. Certainly, over the years we've not seen any problems that would be considered public.

Look at the thinkbroadband forum - the vodafone subforum is tiny compared to the others. Even this forum is quiet.

It's sad that anyone should have problems, and I really do feel for them, but the overall customer experience is great. 

I suspect you're right, and a big compounding factor is the fact that the average person probably won't even notice they're getting a substandard service. Most people will just be doing stuff on their phones that fall back on 4G whenever their local WiFi is bad and never notice, which is a nice cash cow for Vodafone. It's folks that a bit more savvy and use the line for more "enthusiast" stuff that'll notice, like gamers who understand latency etc.

Just found out yesterday that my sister is on Vodafone's 900Mbps package too, I never knew. She said "Oh yeah, the videos don't work in the evenings so I just switch off WiFi and go to 4G and it works again". A packet test on her line showed 16% loss, so yeah, she gets the same issue and just happily worked around it. I suspect that's keeping the Vodafone going. 

This is exactly why those of us who are savvy to the issues should shout about them at every opportunity.

silverblack77
4: Newbie

900MB voda/cityfibre today has been awful as low as 7mb speeds.

Speedtest check on voda website says everything normal.Highest speed i get is 38mb on ethernet.

Can't even do live chat as the box doesn't load.

38Mbps, not bad, I'm down to 2Mbps =D 

A VPN gets me back up to 450Mbps so I can still work at least, but still 20% packet loss so no gaming. Try that if you need an immediate workaround.

I had to try the broadband tester a few times before it detected a fault and generated (yet another) ticket for me. It was extremely slow and struggled to load for me too.