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Another evening throttling complaint

Dann2000
3: Seeker
3: Seeker

Good evening everyone,

 

Can see I'm not alone in this but I was just wondering if anyone has come out the other side with a resolution.

Internet is brilliant outside the hours of 6pm-11pm. I stream quite a bit from USA and Canada, huge about of zoom and the quality is poor in the evening but put on a VPN and the quality is HD. When I connect to European streams it is fine, is there a reason the streams from North America would be throttled by Vodafone?

I've spoken to help chat and they've changed my DNS and my IP settings, both haven't worked. Clearly the issue is their end so why they cannot be honest and take responsibility. 

I'm 6 weeks into a 2 year contract after changing from Talk talk with the offer of a shiny new Apple box. How I wish I'd read this forum first :Sad_face:

Danny

5 REPLIES 5

mrbluesky
3: Seeker
3: Seeker

Hi Danny, welcome to the club! Bit of a crap club to be in but you are not alone.

Tech support is a customer assault course and their current strategy appears to be to just wear customers down. They swear blind that they don't throttle even gleefully pointing to their own terms of service on traffic management https://www.vodafone.co.uk/terms-and-conditions/consumer/network-and-coverage/traffic-management/ind... which states that they do not throttle or speed limit during peaks, for heavy users or by service. The tech support don't know whats going on, they are just parroting the company line. Same goes for social media teams, just a damage limitation/public relations exercise.

 

Of course speaking to level one tech support they will give you all the schpiel of I'm looking at your line and I can see there is some fluctuation and we're looking into it for you, this is all a facade. They are reading off a manual, sometimes responses are copy pasted in, i think they deal with 20+ customers at once judging by the response times. If you ask them any technical questions, they fall apart immediately.


I've been jumping through their hoops like i'm auditioning for Crufts for just over 3 weeks.

 

You hit a brick wall at level 2 because they only consider a fault and proceed if the speed to your laptop/main computer is reporting low speed. ie the slowdown is by design and they will only escalate you to an openreach engineer if there is a genuine line fault. Somehow, by conscious design they are filtering/limiting/routing peak time traffic by device, service or OS. For example, my laptop ALWAYS shows full speed, my devices show full speed during off peak hours but during peak hours, this is clearly throttled to 5mbps or less.

 

The reason I know this is A: the UPLOAD speed is always consistent, and B: because I connect via a (good) vpn and these devices MAGICALLY RETURN TO GOOD DOWNLOAD SPEEDS. We'll see what the disconnection team say, I'm expecting them to pull out the Early Termination Fee (plus VAT).

Come on Vodafone, you can't pull the wool over our eyes, you've got an angry mob of customers who have been missold a service and we want a solution.

cmarkod
4: Newbie

My resolution was to get them to allow me to terminate my contract. I don't think Vodafone are throttling but they don't have the available bandwidth at peak times. I had great speeds of over 80mbps during the day but dropped as low as 0.13 between 6-11. I did regular speed tests using Ookla and then exported the results as an Excel spreadsheet. I had to jump through a couple of hoops and have the line test done, etc but Vodafone were pretty quick to admit it was poor service and they couldn't do anything about it so were willing to allow me to leave without penalty. Just awaiting my BT connection to start on the 25th.

I'll keep complaining but only 2 months into a 2 year contract so I'll try but didn't hold out much hope!!  

In the meantime I've purchased a mini router and added a wireguard VPN which only gives speeds of 10mbps but solves the problem.

Instantly goes from standard definition to HD, yet Vodafone insist it's probably something my end!!?? 

I gave up on their tech support channels and spoke to the complaints department explaining my problems, mentioned that they hadn’t delivered the service agreed in the contract and I wanted to leave without repercussions, else I would take it up with Ofcom. They didn’t really offer a solution they just agreed to let me go.

Took up a new internet contract that day, so should be free of them by the end of the month. 

I feel like a weight has been lifted! 

Good luck 🤞 

Mark
Community Manager
Community Manager

I'm sorry to hear you're experiencing difficulty when trying to connect at peak times @Dann2000. I'm sure we'll be able to help get this sorted for you. Pop us a message through one of our social channels and one of our dedicated team will be happy to take a look into this for you 👀 and you'll soon have a smooth connection no matter what the time.