Streaming can be unwatchable

[ShaunIOW]

I moved form Plusnet to Vodaphone in November, my speed with Plusnet was 51Mbps down, with Vodaphone I get 41Mbps down (althogh the router reports 45Mbps down and a max of 55Mbps), and when I try streaming football on an evening or weekend it's nearly unwatchable at times with almost constant buffering (something I didn't get with Plusnet).  Does Vodaphone throttle speeds at certain times?

[Cynric]

VF do traffic management at peak times. There are a number of existing threads in the forum about this subject.

[ShaunIOW]

Well that sucks, because what is the point of paying for broadband for streaming if it's unusable, and more to teh point I should have been informed of that as I'm paying for a minimum speed and expect to get that.

[Cynric]

VF minimum speed promise is on a measurement called Sync Speed. You can see the current value on the router status page. This speed is not the same as the experience speed as you may see on Speedtest.net or similar. VF hide this detail on their sales page in a fold-out that is not immediately obvious to the reader and is easily overlooked. Looking on the VF page vodafone.co.uk/broadband you have to scroll right down to the foot of the page to "Our legal terms" and click on "Broadband" to find their statement about Sync Speed. They are heavily promoting "Broadband Pro" now because their standard product is so dreadfully bad.

[ShaunIOW]

Yeah I've noticed the ads for Broadband Pro, but isn't that mainly related to having better WiFi coverage?  As that would no use to me as all my main devices are connected via cat6e cables to the router and don't use the wifi.

[Jayach]

@ShaunIOW

There shouldn't be any good reason to get a lower sync speed than you had with PlusNet, especially on the magnitude you suggest.

If you are struggling to stream on a fixed cable with a sync of 45Mbs., there must be something wrong. Does this only occur at peak times or is is at any time?

Unfortunately you are going to have problems getting Vodafone to treat this seriously, but you should at least try. Give them a call free on 08080 034 515. Make sure to stress you aren't talking about WiFi speeds.

Keep us informed as to how it goes.

[Jayach]

---

@Cynric wrote:

VF do traffic management at peak times. There are a number of existing threads in the forum about this subject.

---

I don't believe they do traffic manage, more just their systems struggle to match demand at peak times, although I must say I've found it much improved lately.

[Cynric]

.@Jayach Well it must be traffic mismanagement then 😀

All I can say is that since leaving VF I have had no speed problems, nothing lower than 55 down even at peak times. Right now I just got 56.8 down, my last speedtest.net result with VF from 24/4/2021 was 53 down, but one a few days earlier (19th at 20:54) was 30.7 down. It looks like I have just missed the improvements that you spoke of, I do hope that this improvement lasts. Nobody should pay for 63 as advertised misleadingly and not get something close to that figure.

[Jayach]

---

@Cynric wrote:

.@Jayach Well it must be traffic mismanagement then 😀

I like that description, I think it describes Vodafone perfectly.

There could be a lot of reasons why it seems to have improved for me and that may not general, but there have been fewer "I can't get decent speeds in the evening" type posts lately.

[gipjon]

---

@ShaunIOW wrote:

althogh the router reports 45Mbps down and a max of 55Mbps

---

This would indicate you have available broadband signal that is not being used. Some people like myself have more broadband signals in the middle of the night.  Try and reboot your router in the middle of the night, this may put you to the max speed of 55MB. Don't do this if you have already recently rebooted the router (if your router disconnects too many time in a short period it will slow your connections down )

The first thing we need to do is work out what is causing the buffer.  The next time you are watching tv and you start to get the buffer issue run a speed test on a different device at the same time and see what leftover speed you have. Also check if you have children, they may have started downloading a new game on the Xbox ETC which will be using the 41MB bandwidth, or watching a 4k video on youtube using 25MB.

streaming 4k video (just an eg) needs about 25MB of bandwidth and you have at the moment 41MB in total minus any other device using the internet 

another idea in the Vodafone router app on your phone you can also select priority on the device you are using to watch football 

another idea if you have spare mobile data as a test, use the phone with a good 4g signal as a hotspot and connect the device to that to see if you still have the buffer. 

After all that you find it is Vodafone then don't use the forum social dm, its a waste of time .10 minutes to pass security just to be told sorry we can't help you here, please phone our tech department