SO23 - Winchester

[highpriest]

Anyone else in SO22/SO23 Winchester experiencing extremely poor 4G speeds? I've been struggling for months with poor 4G speeds in Winchester (in the city centre mainly). Contacted Vodafone via Twitter - no help at all. Contacted CS and I've gone through every single troubleshooting technique (reset network settings, change APN, re-register sim with network, etc. etc.) in the book and nothing has helped.

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1) Does the issue happen in just one location? If so, how far do you have to travel to regain service?

SO22 (home) less affected, SO23 (work) is particularly bad. If I move outside of Winchester City Centre (even just a few miles), 4G data speeds can jump to as much as 50 Mbps down, 20 Mbps up.

2) What is the full postcode (e.g. ST1 1AA) of where the issue occurs?

SO23 8US

3) Does the issue occur if you try your SIM card in a different phone?

Yes.

4) What errors are seen or heard when the issue occurs?

Phone shows full 4G signal. Calls are unaffected but data speeds are extremely poor. There's quite a bit of variation, but speeds could be as low as 250 Kbps and sometimes between 1-2 Mbps. Upload speeds are not affected to the same degree. Speed tests show 4 or 5 Mbps upload.

Sometimes it is so bad that the speed test app will fail to even locate a server to run a speed test against and just give up.

5) Does this happen on 2G, 3G, 4G or all?

Not tried 2G or 3G (and don't ask me to). Problem is with 4G.

6) When did you first notice this issue?

A few months ago (Q3 2017).

7) Is the issue permanent or intermittent? If intermittent, are there certain times of the day when it occurs?

Permanent. Data speeds range from non-existent to ultra-slow. Everything buffers constantly or just times out and gives up.

I use an iPhone 8 Plus.

[Josh]

@Strowger That still doesn't appear to be the right speeds!  Are you still facing the exact same issues/slow speeds? If so, we may need to check your account over. If the speeds are still the same, drop us a message over on either of the following:

Twitter - @VodafoneUK

Facebook – Vodafone UK

Live chat – Click Here 

[highpriest]

As sappercaptain mentioned, speeds have generally been better in the new year but in the last couple of weeks or so, they have started to struggle like it did last year.

Speed tests are all over the place - 30 Mbps one day, 1-4 Mbps the next. Are there any technical problems in the area?

For the first time in 3 years, I had actually started using data properly on my phone. Would appreciate an update on why it has become poor again.

[Josh]

@highpriest Your mobile data speeds can also be impacted by high network traffic, have you been in largely populated areas when you face slower speeds? Also how long has it been that your data speeds have dropped again? 

[Strowger]

Just to try to keep this topic alive, I did a speedtest today  on LTE, which gave me 0.85Mbps down and 0.26Mbps up. I live less than 5 minutes walk from the Vodafone shop on Winchester High Street. (For comparison, I usually see around 74.3/18.5 when connected to my wi-fi, and have seen 87.8/6.63 when connected to 5G in Southampton).

It's astonishing that, over 3 years after this thread was first started, the service in Winchester is still so very, very poor.

[Neil_no_4G]

I had to go to Winchester for the first time in ages the other week, as I now work from home. I was really disappointed to see that Vodafone isn’t viable in Winchester. If I have to go back to working in my office in Winchester, then I will be leaving Vodafone!

[Mark]

Hi @Strowger I'm sorry to hear you experiencing a poor connection when you're in Winchester. I've taken a closer look into this and there doesn't appear to be any outages in this area at the moment and the masts serving you haven't experienced any recent outages. We don't offer a 5G service in the SO23 area at the moment but you should be receiving between 3.8 and 60Mbps download and 0.9 and 23.2Mbps upload when using our 4G service.

So we can take a closer look into this for you, please confirm the below information 👇

- Does the issue happen in just one location? If so, how far do you have to travel to regain service?

- What is the full postcode (e.g. ST1 1AA) of where the issue occurs? (if you'd prefer not to post this publicly, please add it to the personal information in your profile where only you and our moderators can see it).

- Does the issue occur if you try your SIM card in a different phone?

- What errors are seen or heard when the issue occurs?

- Does this happen on 2G, 3G, 4G or all?

- When did you first notice this issue?

- Is the issue permanent or intermittent? If intermittent, are there certain times of the day when it occurs?

If you'd like us to also look into this issues you experienced recently @Neil_no_4G, if you could check the above next time you're in the area and we'll be happy to add this to any case we raise to our engineers.

[highpriest]

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@Mark wrote:

Hi @Strowger I'm sorry to hear you experiencing a poor connection when you're in Winchester. I've taken a closer look into this and there doesn't appear to be any outages in this area at the moment and the masts serving you haven't experienced any recent outages. We don't offer a 5G service in the SO23 area at the moment but you should be receiving between 3.8 and 60Mbps download and 0.9 and 23.2Mbps upload when using our 4G service.

Please see the screenshots I have posted.

So we can take a closer look into this for you, please confirm the below information 👇

- Does the issue happen in just one location? If so, how far do you have to travel to regain service?

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Badger Farm (home) and various spots in the city centre.

Postcodes

SO23 7DZ (City - example "not spot")

SO22 4QB (Postcode of Sainsbury's near my home)

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- Does the issue occur if you try your SIM card in a different phone?

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I get 437 Mbps in Southampton so clearly there is nothing wrong with my phone or the sim.

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- What errors are seen or heard when the issue occurs?

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Can't access data (WhatsApp, Facebook etc.)

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- Does this happen on 2G, 3G, 4G or all?

- When did you first notice this issue?

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Sometimes the phone drops to 3G which is even worse. Nothing works.

During the past few months. But since I've been working from home, I've been primarily using home wifi, which has lessened the impact. But I have tried to tether to my phone a couple of times and the experience was very poor.

[Strowger]

- Does the issue happen in just one location? If so, how far do you have to travel to regain service?

Seems to happen anywhere in Winchester city centre

- What is the full postcode (e.g. ST1 1AA) of where the issue occurs? (if you'd prefer not to post this publicly, please add it to the personal information in your profile where only you and our moderators can see it).

SO23 9HU most recently, but as I said it seems to be anywhere in Winchester

- Does the issue occur if you try your SIM card in a different phone?

Yes, I have had a number of handsets over the last 3 years that this problem has been ongoing. It also affects my wife's Apple handsets, so it's not just an Android issue.

- What errors are seen or heard when the issue occurs?

Very, very low Up and Down speeds

- Does this happen on 2G, 3G, 4G or all?

4G primarily. (2G? How many Vodafone customers are still using 2G, or even 3G?)

- When did you first notice this issue?

3+ years ago. This thread was first started in May 2018.

- Is the issue permanent or intermittent? If intermittent, are there certain times of the day when it occurs?

Permanent, as far as I can tell. I've not seen any variation with time of day or day of week.

[Mark]

Thanks for you replies @highpriest, we don't have an exact date for our 5G rollout to reach Winchester, you can sign up for updates on our progress with this in our dedicated 5G content. Is it just your data that you have problems with or are any of your other services affected?  

We'd need you to check if either your 2/3G services connect @Strowger, as we'll need this information before we can raise a case to our engineers.

As we'll need to take a little personal information so our engineers can contact you if needed, we'll need you to pop us a private message through one of our social channels. When you message us, please include your forum ID's and a link to this thread, along with the information requested in this message.  When you contact us privately our automated assistant will try to help. You can speak directly to an agent by selecting 'Get started' followed by 'asked to DM'.

Once we've got this, we'll be able look into escalating this for you.

[Strowger]

OK, an interesting set of results.

2G - couldn't get Speedtest to work (although I did have a - very slow - data connection)

2G/3G - 2.77 / 0.83 Mbps

2G/3G/4G - 7.12 / 0.98 Mbps

2G/3G/4G/5G - 3.88 / 1.07 Mbps

Wi-fi - 74.4 / 18.5 Mbps

So I get faster speeds if I constrain my handset to 4G (but this means that I'd need to manually change it every time I go to Southampton, London or anywhere else with 5G). And my Vodafone broadband is an order of magnitude faster than ever the fastest of these speeds.