Vodafone 4G dropping connection overnight

[kbrownuk]

Hi 

I am based in Devon and use 4G for working from home as the BT Connection is so poor in my area. It has been working fine for many months and had fantastic download speeds in excess of 70mbps at most times however I am  finding that the connection drops overnight after midnight and needs to be rebooted in the morning (sometimes more than once ) to get restored. I am using an external antenna and have been in contact with the manufacturers to look into the issue but they are saying the problem is with the vodafone network.

If the router is not rebooted in the morning it does sometimes return on its own without any intervention.

Vodafone network status is not showing any issues but I am convinced this is some sort of bandwidth management or energy saving attempt on the mast outside of peak times. 

I use multiple sites and have seen this at most locations.

Is anyone else seeing this problem recently from about november 22 onwards?

[Kate31cook]

Great news ARH1950!  And thanks to Vodafone for taking this seriously now - your customers know when the signal is down, life in my house comes to a halt as I have it for mobile broadband! 

ironically when I lose signal, the Vodafone app doesn’t work (no surprises) and the speed checker doesn’t load so that would be no good but I can take screenshots of it not loading if that helps…..

also, like you, I have not had a problem the past few nights so it may have fixed.  Well it seems like progress and I still have signal tonight.

[ARH1950]

There was no problem here last night, whih I think is four OK nights in a row.  I'll check again tonight and tomorrow night, but after that I'll be away for a week.  It occurs to me that if you find that it's happening again, you could screenshot when it's off and when it's back on again, as Vodafone were requesting, because that might help.  I don't know how anyone else could get into the chat I'm involved in, but if it does happen you could always email me the screenshots [Removed] with your postcode, and I could pass those on. 

I wonder if these anomalies that VF has discovered are specific to the cells which they say serve me, or if the same anomalies occur at the same time at other masts.  They didn't appear to have checked that (so far).

 [MOD EDIT: This post has been edited to remove personal information. Please see Community Guidelines]

[Kate31cook]

Right in queue my mobile broadband has gone down again at midnight.  It’s now half last midnight and still nothing.  This is starting to get ridiculous now.  

@ARH1950 I have emailed you some screenshots.  I was able to do this despite no signal still because I have a mobile on EE.  At this rate I will be switching my mobile broadband to EE as well.  If Vodafone don’t get this sorted, we really ought to consider logging some complaint with ofcom because you can’t sell unlimited data packages and only supply it for some of the time.  
It seems we’re probably going to get best traction by sticking together on this one.  

is everyone else still getting these problems?  

[ARH1950]

Hi again Kate. Just to confirm, I've sent the details you gave me to my Vodafone chat, and suggested their engineers might want to check their data for the cell that serves your postcode.

If there are further outages, just let me know and I can report them.  I think they were suggesting that a screenshot of a speed test after the connection has been restored would help them, so if you can do that, it might help move things on.  All the best meantime.

[Gemma]

Hi @Kate31cook  and @ARH1950 - I understand how important it is to have the best possible connection at all times. It's nice to see you're helping each other out. @ARH1950 I've removed your email address, just for security reasons. My team over on Social Media, are able to investigate what's happening when you're losing connection. So we can take your postcode and look into what's happening, please send us a message on Social Media. 

[ARH1950]

Hi Gemma.  Many thanks.  There is a long chat on Messenger with a lot of background information about my own case, including postcode, SIM card information and so on.  Presumably you have access to that chat.  However, as you'll have gathered, this is a problem that has been affecting a number of people in various parts of the country.  The point we've reached at the moment is that your engineers have identified anomalies in the cells' traffic reporting which appear to coincide with my experience of loss of internet connectivity.  @Kate31cook has also supplied a postcode.  Hope that helps.

[Davidch]

The social media chat is a complete waste of time. I can guarantee you will lose the will to live long you before you make any progress. 

The problem is with the Vodafone network. As a policy,  Vodafone reduces power to mast cells at night when they are being less used. If you happen to be a rural user dependant on a mast they power down then you are out of luck. Your speeds will drop and in extreme cases you may even lose connection.

The opening post by Vodafone here says the masts are fully powered 24/7. This is simply untrue. Vodafone itself has issued press releases about this money-saving policy which it presents as a green policy. It also describes how solar powered masts are reducing the need to do it. Vodafone support will gaslight you into believing the home networks of the many people who complain about this are incorrectly configured. It is strange because the PR department of Vodafone openly admits the policy and even seems quite proud of it.

I think it is a fairly commonplace practice among mobile mast operators and it affects only a relatively small number of their customers but if you happen to be one of them you are stuck; there is no way of speaking to anyone who can do anything about the problem or even acknowledges it. You will simply find yourself going round in circles repeatedly explaining the same problem and repeatedly providing the same information until you give up in despair. Sorry to be gloomy, but them’s the facts!

[colinstone]

Davidch, Can you put some links to the Vodafone PR stuff?

How about using a network signal strength app which would show the mast and the change in signal strength. Screenshot the changes and submit. 

I do agree, the social media is full of useless platitudes. My local mast, actually on an electricity pylon, stopped one morning.  I walked 500m to find out - painters.

Vodafone though were completely unable to explain that it was only off 0900-1700 so that painters could paint the pylon without being fried and made it sound like commercial in confidence info. 

[Davidch]

Typically, I can’t find the press release, but here is a link to an article about the talk from Vodafone’s head of tech Andrea Dona which gave rise to the release: 

https://www.telecomtv.com/content/green-network/vodafone-uk-shares-its-recipe-for-energy-efficiency-...

The relevant paragraph is : “It [Vodafone] has introduced new radio units with built-in AI that automatically switches off during quiet periods and goes into ‘deep sleep mode’ when there is no network traffic, so the radios don’t have to transmit data.”

Band sleeping as it is called, is the practice of turning off certain bands when demand at a base station is low, usually at night. I believe all the carriers do it or soon will. Google “sleep mobile phone base station power save energy” and you will see that it is rapidly becoming the industry norm. 

 Vodafone started doing it in 2022. Its band sleeping is not always (or even mostly) determined by AI but relies on analysis of historical traffic patterns to determine when and where to sleep bands. In my case, I can time the sleeping of band 32 and several cells at my nearest mast to the exact minute at 6pm every evening, making band aggregation (4g+) impossible and causing data speeds to drop by two thirds. It stays in a deep sleep mode until around 9 the next day. 

Even with AI band sleeping, things will not improve. There is a balance between energy saving and what is euphemistically termed the customer experience. In other words, if you live in a rural area with a lightly used mast at night, Vodafone is not going to turn on its 5kW base station just because you want to stream Netflix for a few hours. It is inevitable that some rural areas will always fall below the threshold set for bringing a cell or mast out of deep sleep. 

There is no point in posting data showing that this happens. The only people who are unaware of this are the customer service department and anyone who believes their advice that the problem can be solved by sending them yet another speed test and unplugging their modem for 30 seconds. The bottom line is that this is how a modern telco operates its network by design and that is that. 

[tiptaptoe]

I started using a Vodafone mobile data sim as my household broadband while I wait for my new company to fix their cables. I've been up and running for a week using a netgear 4g router wired to an antenna in the attic. I get pretty decent speeds... but every day at 12:02am the internet cuts off for around 3-4hrs every night. This mean my security cameras are useless and I can't keep anything running over night (which I need to do for my work) I've popped a review on trust pilot and got their usual "contact our social media team". I'm doing that but thought I'd add my voice to this. I'm in the north east of england.. seems to be happening nationally.