You go fast, but we go 'further' and 'deeper' – Voda tells 'Speedy' EE In a blog on the Vodafone website, its UK CEO Jeroen Hoencamp claims the global operator could build something as fast, or faster than, EE’s 300Mbps - it just doesn’t want to. Hoencamp claims that “one of the things that makes us different from others is that we have our 'low band spectrum'. What that means is that our 4G is …
"20Mbps is not broadband according to the FCC"
And what would Vodafone or the rest of the world care? The FCC do a bad job of regulating US telcos and Vodafone have no meaningful US presence since the sale of their Verizon stake.
To a large extent Vodafone are right when they talk about the bandwidth demand of mobile devices, and even for fixed line, most of the world aren't seeing anything like 20 Mbps.
I'll take consistency over bandwidth any day of the week, provided the bandwidth is over 10Mbit. In my old place I had 105Mbit internet but the grid was built on spotty infrastructure so I'd get momentary downtime a few times per day. Now I'm on 25Mbit that's up 24/7 and would go as far as to say that it's 10x better than my old situation. Even for a home network where bandwidth isn't capped, 1080p video streaming buffers seamlessly, games don't lagg, and everything else works just as well on 25Mbit as it did on 105 (actually better without the downtime). The only area where there's any difference is in big downloads that can actually upload fast enough to match my bandwidth, which are pretty much steam and torrents. Unless you download a fuckton or run a livestream, I don't see how an individual would need more than 20, and that's on a home network. On mobile I'd choose 20Mbit everywhere over 200 outside any day of the week.
@Pez92 I find my gigabit home network painfully slow at times when copying backups around. With game downloads now regularly topping 20gb I've had to learn patience with my 50mbit broadband. I remember how slow 100mb home networking felt (and 10 before that}.
There are a lot of people needing to transfer fuctons of data often enough to feel the pain, even when it's casual, not work related.
At work we courier Tb drives around while we wait for affordable >GB broadband! Waiting a guesstimated 4 months to populate workspaces from source control over broadband didn't really work for us ;)
@voland: observation check, this comment *thread* is discussing broadband speeds/quality.
And the disturbingly common 1.5 to 2gb mobile game downloads are a painful experience over 20mbit mobile when the servers fail to keep the connection long enough for each chunk (thanks Gameloft though they aren't the only incompetents). Which is the consistency over raw speed argument of course.
+1
I live in Romsey, a market town in Hampshire. Despite 3 Vodafone masts around my house, I have ~zero indoor 2G coverage, barely any in the garden either!
If I move 20m away its fine, even decent 3G, another 30m and good 4G.
In the house I need a SureSignal box!
Sort it out eh?
Vodafone's network has actually worsened in the areas I used to use it until I changed to EE a month ago. I now have up to 90Mbps in the countryside *and* I can make calls. Before I had EDGE if I was lucky and could only make calls indoors with the help of a femtocell.
The choice is between an intermittent 1990s service with Vodafone or a ubiquitous LTE service with EE.
I've had the opposite experience. At work we switched from O2 to EE, and now the only way I can make or take a call on the mobile at home or work is if I stand next to a window. I thought maybe it was my fault for flashing AOKP onto my S5, but my IT Manager's M8 has exactly the same issue after switching to EE. He even said that it was due to EE's signal penetration being awful.
At home the wife's Note 3 is on Vodafone and gets a great signal, while mine says 2-3 bars, but still can't make/take calls.
Like the rest of the commentards, outright speed isn't the be all and end all for mobile broadband, I'm more than happy with sped that is half that of a wired home copper connection....
But what voda needs to do is actually get its slow signal out to the depths of the world... east Essex where I live I can have HSDPA from O2, Three and EE - Voda - I can occasionally get voice, sometimes a GPRS signal, which is a sod as I am having to keep my EE contract running alongside a newish vodaphone contract that I can't escape from... added to that, since before Christmas the subsidised home box has been unavailable from either of the Vodaphone stores nearby....
Having paid Vodafone for '3D' for many years now every time I renew I ask the question - when will I ACTUALLY be able to use it? Even 2G access is intermitent, and when I am in a 3G area most of the time BTWifi coverage is much better anyway. So what i- the point of pumping 4G into areas that already have good coverage with wifi anyway.
We can't get reliable mobile broadband, and now I learn that despite the fact the cabinet across the road has been upgraded to fibre, we are not even on the 2017 list to be upgraded. Not economically viable!
How about a refund for customers who are never going to get what they have been ripped of for for years?
"the big problem with rural areas is the NIMBY types, they don't want masts near them"
I doubt it. That's a problem in urban and suburban locations. In most rural areas the most likely problem is the subscriber density and traffic volumes that are too low to justify the cost of the mast plus backhaul and power connections. I'd also guess that the mast can be shrunk in size and cost, but the real deal breaker is the cost of any new backhaul. Throw in the ongoing 4G roll outs, and the stretched technical resources, and I'd suggest that NIMBYs are a relatively small problem.
Not a recent one no - bloody vw in skirts. My old Favorit on the other hand - built like a tank, looks like a tank, sounds like a tank, drives like a tank (but blissfully comfortable with it), got the lugging ability of a tank - just keeps on taking the abuse my work gives it ... Mock 'em if you like, I'll be sad when I finally have to give up this one.
Out here in the Brecon Beacons, O2's coverage map says I should get 2g in the house. Apart from holding the phone against one window, I just get emergency calls only. But at the least they have the rather flaky TuGo app that routes the call through my land line broadband link. So I'm paying for the fact that O2 don't have enough masts to give coverage outside of central London. The coverage in this area is worst on EE as they shut down a lot of the Orange masts at the time of the merger. Vodafone also very poor.
Better geographical coverage is what is needed in the UK, I can't see the need for very high speeds when I can stream most of what I want at 10 Mb/s.
My parents live in rural somerset. The area has had 3G on EE for about 5 years, on Three for the last 4 years. They now have 4G on EE but Vodafone and o2 still just offer 2g. You can drive many miles in any direction without getting 3G on the two "enterprise" networks the further you go down the South West the worse it gets.
Instead of yapping on about his 4G strategy, Vodafone's CEO needs to spend some time explaining why their 3G coverage is still abysmal more than 11 years after deployment. Their latest posters in London which say they have the best network there are also misleading in the extreme - there are many places my work phone (on Vodafone) gets no signal or only 2G data whereas my EE phone has 3G everywhere and 4G in all but a few places and the testing by root metrics seems to support this too.
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