Fourplay frolics: Vodafone launches landline broadband As expected, Vodafone has launched Connect, a consumer broadband service - and, as expected, the speeds are disappointing. While AQL and Gigaclear will let you have a gigabit or more, and Virgin Media offers 152Mbps, the new Vodafone service is aimed at BT’s 76Mbps Infinity 2 package. Vodafone claims that it will offer speed …
Maybe they could also offer a free sub to Spotify Premium which expires after a random interval. They could then consign thousands of affected complaining customers to support processes inspired by Kafka performing Dante at the salad bar of a Harvester.
I'd patent this idea but Vodafone already have prior art.
Not that I'm bitter, Vodafone, you scum-sucking bastards! Buy broadband from you? I'd sooner spend my twilight years waxing Rupert Murdoch's ball-sack
Anon for what should be obvious reasons ...
I'd need dragging and screaming to use a broadband service from Vodamoan right now. We use them at work (some connections directly with them, some via a reseller) - and to say we've had problems would be an understatement ! I really have no confidence that they are fit to run any network.
They had a nationwide outage (most of their leased lines and all of their FTTC) on services last year. Why ? Well a breaker tripped in a datacentre - but they had no monitoring to detect that. A power supply failed - but they had no monitoring to detect that. Due to the combination of those, they were running off the batteries - but they had no monitoring to tell them that. The batteries ran down - but they had no monitoring to tell them. Anyone spot a theme going here ? The generators didn't start because the combination of faults left the control system thinking that everything was OK. Eventually the batteries ran out - they didn't need any monitoring for that as their call centre phones went into meltdown.
I got my call in early - and had the comment that "something must be happening, there's 5 calls in the queue and I've never seen that before". Minutes later it wasn't possible to get through !
One of our connections came back after 10 minutes when they switched the tripped breaker back on. Unfortunately, another circuit was on a router that took exception to being switched off and decided to fail quite spectacularly - that circuit was off for over 12 hours, as were a lot of other leased line connections.
That was last year, this year, new year, new pile of poo !
We have a number of customers on FTTC circuits with them. They've been suffering from "poor throughput"* because (as far as we can find out) Vodamoan oversold capacity and have a node that's seriously congested. It's now been about 2 months as we are still at the "we'll have a fix in a week or two" mode. Apparently as of this week they can migrate customers with a single IP address to a different bit of network (via new user-ids) - but can't do that for multiple IPs yet. Quite why they can't re-route some of their traffic to a different node escapes me.
* "Poor" as in, a FTTC line which normally speed tests at around 60M was yesterday only managing under 1M. Sometimes speed tests fail altogether !
So in case it wasn't clear, no I'm not a big fan of Vodamoan for "fixed line" comms.
And yes, I did tip-off El Reg about both these issues - but for some reason, not a sqeak.
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