Voda boss claims 'turning point' as infra investment kicks in

Vodafone CEO Vittorio Colao claimed this morning that the company's huge £18bn infrastructure investment was slowly starting to pay off, with the operator reporting a growth in earnings for the first half of its financial year. Group sales fell 2.3 per cent to £20.3bn for the six months ended 30 September, while organic …

[JimS]

Infrastructure Upgrade??

18 billion invested, where exactly?? Be nice if they had a working infrastructure to start with, especially in the South West of England!

<rant alert>

We've had over a year of continual excuses and being ignored by Vodafone, they have non-existant 4G service in the South West and their 3G service has been terrible, so much so that 3G was turned off on all phones due to constant call drops and calls from customers sounding like Daleks. Even then call drops were still happening, but at least you could have more than a 10 second conversation with someone before having to find a land line.

My last network support ticket lasted nearly 3 months before their engineers 'fixed' the issue, which still isn't fixed. The one before that took 2 months to be 'resolved', and wasn't.

And don't get me started on the web site and customer portal, if you want to see what a site would look like if you gave a few hundred monkeys access to keyboards and a vat of jelly, go try and use it.

</rant alert>

tl;dr

Been with them for over 10 years, will be moving carriers come the new year, bunch of amateurs. This will bring it's own issues though, as the only other viable option is EE.

The state of the mobile infrastructure in this country is pathetic and 'coverage' doesn't mean squat if you don't have a usable service.

[Neill Mitchell]

Re: Infrastructure Upgrade??

I don't know where you are in the South West, but just to warn you, EE coverage in Dorset is poor to non-existent. When they merged with T-Mobile they shut down a lot of masts. I went from an already poor 2 bar 2G signal to absolutely nothing (and I leave near a big town, not right out in the sticks). Their network coverage map is completely inaccurate.

I switched from EE to Vodafone and generally it's much better. EE didn't give a toss when I left after 9 years citing poor coverage. They refused to even offer a femto cell. My work phone is EE and it still gets nothing at home 2 years on.

These companies only care about cost saving and whilst that continues I can't see the rural situation improving much.

[Trumpet Winsock IIIrd]

Re: Infrastructure Upgrade??

I'm in the Poole / Bournemouth area and am currently with Giffgaff who I think are using the 02 network.

I was tempted by an offer from 3, checked their online coverage map and all seemed well. I decided to get a 3 PAYG SIM just to double check and it's a good job that I did. 1 bar where I live, and very patchy when I am out and about.

Giffgaff has worked well for me, they recently upgraded the rolling monthly contract to 4G and doubled my data allowance at no extra charge.

If you haven't already checked them out it might be worth taking a look.

[JimS]

Re: Infrastructure Upgrade??

We went out and bought a PAYG EE 4G cheapy phone to test, it's by far from perfect (Near Weymouth, Dorset), but it had far better signal with fewer call drops compared to Vodafone. Pretty fast 4G as well, we were getting 50 Mbps / 13 Mbps inside buildings a lot of the time, even EE's 3G at it's slowest was far, far quicker than Vodafone's 3G.

I know what you mean though, it is definitely a case of out of the frying pan and into the fire switching carriers in rural (ish) areas, they're all pretty useless outside of the larger population hubs, even for making a basic call, let alone for data.

[BlackBolt]

Re: Infrastructure Upgrade??

Its not 'Magic'. They might have ring-fenced 18 Billion but it takes time and effort to allocate, design and deploy it.

Money alone does not create a sustainable telco network, its the implmentation (time!) that does.

[AnoniMouse]

Not all Vodafone customers are benefiting

>> "Our customers are benefiting from the significant investments we are making in high speed mobile and fixed networks," he added.

Not true for Demon Internet customers, for whom Vodafone has repeatedly failed to provide information about the future of Demon broadband and email services.

[The Wookie]

I'm in central Bath on Vodafone and I get HSDPA, not even HSDPA+, pathetic.

[g7rpo]

Network doesnt matter if CS fails

CS from Vodafone is the worst I have experienced ever, even BT are a shining beacon of competence compared to VF.

45 mins on hold before you speak to someone who will then do precisely nothing to resolve the problem and make the noises the user wants to hear to get off the phone.

Would never ever use their service again

[Mobile Mole]

Global company

As usual a lot of discussion on here around UK coverage issues. You need to remember that Vodafone is massively multinational and that network investment is across the globe so there are obviously going to be priority calls on where to spend the money.