I’ve happily used Virgin for many years and their broadband service round here has for the most part been excellent with reliable fast speeds and now get 350mbps. If they remained cost effective I’d stick with them.
However Vodaphone now offer their Gigafast service round our way and 500mbps with home phone line rental will be significantly cheaper at just under half Virgin’s price.
Before switching though I wondered if anyone had any experience of the Vodaphone gigafast service, good or bad?
I’d not heard of this, so looked it up and it seems it’s not available here yet. The only thing I’d say about Vodafone is that their customer service is shockingly bad. When I left their mobile service they messed everything up and put a negative marker on my credit file that was totally wrong. When my wife left them it was also a nightmare.
That said, Virgin are really irritating in putting the price up every year, which gets reduced again after a good moan to their retentions team. Hopefully the new Ofcom rules will change that but I’m not holding my breath! They are very nice when you do get through though, whereas Vodafone customer services are simply clueless.
A good friend has it and tells me it’s great. Speeds are slightly faster than advertised to avoid disputes, the need for a BT landline disappears but there was mention of an option to retain your existing number for use on VOIP calls. Maybe it’s just A number that can be dialled from anywhere; I’d need to check on that.
Regardless, he’s happy; when it comes to our part of the world in January this year (!!!) I’m going for it. Cheaper, faster, from what m’chum tells me completely reliable so far a year in.
Cool, thanks for that. I’ll do the normal thing and contact Virgin first to try and negotiate price but I cant see them dropping that much…
Had a bad experience with Vodafone after they billed me incorrectly for £600 of euro data. I couldn’t even get a normal phone signal never mind enough to download data where I was at the time. They never admitted they were wrong but credited me £450 in my account a few months after I’d gone through all the customer services, been called a liar, had calls ended etc. The worst CS experience I’ve ever known. They tried everything to keep the credit too but I was out of contract by then so insisted they put it back in my bank account not theirs. They’ll never see me as a customer ever again.
Avoid.
Sounds bad, but issues with mobile roaming data and questions about their FTTP are apples & oranges. Granted it’s a lurid tale about their CS, but I’d have a £ on every ISP in the country having customers with a tale to tell.
I had a similar bad experience with Vodafone. I won’t bore you with the details, but they overcharged me, and 2 years after I left, they sent me a threatening letter saying they wanted to recover more money from me. Never again.
I had to pay up as I was still in contract. They agreed to let me pay around £150 a month extra to clear it. I couldn’t prove I hadn’t used the data any more they could prove I had but I needed the contract for work so I was stuck. I couldn’t wait to get out as soon as the contract was up. I don’t care what service they have in the future, it’s one of those episodes that make you say ‘never again’.
I would be wary of what you are looking at… it appears VF have fallen foul of Advertising standards on being somewhat misleading with the term Gigafast.
Effectively it’s a marketing term encompassing a whole range of products from standard superfast to ultra fast broadband.
If you are looking at FTTH/FTTP, then you need to compare with other services such as Virgin Media, BT Full Fibre, and Hyperoptic,
Yes they call it gigafast (stupidly, and the complaint was raised by Virgin) but round here it does offer the advertised speeds (100, 500 and 900) over usual ‘broadband’ standards. This is in their partnership with CityFibre, having dug up all the pavements around here to lay their cable, despite our street being built with original NTL (now Virgin) cable back in the '90’s.
It does offer competition to Virgin, which until now has been my only choice (albeit proven to be a very good one in delivery).
That’s dependant on location, they have a check first facility, its standard FFTC line speed in my village - i.e. same as I get with BT 70/18
Indeed as in those locations VF will be using BT Openreach cabinets, backhaul, and fibre/twisted pair infrastructure upto the main fibre unbundling exchange point which could be 10s of miles away.
The check facility uses the same facility that most ISPs use which is the range (I think 90th percentile) that OpenReach dynamically publish for a line number or postcode based on current synchronisation rates.
For BT customers you can see the info for your line using dslchecker.bt.com. (Mike I know of course you are aware of all this)
OK, I know…The point I guess I’m failing to make here though is that in this specific location, which is why I raised the initial question, the CityFibre cable and associated faster speeds are available. I realise that in most other parts they’re not yet.
I really just wanted to see if anyone had tried them yet.
Sorry we do digress, be interesting to hear of others experiences, but I would be genuinely surprised if there was an issue affecting our very modest consumer audio applications we are discussing here on a superfast/ultrafast provision, unless due to an issue in the home LAN/WLAN which is significantly more likely or one is using a Naim legacy streaming product.
Wow! These are speeds I can only dream of. Typically here we get 3Mbps, although this varies between 1-6, but only once have I ever seen 6Mbps.
Yep, we were fortunate to buy a house with decent cable from the off, so in the days of broadband we’ve always managed to get decent speed/bandwidth.
Useful in a house of 4 (with two streaming on their bits and bobs virtually non stop it seems) with over 20 connected devices…
Well within the UK there is now I understand the 10Mbps USO for a minimum 10 Mbps sync download speed… BT has signed up to it, disappointingly many other ISPs have shied away… says it all really, that’s why I always recommend using a quality ISP, other than ones just trying to make a quick buck.
There is a process to follow a USO request… there is no absolute guarantee this can be met in certain extreme circumstances, and in other extreme cases you may be asked to contribute to the install, but it would be interesting to see what you are offered. But as you have long line ADSL by the sound of it, you are not too remote. (It might be suspended due to current situation however)
https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2019/06/ofcom-set-march-2020-launch-for-10mbps-uk-broadband-uso.html
For very remote and distant locations, and isolated remote headlands and islands, there is also the option of satellite, which can work quite well too, but cheap satellite service offerings can be highly contended. But you will probably be aware of this already, as these locations rarely have ADSL.
As I found out to my benefit, in rural areas if you put a bit of effort it, sometimes through local gov / parish council, the results can be very worthwhile, and that was before the USO. In urban and suburban locations it tends to get served to you on a plate 
As an incentive through organising through my parish council (I became a councillor) I lobbied to get a build out for our small village through the UK Gov Better Broadband Scheme, and the County Council , and my broadband went from around 3 Mbps (with fairly frequent disconnects) to a rock solid 47.55Mbps … it was quite transformational…took some persistence though over a few years, but should be easier now because of the USO.
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