I have BT, whenever I call I get UK support.
Live chat is foreign based.

Sky always seemed to be Irish, Scottish or English sounding.

Plusnet seems to be mainly UK based.

My experience has been the last few years I almost never get non UK support, on my mobile (EE) and internet sky / BT and energy provider EDF and bank Santander / AMEX.

Well the new router arrived, and in typical VF fashion it doesn't even connect to their network!!

Complains about an ACS failure, and that was even after I'd phoned them up and they "replaced the old router's serial number with the new router's serial number".

hahah. Shambolic!

Edited by mbames (Tue 22-Jan-19 15:26:54)

I too have been experiencing problems with Vodafone. Since mid-December I've spent over 10hrs on the phone to their tech support teams, I've written to their complaints team, I've been pretty vocal about their awful service on social media and where has it gotten me?.... Nowhere.

I ended up speaking to a guy called Robert at their L2 support, who basically told me that there was nothing they could do as all their systems were telling them that there was nothing wrong with their network and "some" speed tests showed full throughput. I explained that the vast majority of speed tests (particularly single-connection) didn't show anywhere near full throughput; especially Fast.com, but was told that basically "that's the internet for you". I asked why if that was the case, when I turned on a VPN did all my speed test results go through the roof? He wasn't sure. I told him to take a look at this forum to show that I wasn't the only one affected, he said he might.

I have however since resolved the issue entirely!! I switched provider today to IDNet and sure enough, all my speed tests are now running at full speed, including Fast.com.

So the answer is simple; don't use Vodafone as an ISP, they are awful.

Oh and FYI, even after all these issues and hours and hours on the phone to Vodafone, they still made me pay to get out of the contract.

I've just spoken to the Directors Office and they told me "we don't accept speedtest.net results from any servers, apart from 'BT Lanc Services', our own servers are broken, and we can't guarantee the speed or accuracy of any other speedtest.net servers".

Curiously a traceroute to ookla.btlancashire.co.uk shows the route hops into Janet almost immediately, thus bypassing their shonky network.

Mine went [censored] in November and they just keep trotting out the line "you are syncing above the min speed, there is nothing wrong".

If I want to leave before 1st Sept, then I have to pay my early termination charges....

My fast.com results are shockingly rubbish, around 1-2Mbps, which is significantly worse than other tests.

C:\Users\matth>tracert ookla.btlancashire.co.uk

Tracing route to ookla.btlancashire.co.uk [194.150.176.123]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 192.168.100.254
2 5 ms 5 ms 5 ms host-212-158-250-33.dslgb.com [212.158.250.33]
3 9 ms 9 ms 9 ms 63.130.105.130
4 10 ms 10 ms 10 ms linx-gw1.ja.net [195.66.224.15]
5 10 ms 10 ms 10 ms ae23.londtt-sbr1.ja.net [146.97.35.169]
6 18 ms 17 ms 15 ms ae27.erdiss-sbr2.ja.net [146.97.33.14]
7 16 ms 13 ms 44 ms ae29.manckh-sbr2.ja.net [146.97.33.42]
8 13 ms 16 ms 13 ms ae25.manckh-ban1.ja.net [146.97.35.50]
9 13 ms 13 ms 13 ms lancs-council.manckh-ban1.ja.net [146.97.40.50]
10 * * * Request timed out.

Bypassing? Righto!

Good move!

Use a VPN. You won't be affected by shaping.

I didn't even notice they had introduced any, and I've been on voda for years.

I just got 69/72 on speedtest.

with vpn off? 5.

It's not throttling or shaping. It's congestion.
A VPN won't help with that.

edit: They have very poor routing. VPN can help with that.

Edited by j0hn83 (Thu 07-Feb-19 10:34:22)

I signed up to them at the start of January, luckily im within my 30 day period

Migrating to Plusnet next week, i just can't believe how congested the network is, when i rang to give Vodafone my notice they didn't make any attempt to pass me to technical support or retain me.

In reply to a post by j0hn83:

It's not throttling or shaping. It's congestion.
A VPN won't help with that.

edit: They have very poor routing. VPN can help with that.

its not congested. its traffic management. my connection is fine with a VPN
and capped to 5mbit without. congestion doesn't do that.