Vodafone BQM's

I thought it might be useful to share live Vodafone BQMs, especially monitoring their peak time performance. This is mine via CityFibre, hope others can share theirs too:
Live Vodafone BQM

Post deleted by Ahmedg

Edited by Ahmedg (Mon 14-Apr-25 11:22:56)

Live BQM

This is also on City Fibre, looks like we both encounter high latency around the same time.

Okay, I'll play. Mine's in my siggie (Openreach)

Might want to ask folks to list their (appropriate) location and speed tier.

In reply to a post by dgilbert2:

I thought it might be useful to share live Vodafone BQMs, especially monitoring their peak time performance. This is mine via CityFibre, hope others can share theirs too:
Live Vodafone BQM

@Pheasant, good point. Mine above is connected to the Birmingham gateway 84.65.192.1, about 30 miles away, at Full Fibre 150/150.

Interesting that out of the small number of BQM's so far, Openreach is not suffering the same level of peak time congestion, so will be interesting to learn which gateways are being connected to

Location Nottingham Cityfibre 900/900

Definite network congestion issues in an evening, especially bad on Tuesdays for some reason, upload speed unaffected but download heavily impacted anything as low as 100. Use of a VPN makes network speedier.

Hate using their kit but may need to report this and you are not using our router blah blah get out excuse.

Live BQM

Edited by zingers (Tue 15-Apr-25 20:45:46)

In reply to a post by zingers:

Location Nottingham Cityfibre 900/900

Live BQM

Remarkable similarity with the Minimum Latency last night between your BQM and mine (also aligns to last nights football, but that's probably a coincidence!?)

I'm guessing that as you are not that far from us (but not close enough to be on the same CityFibre infrastructure), you also connect to the Vodafone Birmingham gateway 84.65.192.1 which could explain the likeness and firmly puts the issue with Vodafone.

How to get their support to recognise this on their "flowchart", I just wouldn't know where to start though! Mind you, your minimum speed is below the guaranteed for a 900 line, so that might be a good place to start?

Same here. Openreach in Lincolnshire. Throughput plummeted to less than 5Mb/s and I had to use Proton VPN's free service to boost it.

https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/...

In reply to a post by Zadeks:

Same here. Openreach in Lincolnshire. Throughput plummeted to less than 5Mb/s and I had to use Proton VPN's free service to boost it.

https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/...

Ummm, another very similar looking minimum latency between 8 and 10:30 last night, definitly cannot point fingers at CityFibre for yours

I wonder if your Vodafone gateway is also 84.65.192.1 being 'neighbours' in Lincolnshire?

Yes, same gateway.

In reply to a post by Ahmedg:

Live BQM

This is also on City Fibre, looks like we both encounter high latency around the same time.

In reply to a post by Ripshod:

Okay, I'll play. Mine's in my siggie (Openreach)

@Ahmedg, @Ripshod which Vodafone gateway are you both connecting to? I suspect different to 84.65.192.1 as your BQM's look comparatively different to the recent posts?

Yep same gateway so explains the similar bqms, clearly evening congestion frustrating as generally no issue at all since the last time (over a year ago) where ended up compensating me for the poor speeds.

They tried for weeks to say it was anything but them though

This is my gateway, on Cityfibre, 900Mb

Gateway 83.105.128.1

My gateway is 90.246.0.1 (Leeds), though the physical location of the gateway is closer to Manchester.

Thank you to everyone who has shared their BQM's and contributed to this thread.

In my opinion and observations over the last week or so, it has shown that there is no 'fault' as such with my particular install. The latency trends are very similar across others, particularly if connecting via the 84.65.192.1 gateway. So the issue does seem to lie with the capacity of the Vodafone network at peak times, which aligns with other 'googled' complaints about the Vodafone network.

Can anything be done? I suspect trying to get Vodafone technical support to understand and acknowledge this issue would be near impossible. I would have thought though that the main network management engineers would be seeing these issues and we can only hope that upgrades are implemented in the future, we can dream anyway!

My only other thought was whether it is possible to somehow make the router connect to a different gateway, but I don't believe it is?

It's not possible, On my Asus I can manually set a gateway and both gateways show in the GUI, but the manual gateway setting is ignored.

I've just stumbled across this thread and had to register just to say it's not just you. I thought I was going mad with me using my own router and vodafone support saying there are no issues. Well, BQM says different:

Last Tuesday's BQM

and

Live BQM

Based in the East Mids and my gateway is currently: 83.105.128.1

In reply to a post by Ripshod:

It's not possible, On my Asus I can manually set a gateway and both gateways show in the GUI, but the manual gateway setting is ignored.

A shame but not surprising

In reply to a post by Timbo01:

I've just stumbled across this thread and had to register just to say it's not just you. I thought I was going mad with me using my own router and vodafone support saying there are no issues. Well, BQM says different.....

Congestion does seem to be a real issue with Vodafone at times. I don't know if its just my imagination, but it does seem worse when there is evening football. Tonight, no football, Vodafone not as bad!?

FTTP connections are sold to us on the basis that they are fast and reliable. Anyone using this Vodafone service for gaming is going to be sorely disappointed by the latency they experience.

Seeing the service suffer every day at the same time means something should be being done or at least acknowledged by the ISP..

In reply to a post by Timbo01:

FTTP connections are sold to us on the basis that they are fast and reliable. Anyone using this Vodafone service for gaming is going to be sorely disappointed by the latency they experience.

Seeing the service suffer every day at the same time means something should be being done or at least acknowledged by the ISP..

Agreed, in my opinion it's time that Ofcom introduced measures for ISP's based not only on speed, but also for Latency. An average minimum latency over a 24hr period would shake things up! However, is it a case of you get what you pay for!? I'm beginning to wonder.

In reply to a post by dgilbert2:

In reply to a post by Timbo01:

FTTP connections are sold to us on the basis that they are fast and reliable. Anyone using this Vodafone service for gaming is going to be sorely disappointed by the latency they experience.

Seeing the service suffer every day at the same time means something should be being done or at least acknowledged by the ISP..

... it's time that Ofcom introduced measures for ISP's based not only on speed, but also for Latency. An average minimum latency over a 24hr period would shake things up! ...

Wholeheartedly agree with this!

However, I don't think Joe Public, legislators or customer rights campaigners understand what latency is. If they do, I would suggest they probably think it's for kids playing games.

My experience speaking with my ISP is their first line teams don't grasp the problem if upload/download speeds tests ok. Following that, I'm not confident of the next support line's ability to readily provide solutions, other than where it affects single subscribers - just conjecture on my part, but I imagine these matters could potentially require sizeable infrastructure changes around routing, balancing or capacity. i.e. medium to long term solutions requiring investment, change management and planning.

In reply to a post by dgilbert2:

My only other thought was whether it is possible to somehow make the router connect to a different gateway, but I don't believe it is?

It would theoretically be possible to do this in any router that supported scripting such as Mikrotik RouterOS or OpenWrt. You wouldn't specify the gateway to connect to but you'd have it look at the current gateway and drop the PPPoE session, wait a bit and then bring it up again if the gateway was in a predefined list of ones you didn't want to use. Have this repeat every five minutes in the early hours of the morning and you should fairly reliably be able to avoid 'bad' gateways.

Though Vodafone have shown repeatedly they are unable to manage their network in such a way that capacity is added before it starts causing severe issues, I would only expect the problem to get worse, and your efforts would be better spent logging your speeds over time, showing they are below the minimums given to you when you signed up, and using that evidence to terminate the contract.

In reply to a post by ArthurMorgan:

However, I don't think Joe Public, legislators or customer rights campaigners understand what latency is. If they do, I would suggest they probably think it's for kids playing games.

My experience speaking with my ISP is their first line teams don't grasp the problem if upload/download speeds tests ok. Following that, I'm not confident of the next support line's ability to readily provide solutions, other than where it affects single subscribers - just conjecture on my part, but I imagine these matters could potentially require sizeable infrastructure changes around routing, balancing or capacity. i.e. medium to long term solutions requiring investment, change management and planning.

Agreed, but when more and more people move to FTTP and use video conferencing / gaming, but then realise FTTP is fast but worse for these applications with certain ISP's, heads need to be taken out of the sand

Edited by dgilbert2 (Fri 25-Apr-25 18:36:47)

In reply to a post by jpm:

.....Though Vodafone have shown repeatedly they are unable to manage their network in such a way that capacity is added before it starts causing severe issues, I would only expect the problem to get worse, and your efforts would be better spent logging your speeds over time, showing they are below the minimums given to you when you signed up, and using that evidence to terminate the contract.

Thanks, that's good advice, especially as script writing is not something I'd like to undertake myself with any level of confidence.