Moving from Sky to Vodafone

Last Saturday I tried to move from Sky to Vodafone. However, I had a few problems.

First I phoned Sky to ask them if they could match the Vodafone offer. Vodafone offer fibre broadband for £22 a month for existing customers and they charge another £8 for anytime landline and mobile calls. I currently have fibre unlimited with Sky with anytime calls, costing £45.40 a month. Sky wouldn't match the Vodafone price (£30 total a month) and would only go down to £37.90.

I'm not actually an existing Vodafone customer but you can have a PAYG account and still get the discount, so I went out and bought a Vodafone PAYG sim with £10 credit on it. In order to keep the discount you need to make a call or text at least once every 90 days. However, after I applied the top up to the sim, it was converted to a big value bundle. However, I'm not intending to use the PAYG sim as my main number, so I don't want the bundle. I phoned Vodafone customer service with the PAYG sim to remove the big value bundle from the sim and to put the credit back on the sim. The next thing I did was set up a My Vodafone PAYG account on the Vodafone website.

After setting up the account on the website, I tried to order Vodafone fibre broadband through the website. However, the sign up failed. I phoned Vodafone CS but I could hardly understand the man on the phone. After half an hour on the phone I hung up because I had no idea what he was saying. He also asked for my post code about 5 times without explaining what he was doing. It turns out that if you have a PAYG account then you need to add your address details before you can sign up for broadband. However, this is not mentioned anywhere during the broadband sign up process.

After entering my address details on My Vodafone, I tried again and this time I succeeded. I received 2 emails about my order and the Vodafone router that they will send me but neither of the order numbers track on their website. I have no idea when the Vodafone router will arrive but the fibre broadband is going live on December 13th. Sky emailed me to say that my Sky service will stop on the 13th so it looks like my order has gone through.

It should be easy to sign up for broadband but I certainly didn't feel like the happy people in the Vodafone broadband adverts that are dancing in the street.

Vodafone's website definitely needs work. I cannot even log in to the 'My Vodafone' site
it gives a java error in the second stage of the two stage authentication process.

My router arrived about a week and a half before my activation date and no, the tracking didn't work either. My activation is tomorrow and I have had an email reminder to plug my router in tomorrow morning.

Just a quick update on my migration. They have emailed me 2 order tracking numbers but neither of them work. My router hasn't arrived yet. When I spoke to Vodafone, they had no idea if the router had been sent out or where it was. My Vodafone only shows my mobile account but nothing about my broadband.

I haven't received anything in writing from Vodafone yet, although Sky (my old provider) have sent me 2 letters. Sky have advised me that my phone number is going to be cancelled rather than ported. Obviously I don't want to lose my number that I have had for nearly 20 years. I phoned Vodafone yesterday evening and at first they had no idea if my number was going to be ported. When I spoke to a different person, they said that I would get a temporary number and that I would have to phone them to get my old number back, which could take up to 48 hours. However, given my recent experience with Vodafone's incompetence, I'm expecting that they'll probably fail to port my number.

I'm now wondering whether to just cancel the whole thing and not risk losing my phone number. Vodafone managed to lose my mobile number about 3 years ago so I don't want to have to go through that experience again.

I now can't even log in to My Vodafone any more, it says I need a phone number (although it worked fine until today)

I have now actually cancelled the order as I don't want to risk losing my number. I'll stay with Sky for the moment and consider my options after Christmas. Maybe Sky will have better retention offers by then.