The company I work for provided the customer service for Freeserve (and all it�s later names such as Wanadoo / Orange Home Broadband and even EE). I have a vague recollection of Freeserve having infrastructure provided by a company in Leeds called Planet Online or something similar sounding in the very early days. By the Wanadoo merger they used cable and wireless (who were also in Leeds so might have just been through acquisitions) although by the modern day it ended up being just a rebranded BT service and moving back to BT for customer service.

I seem to recall Freeserve and Wanadoo as having decent reputations, they certainly were rated as nice units to work on by colleagues who I�ve known over the years. That wasn�t the case in the later years!

Edited by gary333 (Thu 09-Jan-20 20:45:16)

In reply to a post by mrmarktigger:

My experience with them was similar to most of the reviews they have received on trustpilot:

https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/www.vodafone.co.uk

WOW, why am I not surprised!

It is no wonder I've had problems signing up to them, constant Errors and Credit Check Errors during checkout.

Now after reading those reviews I have no regrets not being able to sign up. Vodafone told me I could sign up to them via telephone calling. But of-course I won't bother, not only because I won't get the £100 gift card, but also due to the complaints.

This explains why the price is so cheap for their FTTC at £23 a month. When an ISP sucks then their packages tend to be cheap for a reason!

I guess only their FTTP is good. But then customer service is pretty dreadful.

In reply to a post by BLaZiNgSPEED:

I guess only their FTTP is good. But then customer service is pretty dreadful.

The Vodafone FTTC service I had was fine. I may well return to them when my current contract ends in September 2020. It will depend on the price.

I actually had freeserver then i think it changed to wanadoo.

wow that was a life-time ago.

I would only recommend voda on their city fibre FTTP.

In reply to a post by epyon:

I actually had freeserver then i think it changed to wanadoo.

wow that was a life-time ago.

I would only recommend voda on their city fibre FTTP.

Bless you.
That was only Half -a-Life-Time ago for me.... hahahahhaha

I'm so old that I used to repair equipment that had Thermionic valves fitted, (That's 'Tubes' to any Americans listening in) before Transistors and Chips were in common use.

Edited by mrmarktigger (Fri 10-Jan-20 22:05:34)

In reply to a post by Michael_Chare:

In reply to a post by BLaZiNgSPEED:

I guess only their FTTP is good. But then customer service is pretty dreadful.

The Vodafone FTTC service I had was fine. I may well return to them when my current contract ends in September 2020. It will depend on the price.

Well looking at the comparisons. https://www.thinkbroadband.com/isps/compare?isp_22=1...
This is actually looking pretty bad! TalkTalk Overall Satisfaction 66% vs 63% Vodafone, Reliability 68% TalkTalk 63% Vodafone.

Only on Customer service Vodafone is slightly better.

But for me reliability and customer satisfaction are the most important factors when choosing an ISP.

Across all internet service providers in the Barchart comparison here on thinkbroadband, Vodafone is the worst performing ISP of all the major ISPs. And I am sure all this chart is FTTC figures. FTTP is a completely different matter.

That's why I chose TalkTalk as the price at £21.95 p/m for 67 Mb/s is fixed for the remainder of the contract, while Vodafone do not promise the £23 a month price, it fluctuates and is likelier to go up mid-contract.

In reply to a post by BLaZiNgSPEED:

In reply to a post by Michael_Chare:

In reply to a post by BLaZiNgSPEED:

I guess only their FTTP is good. But then customer service is pretty dreadful.

The Vodafone FTTC service I had was fine. I may well return to them when my current contract ends in September 2020. It will depend on the price.

Well looking at the comparisons. https://www.thinkbroadband.com/isps/compare?isp_22=1...
This is actually looking pretty bad! TalkTalk Overall Satisfaction 66% vs 63% Vodafone, Reliability 68% TalkTalk 63% Vodafone.

Only on Customer service Vodafone is slightly better.

But for me reliability and customer satisfaction are the most important factors when choosing an ISP.

Across all internet service providers in the Barchart comparison here on thinkbroadband, Vodafone is the worst performing ISP of all the major ISPs. And I am sure all this chart is FTTC figures. FTTP is a completely different matter.

That's why I chose TalkTalk as the price at £21.95 p/m for 67 Mb/s is fixed for the remainder of the contract, while Vodafone do not promise the £23 a month price, it fluctuates and is likelier to go up mid-contract.

Does not compute with Talk Talk. They are cheap and cheerful (well cheap) and that's about it.

In reply to a post by gary333:

In reply to a post by BLaZiNgSPEED:

In reply to a post by Michael_Chare:

... nested quotes trimmed ...

The Vodafone FTTC service I had was fine. I may well return to them when my current contract ends in September 2020. It will depend on the price.

Well looking at the comparisons. https://www.thinkbroadband.com/isps/compare?isp_22=1...
This is actually looking pretty bad! TalkTalk Overall Satisfaction 66% vs 63% Vodafone, Reliability 68% TalkTalk 63% Vodafone.

Only on Customer service Vodafone is slightly better.

But for me reliability and customer satisfaction are the most important factors when choosing an ISP.

Across all internet service providers in the Barchart comparison here on thinkbroadband, Vodafone is the worst performing ISP of all the major ISPs. And I am sure all this chart is FTTC figures. FTTP is a completely different matter.

That's why I chose TalkTalk as the price at £21.95 p/m for 67 Mb/s is fixed for the remainder of the contract, while Vodafone do not promise the £23 a month price, it fluctuates and is likelier to go up mid-contract.

Does not compute with Talk Talk. They are cheap and cheerful (well cheap) and that's about it.

That's true, but if you are going to spend more money on a service but don't get guaranteed reliability or speed improvement, then that will bring more frustration.

At least with TalkTalk if the service is not up to scratch, I can say "I am paying only £21.95" so I wouldn't be as angry as I would be if I had to pay £29 to Sky or Vodafone £23-£27 a month. And that will be even more expensive as the price will not be fixed.

It is important that the money you spend is in ratio to the service you get. I would surely go with Andrews & Arnold, Zen or Cloudscape if I were to spend £30-35 a month. But I would think twice on Sky and even Vodafone is not so good of a deal without the gift voucher or the latest router.

The truth is Vodafone is the worst performing ISP of any major provider in the UK, it performs worse than TalkTalk even if it costs more. The Trustpilot reviews of Vodafone is the worst I have seen of any provider yet.

I believe there is an active campaign on a facebook vodafone hate group to post negative reviews at the moment,

As we all know, unhappy customers are vocal, and happy ones don't feel the need to say how good the service is/that it works for what they want.

In principle that may be generally correct.

However, this latest article on ISPReview.
https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2020/01/vodafo...

And https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/www.vodafone.co.uk

85% cannot be an over-exaggeration. I don't deny there are happy customers. But unhappy customers will also not write negative reviews if it was only partially bad. A service generally has to be quite bad for an extensive period of time for someone to write a negative review.

There are people with a complaining nature who will be quick to write negative reviews. But then again we must wonder why this is not happening with the other ISPs. I thought Onestream was bad, but this is worse. And my difficulty switching to Vodafone due to credit check failure is something very new. I've had internet for 20 years with a variety of different ISP's but this is the first time I've had such a negative experience.