I do wonder if Vodafone over subscribe their cable links in comparison to some other providers like BTW

I must admit the Vodafone offer via moneysavingexpert is about £1 more for 500mbps vs 145 with plusnet , but slow speeds and the often poorer resilience non open reach providers have when exchange outages happen (rare i know) is making me think twice

Agree with router separation... with your own router you don't have to re-jig all the ports and settings each time you have to do the regular 24 month ISP shuffle.

I'm looking to upgrade to FTTP as soon as it comes available but will stick with VF (again) because of the effective "free" static IPs.

I have a friend on 1Gb FTTP with VF as well and he kindly (I don't think he knows or cares the cost of electricity) lets me host a 40TB raided zfs server there. The static IPs make life simple without occasional DDNS losses.

Over 4 years of service I've no horror stories to tell, dealing with out-sourced support seems the norm.

Interesting - sounds like you’re noticing no slow downs?!

> Slowdowns
It's hard to say, mostly I think it's what you're connecting to. I can test my friends 1Gb/s via a torrent of large public (non-copyright file). When using torrents generally with VPN it seems to be limited to about 100Mb/s but I'm sure that's the VPN service.

Obviously at peak times, some slow down can be expected, dependant on your source.
My VDSL connection is 22Mb/s, which I can strean 4K from the external server, they are both on VF but deographically seperate exchanges. But the data rate isn't tha high for that.

I'd say for me they've been an acceptable, reasonably reliable but budget connection. I got a £17/m deal a couple of years ago, it's currently £18 something for the VDSL ! The £3.50 increase in April will require a contract switch to wife's name, Topcashback deal and hopefuly FTTP to make it palatable.

Had issues with Vodafone but they were quickly resolved. 3yrs now without issue.
vs Plusnet? Look at the relevant forums lower down. See how quiet the Vodafone forum is.

Cannot comment on Vodafone vs Plusnet, but can comment on Vodafone vs TalkTalk as we now have services from both at different properties.
The customer service from Vodafone is worse than TalkTalk, an example this morning, gf rang the Vodafone equipped house, phone didn't work, so we went over to investigate, indicator light for phone service on the router was flashing red and the dialing tone was very odd and calls could not be made or received, so a call to customer services, what a joke, was told nothing wrong with internet (which I already knew) and it was a problem with our phone as shown by the red flashing light, that we had the wrong type of phone (which had been working fine for 3 months) and that we needed to go out and buy a 'Voice over Landline' phone, where do they find these people. Anyhow after trying another DECT phone and still no joy we hit upon the obvious answer, 'switch it off and on again' (the router that is), this restored the phone service and once this was working we could see that the indicator light for phone was green if the phone was plugged in or not, so had no bearing on the function of the phone handset.

In reply to a post by burble:

... we needed to go out and buy a 'Voice over Landline' phone ...

LOL. The very latest pre-internet tech

In reply to a post by burble:

The customer service from Vodafone is worse than TalkTalk

And that is quite an achievement.