I have been having LOTS of difficulty with Vodafone's MBB package, mainly the speed, or should I say LACK of it, and as a result have been in lots of telephone and email contact with their "support" teams. Now I am NOT an expert on the modern internet although I was one of the first to use its forerunner(Packet Switching) but even I know that a transferr speeg of .1Kbps is SLOW but one person I spoke to about this told me that it was quite acceptable and that even if it did take 60secs. to load a page that I could have looked at 10 pages in the time I had taken to talk to him! The supervisor was even less helpful. I was a little agrieved and decided to look for ways to check the real speed of my connection(billed as 3.6Mbps by Vodafone), I found this site and took the speed test, the result a whoppimg 0.17 Mbps so I went looking for speed monitors on Snapfile, found and installed 2(two) of them(just to be sure) and have been running them all this week, the result is that I have an average speed of transferr of 2.8Kbps(yes two point eight). I have, as a result, cancelled my 24 month contract with Vodafone, after of course, informing them of the monitoring I was doing, and of the results. Now their customer "service" people seem to be sitting up and taking notice! Was it my persuasive ways or was it the proof of their lack of performance or was it the fact that I followed this site's advice and mentioned Trading Standards and the Advertising Standards people. The long and the short of it is that I am now on my way to a cabled solution, fingers crossed, and away from Vodafone. Pity really since the MBB is suck a neat convenient solutioon - pity about the implementation though.
from experience you can only get good reception in London with MBB, I have a Three dongle and often get over 1.5 Mbps in London, but as soon as I leave London it dwindles and drops out very rapidly.
The mobile operators need to invest a lot more money in the technology, but it is still early days for the platform.
More importantly, I think the ISPs needs to stop *****ing about iPlayer raping their service and either upgrade their infrastructure or stop false advertising.
On a more prosaic note, i discovered today loads of heavy apps (iplayer, skype, instant messenger etc) aren't included in Vodafone's overseas roaming fair usage policy. £5 a time they'll cost you. Here's the link:
There was a story in the great local rag the London paper yesterday about Vodafone charging a customer over £5000 for watching a couple of episodes of the apprentice on the iplayer.
I agree that users have a responsibility to check the terms before they use it. But the amount that they charge is excessive, and has nothing to do with how much extra it costs the operators.
The operators are just trying to find new ways to maximize their profits, now that they been forced to reduce roaming call charges. The European Parliament needs to act quickly on this.
I agree that users have a responsibility to check the terms before they use it. But the amount that they charge is excessive, and has nothing to do with how much extra it costs the operators.
The operators are just trying to find new ways to maximize their profits, now that they been forced to reduce roaming call charges. The European Parliament needs to act quickly on this.
Companies should be free to do what the **** they want.
I am going to buy a laptop for when I am away from home. I just want it so I can download / respond to e-mails and perhaps go on the odd forum! I will normally be around the Portsmouth area.
I was thinking of getting mobile broadband (is it available on PAYG as I don't want a contract then find I haven't used my monthly payment). However, reading some of the comments here, it doesn't seem to be such a great idea. What is the general consensus ?
Good for light use, not recommended for heavy downloading.
If you approach mobile broadband in a realistic manner, it'll work for you. For instance, if you're using your laptop on a train, the download speed will vary wildly as you travel and occasionally drop out altogether. You just have to accept that.
On the whole though, two thumbs up. I think a mobile broadband connection would suit your needs quite comfortably.
Mobile Broadband - Vodafone
Posted - 15/05/2008 : 05:04:32
