Vodafone Home Broadband Issues - Sigh

TechnoFreek

Hi Guys,

I've been experiencing some issues with vodafone home broadband particularly in the last few months. I have had some contact with vodafone already but to no real avail. I am posting here as I want to get some information and clarify my understanding (especially technical) before I go back to them. This is a bit of a long story but I'll try break it up.

First things firsts. I am on the vodafone 3mb package (sort of, I'll explain later!) using their modem/router (latest firmware) and I'm on the Arklow Exchange. I changed from eircom to vodafone around last Christmas.

When I first switched to voda I was able to get the full 3mbs but experienced random disconnects - i.e. dsl light goes out, windows says no internet connection and router goes into a sort of reboot mode until it reconnects several minutes later. This settled down after a while to my satisfaction.

About two months ago the latest set of problems started. When browsing sites especially forums with embedded images, the images would never appear. There wasnt a blank outline of where the image should be or a red x etx, the image simply wasnt there. After multiple reloads of the page some but generally not all of the images would not appear. If i clicked on an image to load in a new tab, the image would never load. It would always "time out" and eventually display a "Server Not Found" type error in the browser. Also web pages would that were loading would freeze, the browser loading bar would alsom appear to freeze but the page never timed out. Like it got stuck in a loop. Trying to open a new tab but immediately get the "Server not found" error. If I tried to start a download through my download manager I would aldo get a server not found type error. Essentially it looked a little bit like the router had dropped connection but it hadn't. The light was still on and windows said that it still had an internet connection.

I contacted a vodafone rep through boards.ie. He said the PM him my landline and he'd take a look. He replied stating that he'd tweaked the line and eveyrthing should be sorted. Not so. Plus around the same time by coincidence or not I my connection speed was dropped from 3mb to 2mb. I asked the rep again why this was and he "It's likely due to the speed change, we had to lower it a little to get it to stabilise, so the download speed is going to be a bit lower now."

Not sure what this means, and I know when connecting, speeds are advertisied as "up to 3mb" but when you had 3mb working pretty much ok it is a hard thing to take a step back. Speeds are already stone age and every mb counts at such slow speeds.

Anyway, after all of this embedded images are now loading and I'm on 2mb but I'm still experiencing difficulties. If i'm downloading a file I am unable to browse web pages - server not found error. Now i know when I'm downloading I'm eating up my 2mb but before I was still able to do it albeit that the page took ages to load. Plus have more than one download is next to impossible. Server not found type errors are thrown back at me.

Any advice here would be greatly appreciated. I'm also concerned because I received a letter a month or so ago stating that my exchange was due for upgrade for the next gen broadband. If I had to be downgraded to 2mb my hopes arent high for 8mb!!

I dont know exactly how to get my line stats - is this it?

Status: Connected
ModulationType: G.DMT
Upstream Downstream
CurrRate(kbps) 256 2048
MaxRate(kbps) 1008 2400
NoiseMargin(dB) 24.0 6.4
Attenuation(dB) 50.0 28.5
Power(dBm) 11.9 17.4

ejmaztec

I'm a former BT customer who was forced against his will to become a customer of Vodafone, the broadband supplier from hell.

Vodafone dropped mine from 3mb to 2mb, telling me that my line wasn't capable of handling 3mb, although it had been doing so with BT, for 18 months, no problem.

How far away from the Arklow exchange are you?

I'm about 1.5 miles away from the Listowel exchange, and my line stats are:

DSL Upstream Rate: 256 Kbps
DSL Downstream Rate: 2048 Kbps
..................................Down up
DSL Noise Margin: ......17.9 dB 18.0 dB
DSL Attenuation: .......48.0 dB 27.0 dB
DSL Transmit Power: ...7.8 dBm 1.8 dBm

I haven't a clue as to why my line hasn't been able to handle 3mb since Vodafone took it over, and Vodafone has absolutely no intention of telling me, no matter how many times I ask them. Your attenuation is similar to mine, so I'm assuming that you're well and truly stuck with what you've got. According to the whipping boys on the Vodafone forum, even when the exchange is "enhanced", it won't make a blind bit of difference to the line speeds.

I assume that the Vodafone management has told its customer service folks to ignore any questions relating to sudden drops in line-speed capability, and we're probably only going to get the truth if one of them slips up and spills the beans.

TechnoFreek

not too sure where exactlt the Arklow exchange is but as I'm on the edge of town I could potentially be a couple of km away.

Anyone know what the max speed my line could handle based on line stats posted above?
anything I could do to try get vodafone to bump me back up to 3mb? (when everything was actually working ok for me despit what they say)

dazdrog

TechnoFreek wrote: »

not too sure where exactlt the Arklow exchange is but as I'm on the edge of town I could potentially be a couple of km away.

Anyone know what the max speed my line could handle based on line stats posted above?
anything I could do to try get vodafone to bump me back up to 3mb? (when everything was actually working ok for me despit what they say)

http://www.kitz.co.uk/adsl/max_speed_calc.php

using this site it says your 3.6k from the exchange with a max speed of 4832kbps, now this all depends on line quality and from the looks of your snr of 6.4dB id say what you have is defo teh max you can take without disconnects but maybe a tiny bit more

foggy_lad

dazdrog wrote: »

http://www.kitz.co.uk/adsl/max_speed_calc.php

using this site it says your 3.6k from the exchange with a max speed of 4832kbps, now this all depends on line quality and from the looks of your snr of 6.4dB id say what you have is defo teh max you can take without disconnects but maybe a tiny bit more

that site says my line is 3.5km long which is just impossible unless the people laying the lines were all drunk and went aroung the houses a few dozen times! but that could be the case as it is eircom that laid the cable. and google maps is telling me 2.1km and that is travelling an extra few hundred metres over the same ground twice

charlie_says

My vf broadband line has gone to pot recently too. Latency has gone sky high - I get lower on my mobile phone data connection sometimes.

dazdrog

foggy_lad wrote: »

that site says my line is 3.5km long which is just impossible unless the people laying the lines were all drunk and went aroung the houses a few dozen times! but that could be the case as it is eircom that laid the cable. and google maps is telling me 2.1km and that is travelling an extra few hundred metres over the same ground twice

distance to the exchange by roads or across fiels or whatever is no way to measure a lines real distance, you have to take into account what route the line takes, where it travels to after it leaves your house and heads down the road and so on before it gets to that exchange, and that is impossible to find out