Fourplay frolics: Vodafone launches landline broadband

Behind the curve?

If 76Mbps is "behind the curve", then wtf is the 1Mbps that I'm still on? And that's with Vodafone (after they bought Demon)!

Nothing to see here. BT still have the strangle hold on the final connection to the home :-(

FTTC

Fibre-to-the-curb? Really?

The special feature is control of the clever router from an app.

And VULN discovered in 3...2....1

Promo idea

Maybe they could also offer a free sub to Spotify Premium which expires after a random interval. They could then consign thousands of affected complaining customers to support processes inspired by Kafka performing Dante at the salad bar of a Harvester.

I'd patent this idea but Vodafone already have prior art.

Not that I'm bitter, Vodafone, you scum-sucking bastards! Buy broadband from you? I'd sooner spend my twilight years waxing Rupert Murdoch's ball-sack

and in 2018

Vodafone buys Gigaclear

Connect

Any connection to Connect that my telly uses to watch IPTV?

Anon for what should be obvious reasons ...

I'd need dragging and screaming to use a broadband service from Vodamoan right now. We use them at work (some connections directly with them, some via a reseller) - and to say we've had problems would be an understatement ! I really have no confidence that they are fit to run any network.

They had a nationwide outage (most of their leased lines and all of their FTTC) on services last year. Why ? Well a breaker tripped in a datacentre - but they had no monitoring to detect that. A power supply failed - but they had no monitoring to detect that. Due to the combination of those, they were running off the batteries - but they had no monitoring to tell them that. The batteries ran down - but they had no monitoring to tell them. Anyone spot a theme going here ? The generators didn't start because the combination of faults left the control system thinking that everything was OK. Eventually the batteries ran out - they didn't need any monitoring for that as their call centre phones went into meltdown.

I got my call in early - and had the comment that "something must be happening, there's 5 calls in the queue and I've never seen that before". Minutes later it wasn't possible to get through !

One of our connections came back after 10 minutes when they switched the tripped breaker back on. Unfortunately, another circuit was on a router that took exception to being switched off and decided to fail quite spectacularly - that circuit was off for over 12 hours, as were a lot of other leased line connections.

That was last year, this year, new year, new pile of poo !

We have a number of customers on FTTC circuits with them. They've been suffering from "poor throughput"* because (as far as we can find out) Vodamoan oversold capacity and have a node that's seriously congested. It's now been about 2 months as we are still at the "we'll have a fix in a week or two" mode. Apparently as of this week they can migrate customers with a single IP address to a different bit of network (via new user-ids) - but can't do that for multiple IPs yet. Quite why they can't re-route some of their traffic to a different node escapes me.

* "Poor" as in, a FTTC line which normally speed tests at around 60M was yesterday only managing under 1M. Sometimes speed tests fail altogether !

So in case it wasn't clear, no I'm not a big fan of Vodamoan for "fixed line" comms.

And yes, I did tip-off El Reg about both these issues - but for some reason, not a sqeak.