Vodafone UK Home Broadband ISP Speeds Slow to a Crawl.. Again UPDATE2

Last week Vodafone blamed a significant bank holiday weekend fall in peak time fixed broadband speeds (here) on “human error when carrying out some routine maintenance work.” Unfortunately a similarly dramatic drop in speeds occurred on Sunday evening and the complaints soon piled up.

The performance of Vodafone’s network quickly recovered after the bank holiday and seemed to be holding steady until the evening of 1st September, when it suddenly reoccurred. Andrew over at Thinkbroadband has been closely monitoring the network since last week and just confirmed the sharp decline, which is also written across the pages of the ISP’s own Community Forum.

As usual Vodafone’s front line support team aren’t much help and tend to blame everything except the provider’s own network. We’ve already contacted Vodafone about this and have somewhat cynically queried whether or not this latest bout of diabolically slow peak time connectivity could also be put down to “human error.” Vodafone said they are investigating and will respond in due course.

Once again we should add that this issue still seems to be impacting both Vodafone’s Openreach based FTTC products and their separate Cityfibre based Gigafast FTTH service, which as before points to a problem in the management or configuration of their core network routing / peering or capacity.

UPDATE 3:13pm

According to Vodafone, this week’s issue is separate from last week’s.

A Spokesperson for Vodafone told ISPreview.co.uk:

“Due to planned repair works on a damaged fibre cable, some of our home broadband customers may experience slower speeds. Our engineers are fixing the cable as quickly as possible. We are sorry for any inconvenience caused.”

Sadly no fix time has been given, although we do note that some users are complaining of slow speeds even outside of peak times. Broken core fibres can sometimes take a couple of days to resolve and in extreme cases even longer. We have asked for more information.

UPDATE 3rd September 2019

Vodafone told us this morning that the fibre break, which was damaged by a third party company, occurred in Birmingham. The fibre has now been repaired.