Power Fail Kills Vodafone UK’s Indoor Mobile Boosting Sure Signal v3 Kit

Owners of Vodafone’s older £69 Sure Signal v3 devices, which use femtocell technology to boost indoor 3G mobile signals around your home, may be able to request a replacement after some customers reported that their kit “exploded” and “stopped with a loud band and smell of electrical burning.”

The Sure Signal v3 kit itself works by harnessing your fixed line broadband connection (a minimum upload and download speed of 1Mbps is required) in order to boost indoor mobile signals, which makes it handy in areas where gaining good mobile reception can be difficult.

However reports about the kit exploding or popping their way to the land of failure, usually accompanied by a whiff of smoke and tripped power circuits, have been present on Vodafone’s community forums since as far back as 2014 (examples here and here) and they continue to occur today.

The device doesn’t appear to have its own internal fuse, which means that it blows the one in your house instead and apparently that’s all fine with Vodafone. CEO Jeroen Hoencamp said the “products failed in a safe manner with no risk to customers.”

Vodafone Customer sc597 said (April 2017):

“My V3 from mid 2015 blew up last night. Nothing plugged into the passthrough power, it had error lights on the front, I unplugged, plugged back in and BANG! Visible electrical arcing in the device and smoke coming out of it. It now rattles internally. It was plugged into a UPS device so clean power. In going it blew house RCD breakers and a 13A fuse in the UPS. Vodafone are replacing FoC and I have reported to Trading Standards.”

So far as we can tell most of the related issues appear to impact SSv3’s that were manufacturer by Alcatel in 2015 or earlier, which means that owners of more recent editions probably don’t need to worry. The Register is today carrying the following statement from Vodafone.

A Vodafone Spokesperson said:

“We are aware that a small number of customers with a previous version of our V3 domestic Sure Signal unit have seen their device fail due to the surge protection fuse becoming over-sensitive and tripping early. All other models of the domestic Sure Signal are unaffected. We ask any customers whose device has been affected by this issue to switch it off and contact us to arrange a full refund or replacement.

We’re sorry to any customers experiencing problems but want to assure customers that they are not at risk. A design update was incorporated into later versions of V3 Sure Signal units to prevent this happening in future.”

In fairness no electrical devices are perfect and all can fail, although many manage to do so graciously and without the loud popping sounds but that can happen too. As usual Vodafone offers no solid indication for how many units might have been impacted and they clearly don’t feel as if the issue is significant enough to warrant a full recall of the older kit.