Vodafone UK Scraps Forgotten Demon Internet ISP Brand

Remember Demon Internet? If you do then you’re probably of a certain age or familiarity with the market. The small business focused ISP has hung around for years despite a lack of promotion or investment, but parent Vodafone has now finally decided to throw in the towel and cast it to hell.

Back in the old dialup and early broadband days Demon was a much more familiar name in the industry, but that was over a decade ago and the market has changed a lot. Despite this Demon are still offering the same ADSL2+ based broadband packages as they were several years ago and the move to “superfast” FTTC or faster services seems to have passed them by.

Meanwhile Vodafone’s decision in 2016 to scrap the provider’s “free” email service (here), while not bothering to introduce any new products, was probably a good indication of where the ISP was headed. Despite this The Register reports that Demon still has around 15,000 customers, at least for now.

Apparently Vodafone now intends to close Demon and migrate its remaining customers on to more modern services, which is a process that they expect could take around 60 days. This may prove tricky since Demon’s packages were all sold without phone line rental included by default (optional), while Vodafone includes line rental and currently only advertises FTTC packages for such users (residential and small business).

A Vodafone Spokesperson said:

“Turning off our legacy technologies is a critical to ensure we are investing for the future, reducing our energy costs and making sure our customers are able to take advantage of the latest broadband services. We would like to thank all our loyal customers of Demon Broadband and we very much hope they stay with us.”

At the time of writing we could find no notice about this on Demon’s Service Status page, which was last updated in 2015 and so probably isn’t the best barometer for recent changes.

Just for a bit of fun, here’s our list of the top 10 ISPs for average broadband download speeds from a decade ago. No doubt some folk in remote rural areas will probably be shrugging their shoulders at this point, while exclaiming, “Not much has changed, guv!“. Farewell Demon.. farewell.

Top 10 ISPs for Speed in 2008
1. O2 – 6.4Mbps
2. Be Unlimited – 5.5Mbps
3. Virgin Media – 4.1Mbps
4. Sky Broadband – 3.8Mbps
5. PlusNet – 3.2Mbps
6. Post Office – 3.0Mbps
7. TalkTalk – 2.9Mbps
8. BT – 2.8Mbps
9. Demon – 2.8Mbps
10. Orange – 2.7Mbps