I’ve had nothing but problems with my broadband since switching to Vodafone Ireland.
Yesterday I wanted to get onto the USA ESTA site to apply for a travel visa for my trip next year. No matter what I did I could not get onto the site. I reset the router. I swapped out the router. I changed the Vodafone DNS settings to OpenDNS. I verified OpenDNS was OK by getting to the site from our Data Centre where I have OpenDNS configured as the primary DNS server for some of our systems. I tried getting onto the site from 4 different physical Windows machines in my house and a Windows XP VM (IE6). All failed to load the page. The only thing left is the Vodafone network. That leaves me no choice but to open a call with the dreaded “customer service”.
I got through a maze of automated questions designed to encourage you to end the call without speaking to someone. Eventually I spoke to Sean Hunt, a young man who clearly depended on a menu system and had no logical understanding of the failings I described. His requests:
- Can you reset the router? I did that this morning and even replaced it with a non-Vodafone router. No resolution.
- Can you change the DNS to Vodafone settings? That’s what they were by default. I even switched them to DNS settings that I verified were working OK.
Sean didn’t know what to do now. I asked if this could be escalated. The answer was no. Could I speak to his superior? No, he could arrange a call back. I know I’ll never get a call. In this case it appears that Vodafone’s customer service is not set up to be able to figure out what to do when the problem is not inside the house – as it clearly isn’t in my situation.
Why the hell can’t an Irish Vodafone Ireland do customer service right? This is the second such situation I’ve had with them in the last few months. I’m getting very tired of this.
I have had exactly the same problems. I spend Christmas at home and the family has changed the broadband to Vodafone. Absolute disaster.
I am so relieved to find your comments on Vodafone service. Like you, I was moved to Vodafone a few months ago when they took over Bt Ireland. We were having outages with the BT Voyager occasionally and hoped to have better service from Vodafone!! Disaster!!! We have had so many outages on the bT Voyager since the changeover that we suspected the router and purchased the Vodafone router so that the password would default to Vodafone’s own whenever a breakdown might occur. We now average about 16 outages per day. Like you, I have been on to the techies in Vodafone three or four times per day for the last fotnight. They can only go so far. They were supposed to alert an engineer last Wednesday, followed by another call to the engineers last Thursday from a second operator. Today, I find that the call was never logged and is only now in the system.
The system shows continuous service on Vodafone’s side but multiple user requests to reset the router from our side. If we wait, the service appears to come back without resetting. I say “appears” because I am blind and cannot monitor the leds on the router.
We are not trying to do anything so complex as that which you are doing. We have two computers connected directly by cable to the router and three other laptops connecting by wireless.
What do think is the cause of the breakdown in Vodafone? I thought Eircom had charge of all the connectivity adn not Vodafone.
Eircom only owns the piece between your house and your local Exchange. Vodafone takes over from there. There could be anything wrong with your connection. The only way to get action is to create a public fuss on Vodafone Ireland’s Twitter, Facebook pages, and on the boards.ie Vodafone Ireland forum.
My web access is down for the last 6 days, It looks to me like a line synch issue or a
user verification issue.
It took Vodafone 3 days to arrive at this diagnosis,
and they have given me a
turnaroud time 0f 4 to 5 working days to repair.
What planet vodafone