For those of you unfortunate enough to have been migrated from BT Ireland to Vodafone Ireland’s Fixed Line broadband you already know how bad the service is. For those of you considering moving to Vodafone here are some things you should consider.

• During the three years I was with BT Ireland I only had one major problem and that turned out to be an eircom problem when they were upgrading the fibre link to my local exchange.
• When I was first moved to Vodafone, I could not log on to their network. It took several phone calls and several days to fully resolve.
• I have a range of Fixed IP Addresses and when they were first migrated there were major problems accessing Irish sites like Revenue Online, AIB Banking Online, AER Lingus, etc. It took about fifteen phone calls and over a week to resolve the issue.
• On one occasion they de-allocated my Fixed IP Addresses and my servers were no longer accessible from the Internet.
• On numerous occasions the connection has gone down for several hours without explanation and because they have denied there was a problem, I have had to spend hours double checking my configurations only to discover that it was a Vodafone problem after all.
• Since moving to Vodafone my Upload and Download Speeds have been reduced by approx 30%.
• The Vodafone connection cannot sustain a Skype call even during the morning when there is no congestion on the network.

Now before anybody comes back to me and says it might be my phone line, let me point out the following;

• This all worked fine when I was with BT.
• I am approx 100m from the exchange (Attenuation Down 13db, Attenuation Up 7db)
• For legacy reasons I have another DSL connection with another provider to the same exchange, which works fine and has done during all these Vodafone problems.

I do have to say that throughout these problems I have found the Vodafone Staff to be very helpful, but having nice people working for you does not make up for a network that is simply not up to the job.