Vodafone Fibre to the property + CityFibre and my experience

Richh

This is my experience with it and I am posting it so that if someone is considering it in the future and they Google Vodafone fibre broadband they may see this and it could help inform them on their choices.

TL;DR - Vodafone/CityFibre customer service is pretty bad and their internet is incredibly patchy and unreliable.

I decided I wanted to go to them with CityFibre because my contract with Virgin had just ended and I knew someone who had their FTTP broadband and said it was good. Although I didn't ask them what speed they have or anything (I probably should have in hindsight).

I went for their 500mbps because they had an offer going where I'd get a £200 gift card, it'd cost £35 a month plus I'd get £3 off a month for having a mobile with them too. Within a week of applying online, I got a general marketing leaflet through the door saying I could get it at 900mbps for £32 a month.

So obviously I call them up and say I'd like that. I am not joking when I say it took them 30 mins on the phone to confirm that this offer they posted through my door was real. I had to send them a photo of it because they had no idea. This should have been red flag 1 for me but I kept going.

They had to wait for the service to go live at 500mbps before they could then cancel it and set it up again at 900mbps. So instead of paying £35 a month for 500mbps, I should be getting 900mbps at £32 (plus the mobile phone discount). Oh my god, they screwed this whole thing up so badly. Honestly, I have never seen a company get something so simple, so wrong.

I had to lodge a complaint using Resolver to get to their complaints department which seemed to have access to marketing information all other departments seemed to lack. But they said they couldn't just switch me they'd have to cancel it and then put me through to the sales team who would give me the 900mbps for £32. They did this and put me through to someone who refused to honour the price. Then hung up on me. Red flag 2.

I won't bore you with the hurdles I had to go through with the complaints team to eventually get on the higher speed but I went through about 5 different complaints team members, each promising to switch me over and each not doing it.

Finally, I get a complaints team member who does move me over. But their billing system refuses to allow them to lower the price. So to get around this they credit my account for the difference over the contract term. I'm okay with this as it will mean overall I'm paying less.

Now their speed, I should be getting 900mbps (which they say should actually be 1gbps) but I only am getting at best 300mbps. Yes I know that's a really good speed but when you're promised something you should get it. So I made another complaint.

For about 4 months I had multiple visits by CityFibre engineers, multiple new broadband routers, and a few of those stupid useless worthless range extenders (which even though I live in a small house they say I could do with about 3 of them (don't do it, they're useless). The best they could do was get the speed up to 600mbps. No one could figure out why their service was so slow.

In the end, they decided to credit my account for the difference in price between 900 and 600mbps. I was fine with this again as like last time it means I'm paying less overall.

I thought this would be the end of it but now months later it started going down to 300mbps again and at least once a week it drops to 3mbps and won't speed up until I reboot the router. What a pain in the !!!!!!.

Also, a new fun thing it does, is it cuts off access to certain services (XBOX's ability to connect to its servers and Google devices connecting to radio stations) whenever it feels like it and won't allow access again until you press the WPS button and reconnect the affected device to the router.

So now I'm opening a new complaint to leave them. I think next I'll go to Zen or something.