Dear visitor,
Since its inception Vodafail.com has made a significant
contribution towards raising awareness of the problems and issues faced
by Vodafone customers.
Vodafone Australia customers have had the opportunity to voice their concerns, their fears and their troubles from every corner of Australia and beyond our borders.
You have gathered the courage to stand up for your rights as consumers and to make your voice heard.
Each and every person who shared their story should have a sense of pride in this achievement and the changes that have occurred since the start of Vodafail.com.
More recently, traffic to Vodafail.com has declined significantly.
Having achieved the goal of raising awareness and promoting concrete action in early 2011, we have now reached the point of closing Vodafail to new complaints.
The site will remain online for as long as possible as a
reminder and an example of what is possible when we share our experiences.
It has been a privilege to run this initiative
and I'm am forever grateful for the help and support I've received. In
particular I would like to thank Melissa, David and Travis for their
continued efforts over the past 15 months. I'm also thankful and humbled by the support of ACCAN, Choice magazine and a wide range of media outlets, blogs and websites.
You can still browse existing stories and find out how to file a complaint if you are experiencing problems.
Until next time,
Adam Brimo
Share Your Pain
| ACT (1140) | Everywhere (19206) | NSW (7557) | NT (170) | QLD (3578) | SA (987) | Somewhere else (224) | TAS (242) | VIC (3573) | WA (1735) |
13174 Someone from NSW thinks vodafone is intermittent fail is the worst type of fail at 21 Jan 2011 06:30:00 AM
I've been a vodafone customer (3g mobile broadband only) for the last 3 years. I'm on my second 24 month contract now. I'm going to try and keep this succinct. I've had two main issues.
1) The intermittent failure of their online account system, making it difficult for me to check how much data I've used so I don't go over my 4GiB (then), or 6GiB (now) download quota. I documented situations where their website wouldn't load because of some internal network issue (I could load other websites just fine), and also explicit failures of their systems with errors from Apache's tomcat system being presented to me. The Vodafone Mobile Connect application for the Mac is extremely poorly implemented, recording download/upload for only a single session making it difficult to record total usage over a billing cycle. This culminated in my being charged $80 extra one month for going 300MiB over my quota. After at least 3 calls to them about the issues, I eventually got this charge reversed.
2) The second issue is more about network reliability. A bit of background first. Initially I used an expresscard HSDPA modem to connect using the Vodafone Mobile Connect software. As I found, this software is useless, and I eventually turned to the standard Apple interface for creating and using PPP connections. Anyway, during my first contract, I was plagued with disconnections, sometimes 5 times during an evening. This eventually got better, and the problem has now disappeared. The issue now is not disconnections, but simply dropouts. To me, it seems like it happens mostly in peak times, suggesting overloading of the router at the tower. I have a constant ping to google running while I'm connected so I can detect when these dropouts occur. When it happens, pings start to time out, and eventually some random amount of time (sometimes minutes) later, a huge succession of ping responses suddenly come back to me, and my connection becomes live again. Both of these issues are extremely annoying, because it stops me doing work at home that relies on having a working internet connection (e.g. remote ssh to my workplace)
The dropout issue still remains, and most evenings my internet connection is unreliable.
I have since signed up with Optus for an iPhone plan which comes with 2GiB of data quota. I'm very close to going down the path of cancelling my vodafone contract. The only thing stopping me is stories of hours on hold. I can confirm, along with everyone else, that Vodafone's customer support is lacking in many critical areas which I won't go into.
I hope this helps.
1) The intermittent failure of their online account system, making it difficult for me to check how much data I've used so I don't go over my 4GiB (then), or 6GiB (now) download quota. I documented situations where their website wouldn't load because of some internal network issue (I could load other websites just fine), and also explicit failures of their systems with errors from Apache's tomcat system being presented to me. The Vodafone Mobile Connect application for the Mac is extremely poorly implemented, recording download/upload for only a single session making it difficult to record total usage over a billing cycle. This culminated in my being charged $80 extra one month for going 300MiB over my quota. After at least 3 calls to them about the issues, I eventually got this charge reversed.
2) The second issue is more about network reliability. A bit of background first. Initially I used an expresscard HSDPA modem to connect using the Vodafone Mobile Connect software. As I found, this software is useless, and I eventually turned to the standard Apple interface for creating and using PPP connections. Anyway, during my first contract, I was plagued with disconnections, sometimes 5 times during an evening. This eventually got better, and the problem has now disappeared. The issue now is not disconnections, but simply dropouts. To me, it seems like it happens mostly in peak times, suggesting overloading of the router at the tower. I have a constant ping to google running while I'm connected so I can detect when these dropouts occur. When it happens, pings start to time out, and eventually some random amount of time (sometimes minutes) later, a huge succession of ping responses suddenly come back to me, and my connection becomes live again. Both of these issues are extremely annoying, because it stops me doing work at home that relies on having a working internet connection (e.g. remote ssh to my workplace)
The dropout issue still remains, and most evenings my internet connection is unreliable.
I have since signed up with Optus for an iPhone plan which comes with 2GiB of data quota. I'm very close to going down the path of cancelling my vodafone contract. The only thing stopping me is stories of hours on hold. I can confirm, along with everyone else, that Vodafone's customer support is lacking in many critical areas which I won't go into.
I hope this helps.