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The Register
Vodafone customers relying on Sure Signal boxes for mobile connectivity have been hit by an update that left them less connected than ever. The boxes are femtocells – small cellular base stations – hooked up to punters' broadband connections to boost Voda's phone network in areas with patchy coverage. Not every Sure Signal box …
O2 & 3 give away femtocells for free.
Vodafone just keep telling customers to buy them, no matter how much they complain about the poor signal. One even offered me a discount which made the final price more expensive than walking into a store and telling them how long I had been a customer and getting a long service discount.
But then the ones on the end of the phone often require the problem to be explained to them several times. I lost count of the number of staff who I had to tell that the problem was not a fault with my device as every vodafone handset in my property only gets a signal when leaning out of a window.
It may help if the support people shared the same first language at the people they are trying to support.
Re: O2 & 3 give away femtocells for free.
Vodafone do seem particularly hard of thinking when your problem is even slightly off from their limited script library
Re: O2 & 3 give away femtocells for free.
I am apparently in am excellent Vodafone indoor coverage area. Am I heck. I too had to go near a window to get decent signal and I was fobbed off with the device and sim card being faulty excuse. It is the first time with any network I have had signal problems in the areas I live and work so I felt I had cause to complain.
It was only when I contacted their excellent tech team via twitter that I got any decent customer service and got a Sure Signal for free. I said bluntly I wouldn't pay for it, especially having to use mine and my broadband providers infrastructure to do operate it. I now have full signal throughout the house and I'm really pleased. Shame they can't sort the rest of the network out, I'm still miffed at myself for switching from Virgin just to get my mitts on an S3 quickly, the t-mobile orange combo provided excellent coverage (at least for me) wherever I went.
Moral of the story, if you need a sure signal and don't just want your own personal base station as a new shiny then get in touch with their tech team.
Re: O2 & 3 give away femtocells for free.
3 doesn't give away femtocells for free unless you meet their strict policy. They wouldn't even sell me one, so I moved back to Vodafone. I'd have stayed with 3 if they'd listened...
Re: O2 & 3 give away femtocells for free.
"It may help if the support people shared the same first language at the people they are trying to support."
Agreed. Vodafone's offshore customer support is shit. if you can speak to somebody in the UK or Ireland then they're (IME) pretty good, and helpful, and usually sort things out, but when you're on to Toadafone's India call centres then the staggering uselessness and unhelpfulness needs to be experienced to be believed. The other night I was trying to sort out a billing issue for a contract agreed over the phone, and the halfwits In India repeatedly asked me to send them a screenpint or scan of the contract, and kept wittering on about VAT (which had nothing to do with the issue) etc.
Oi! Tossers at Vodafone, I'm paying you and arm and a leg each month for several phones, and I don't want to deal with your cheap and crap offshore "support" centres, not now, not ever. I don't want them "improved", I don't want you wasting money on "consultants" or "research" into the service level, just fucking accept that I'm paying the bill, and I don't want offshore service. I just want to speak to somebody who understands what I'm saying, culturally understands me, and has the ability and enthusiasm to resolve technical or billing issues.
And whilst you're sorting that mess out, you might want to sort out your rubbish IVR that doesn't cover enough eventualities, and means that whenever a customer gets through to a human being (wherever they are located) there's a good chance that ciustomer is already fuming.
Re: O2 & 3 give away femtocells for free.
A friend tried to get a free femtocell from Three but after making several calls and just getting the run around he gave up. Lesson he learned is they do not really value his custom even though he had two contract phones with them and he's now switching to Vodafone. So don't assume you will just call them up and it arrive in the post the next day.
Re: O2 & 3 give away femtocells for free.
"Vodafone just keep telling customers to buy them, no matter how much they complain about the poor signal."
Yes, when I emailed them to complain that myself and everyone I know on Vodafone could never get a 3G signal anywhere in Oxford - inside or outside - and for them to please not bother suggesting buying a Suresignal box as I can use wifi when at home/office and it really doesn't help me when I'm in town and wanting to check the price of something.
Sure enough, on the 2nd or 3rd email, that was their suggestion. I don't think the support guy even understood when I asked if the cable I'd be trailing everywhere I went would pose a trip hazard.
Other than that, their only other advice was that I should reboot my phone or try another SIM as the computer said I was in an area of excellent coverage.
Now with Orange, which has pretty good signal here and at least (unless you have an iPhone) provides an app for free that basically does the Suresignal thing in software over wifi, so I get a good signal when indoors at home/work too.
Femtocells would've caught on quicker if calls were discounted (else it's like paying twice) and the Femtocell was renamed 'The super awesome box of greatness' or something.
Whoever called it a Femtocell made it sound like something that should be sold by Ann Summers
Pretty sure they are discounted - when they first came out they were more like £150-200. So selling for £50 is probably discounted - probably also explains why they are locked to one network - well I've never seen one that is unlocked / works with all networks. My sure signal has been working for about 2 years now - in all that time I have rebooted it once when it seemed to lose connection - compared to not having a decent signal I'm happy to accept that.
Calls through a Femtocell were discounted, not the box.
Effectively you're kind of paying twice for the routing else
OFCOM
>probably also explains why they are locked to one network
Or it might be because the network operators get stroppy and call in OFCOM when someone else starts transmitting in their spectrum?
1MB/s?
"Vodafone recommends a minimum of 1MB/sec"
Really? 8Mb/s seems quite a high minimum recommendation for voice.
Re: 1MB/s?
I believe they meant 1Mb/s
Re: 1MB/s?
I think that's still too high. I think that 0.5Mb/s is still fairly common upstream, and normally you want a phone call to be bi-directional. It's strange too considering that ISDN only gave you 64kb/s and that has no compression at all, and ISTR that GSM only had a datarate of about 14kb/s for calls (including various coding / error corrections).
Re: 1MB/s?
The typical GSM voice codec runs at 9600 bits of user data per second, doesn't it?
64kbit/s for a voice call seems a bit excessive, but twas ever thus with modern technology.
The same copper pair that originally gave you 3kHz of voice bandwidth in due course could be used for 128kbits of ISDN or two whole voice calls.
Then along comes the miracle called ADSL and magically the data rate goes up to a handful of Mbit/s. But try and use it for VoIP and it's ... still only two calls.
Maybe it gets better with VDSL?
Wouldn't notice..
My sure signal is so bloody useless I probably wouldn't notice if the update simply switched it off..
Re: Wouldn't notice..
Either it's faulty or you are holding it wrong. When mine is off I get 0-1 bar 'near the window' - with it on I get 5 bars all around the house. You would know if it was working.
Re: Wouldn't notice..
Ditto. Mine regularly drops out and doesn't renegotiate.
8Mbit to carry a 9600baud GSM audio signal? HMmm....
It's 1Mbit/s and that is probably very optimistic as you are correct that a voice call would never need that much - but it can also be used for data and also with multiple devices.
I was SO SO glad to get rid of that rubbish piece of junk a few weeks back when I moved to T-mobile.
£50 for the privilege of getting an occasionally usable signal as opposed to no signal at all. And STILL using my minutes and data allowance despite all the data going over my own internet connection!
What a rip off and such a sorry excuse for their dreadful network coverage in my city.
And I had shoddy coverage with T-Mobile - no network is 100% - live with it. Around here I have had Orange (dreadful), O2 (dreadful) and Vodafone (poor indoors, fine outside). The femtocell solves that issue. Lovely to think you would get great signal everywhere but it's just not realistic. Same thing at work - building must be made like a faraday cage as no network works well - we get a sure signal and people are switching to voda as they get full signal now.