I used to be with Vodafone many years ago and dropped it as it was awful.
have been with Telstra since but I see a lot of good deal atm with the other telcos. Telstra seems to lag behind with what they can offer vs the amount of money they charge.
what are people's experiences with the Vodafone network.
I live in Sydney
Thanks
Tony
I find VF better than Optus in city/suburbia too (Melbourne). But when I'm on the Hume I always get better reception on my second sim which seems to connect to Optus more (and their website is hillarious, they think Australia and Austria are the same place)
If you're a VF customer, they used to offer free roaming to make up for their poorer coverage in rural Aus. circa 2013-2014. Might be worth finding out if they still do.
so in rural areas, it's still rubbish?
Not exactly, Optus has better coverage out there but it's generally a lot slower, too slow for browsing. VF is a lot more usable than it was pre-2012.
Can't compare to Telstra, never used them except when VF is roaming.
Originally on it (about 20 years ago) and left when it got bad c.10 years ago for Optus/Telstra. Significantly improved since then and because of travel, I use the $5/day roaming which is excellent. The data limits are quite generous when there are special offers on. Word of warning though, make sure you can trial the reception as they do have some certain black spots (like all areas). A colleague was thinking of the switch but apparently their reception was not good there. I got a technician mate to check and he said it was difficult given a few apartments had come up around them (only Telstra would have worked)and he put in a service request for a potential tower there but may take a while given priority/requests/feedback from customers. So best to test for a while and they do respond to blackspot fix-up requests quickly (I have put in a few).
what are people's experiences with the Vodafone network.
Some are fine, some are not. Really depends on the areas you live/work/travel to at the end of the day.
I just had a month on Kogan which uses the Vodafone network and was pleasantly surprised. It has better reception than Optus and much faster speeds as well. This is in SE suburbs Melbourne. In some places it works where you can't even get reception on Telstra. Certainly much better than it was 10 years ago (2G days).
I do remember seeing a sweet 2MBs (7.2GB/h) sending off files to the cloud in the days Vodafone ran flat rate weekends. That was favorable. VF second only to Telstra in Syd: Longtime Telstra/Voda user here (dual SIM carriers for rural). It was the local champ in Perth, Adelaide from my reading commsday 4G benchmark.
I normally get around 20Mbps up and 100Mbps down with Kogan/Vodafone now.
More than enough. I am naturally moving to that as Telstra's Freedom plus offered ~10% of the data (terrible value) for double the dollars. 1 of 2 services left to move and the savings can buy some content instead.
I just recently retried using Vodafone near Montville, Qld with a cheap SIM deal. It would work sometimes for up to an hour with good signal strength and reasonable data speeds and then nothing for minutes to hours. It was weird.
I am in a remote bit on a hillside but I get Telstra 4G full strength and good data speed continually. I can even get Optus now at good strength and about 1/2 Telstra data speed. I just don't get how Vodafone comes and goes. Maybe I can only see one tower and it gets saturated now and then? If you have many towers visible you just handoff to another one usually if one gets congested.
Gold Coast users (central Southport here) how good is VF reception vs Optus and Telstra?
Network coverage Depends on area I guess. Service is okay from my experience. The biggest problem I have personally encountered with VF was when it comes to repairs and handling handset issues.
My wife got a phone with plan from them 8 months ago and phone seem to have battery issue (a problem with model not this particular phone) so we wanted to change phone model with equally priced oher phone but they said not possible unless we pay remaining months fee for contract breaking.
Last month we went for a hardware repair inquiry and VF said it will cost 400+ which was insane as the same phone was available brand new from local retailers for 280-330 range. They also said if we repair this from elsewhere might loose warranty too.
Long story short. If you use their network on prepaid like me, not many issues ive heard or experienced. But on contract phones it can be horrible experience like what happened to my wife.
Voda service is pretty shit. I was with them long time ago when the first iPhone came out. Some rogue app was sucking up my data, I discovered it when I racked up about $300 in bills.
I wasn't sure initially what was the cause, I called them up on a Friday and said I need help to at least stop/disable my data usage so my overrun don't keep going and also if we can work out whether I can get a discount on the charge. Their support folk said sure, they'll look into it and call me back. Over the weekend the charge went up to $500. I called them on the Monday fuming, they said yea the "department" didn't work on the weekend. They didn't want to write off the extra $200. I said I ain't paying. They sent debt collectors, outsourced to some mafioso outfit, to my house. I wasn't home, scared the shit out of my wife and I had a toddler in the house at that time as well.
Worst company ever. With Optus ever since. Coverage is bad compared to Telstra (my work phone), but customer service is much better.
Years later, a new neighbor was an IT architect consulting with Voda, this was after they bought 3 and we're doing some consolidation. He was telling Voda's IT is shit compared to 3.
I was in the same boat with you, switched from VF to Telstra years ago. But it seems to have improved a lot since, depending on where you live I guess. My wife has been with VF for over a year now and no issues. Only last week I switched from Telstra to Optus (on the $30/mth deal). I found Optus's reception is inferior to my wife's Vodafone reception in some places.