Vodafone new €20 unlimited 5G data prepay plan

[Seán]

I just noticed Vodafone has a new unlimited 5G data prepay plan for €20 every 4 weeks:

       

It looks like a nice phone plan for those with good Vodafone 4G / 5G coverage as it also provides 100 national and 100 international minutes and texts and a 30GB EU roaming allowance.  

It claims to provide the fastest available speed, so will be interesting to test for peak time throttling like I recently experienced on their Vodafone X 5G plan. 

For those on an existing Vodafone prepay plan such as Vodafone X or X 5G, this new plan is available in the "Change top up offer" in My Vodafone:

   

[EirPerson]

I see they are coming for us haha, But to be honest. Some competition is good!

I wonder what speed they will offer even though its "Max available speed"

Even with prepay eir / Postpay and GoMo services, I still achieve around 500mbps on speedtest in Dublin

[selfbuilder]

I have been using this plan for the last couple of weeks and so far it’s been working great. There doesn’t appear to be any throttling apart from the usual slow down at peak times. Vodafone isn’t as bad at peak times compared to three for me. I will see how the month goes. Like all mobile solutions sometimes I get speeds of 100+ and sometimes it slows down to 30.

[MobileTester]

Can anyone who is using this plan and already received free credit €20 advise me could I use this free credit from Vodafone for next top up and get free plan for next 28 days?

[selfbuilder]

Can anyone who is using this plan and already received free credit €20 advise me could I use this free credit from Vodafone for next top up and get free plan for next 28 days?

Unfortunately I never received the free €20 despite having joined the plan and topped up.

[Seán]

Since Vodafone upgraded the local mast here in Kilcar to provide 4G on bands 20 and 28, I have been testing this Vodafone prepay plan as my main Internet connection for my desktop PC and VoIP based landline over the past few weeks.  With my current Poynting LPDA-92 antennas and the MikroTik Chateau 5G, it is performing very well between streaming, occasionally downloading large (5GB+) files, working from home, no sound quality issues on calls, etc.  

The speeds I get are typically in the 60s to 80s during peak time and the lowest I've seen is in the 30s.  I have seen suspect throttling a few times during peak time (around 8 to 10pm) where a download starts off very quick for a few seconds, then drops down to a fairly steady rate of around 40 to 50Mbps (5-6MB/s) for the remainder of the download.  However, even when this happens, the speed is still much faster than what I often get on my Three broadband connection where the speed can down to single digit Mbps in speed tests.

One minor issue I encountered recently is with Vodafone appearing to run the data connection over a transparent proxy.  When running speed tests with the Measurement Labs speed test, I noticed it kept reporting a latency of 1ms regardless of what web browser I tested on, including my phone, where as the latency measurement is fine on Three (notice the speed difference ~11:15pm, Vodafone vs Three):

       

I e-mailed M-Lab thinking this was a bug and they came back explaining how their test measures the latency.  They use a TCP based RTT to measure where the connection terminates from their server and reckons that there is some sort of proxy in the path.  As the TCP connection is terminating somewhere within the Vodafone network, the latency ends up being very low like with any other connection from a data centre.  This is different to a regular ping test that sends ICMP packets end to end, which is a different network protocol to TCP.  

While I can ping hosts to get latency measurements, I have also discovered that Trace Route does not work, giving "Request timed out" for every hop after the third hop with any host.  In this example I did a Trace Route to TestMy Australia which should give plenty of hop host names or IP addresses:

   

The TCP Trace Route tool which uses a TCP based TTL confirms the proxy as there should be many more hops than 4:

   

If anyone here has an actual Vodafone 4G or 5G broadband contract that uses the hs.vodafone.ie APN, try running a speed test on Measurement Labs to see if it also reports a 1ms latency or run a trace route to a host like Google.

Depending on the weather, this weekend I plan replacing the Iskra P-58's I currently use for Three with a pair of Iskra P-40's.  These are low band (700-900MHz) antennas with a higher gain.  I will try to do some tests between the two antenna pairs and possibly also test the Poynting XPOL-2-5G to see how well each performs on the low bands 20 and 28, which I will post in a separate thread.  Once I replace the antennas and swap routers, I will cancel my Three broadband.  According to Three, it must be cancelled by phone (not possible within My3) with 30 days notice.

[Confusion]

Since Vodafone upgraded the local mast here in Kilcar to provide 4G on bands 20 and 28, I have been testing this Vodafone prepay plan as my main Internet connection for my desktop PC and VoIP based landline over the past few weeks.......

I have been using Vodafone Data Unlimited 5G as my Internet connection for the last two months. 


It works very well here in Cork City. All three networks have good coverage here.
Vodafone seems a bit better at peak times. There is probably less traffic on the
Vodafone network. Everyone seems to be on 48, Three and GoMo these days.
Three 5G home broadband also seems very popular here.
  
speedtest.net seems to be broken this morning. Here is a test on fast.com.
Xiaomi 5G router. Busy Friday morning at 10:20.
   

[EirPerson]

Does anyone notice when you do a speedtest on vodafone, it peaks and immediately goes back to half its speed and stays there?

It also seems to be picking limerick a lot more as its test servers not Dublin (Where im from)

[Seán]

I have noticed it do that occasionally, including with downloading.  When it happens, it seems to be temporary as the following speed test is usually fine and likewise pausing / resuming the download usually results in it running at the full speed.  It's not doing this at the moment after running multiple speed tests with different servers.  For example, the following is with the Airwire Galway server and the Ehternet graph from the test run:

   

I have also noticed Vodafone regularly picking the Enet Limerick Speed Test server.  It tends to perform lower on the upload speed:

   

I called last Three last week to cancel my broadband.  The assistant asked if I would consider a reduced €20 price while they investigate the performance issue I'm having.  I don't have high hopes of seeing their speed improve anytime soon between their energy saving measures and changing band 1 to a 5G only band (that's I'm out of range of), but decided to continue for at least another month for now.  For comparison, the following is the speed I got on Three just before the above test:

   

[KildareP]

The transparent proxy is the live.vodafone.com APN and is used for the adult content filtering on prepay and their SecureNet service on billpay. Even if the content filter is off and you do not subscribe to the SecureNet service the proxy remains active between you and t'internet.

I believe hs.vodafone.ie and isp.vodafone.ie do NOT support adult content filtering or SecureNet so I'd imagine they do not have a transparent proxy (at one stage hs. gave you a public IP). However I think hs is not included in the prepay top-up offer allowances so will use credit or you need to buy specific data bundles.

Regarding Three - I've noticed their network generally is performing very poorly lately. I'm noticing lots of buffering, stalling, lagging and general poor performance on data on the move. You could get a triple digit speed test with full signal bars yet try and listen to something on Apple Music lossless or watch Youtube in HD and it will randomly spin for a good 10-15 seconds, whereas Eir and Vodafone is instant. It also will frequently stop and buffer midway through a song or video - again, not an issue on Eir or Vodafone unless you're in a bad coverage area. While voice calls are frequently breaking up and increasingly dropping in the last month or so in particular.

With their heavy pushing of their 5g home broadband products I suspect the network is suffering as a result. Certainly I've seen quite a few of their ZTE outdoor FWA units appearing on houses around me recently despite the area having had fibre to the premises rolled out. I think you get something like the first 6 months free and the rest of the 24 months is around the same price as the likes of Pure, Vodafone, Digiweb, etc. so it seems to be attracting people on price alone.

[Shane]

Three has gotten really bad I must say, I got a 48 sim to try it out but I would be lucky to get over 10mbps on a good day, even outdoors. They probably have given Three customers the priority on their network so they would get better speeds.

[fullofquestions]

I'm noticing that on Three when I select 3G instead of 4G/5G it preforms much better. Never would have thought the old O2 Ireland network would out preform Threes 4&5G.

[Shane]

Crazy to say that three is the worst network of the three

Least with eir and vodafone I can get a signal in the middle of nowhere

Three on the other hand. Barely any signal in a good area. I hope they improve since they own most of the spectrum

[Seán]

One more small issue I ran into with Vodafone is that if the power goes out in the area, their mast has no backup power.  The local Three mast has a few hours of backup based on previous power cuts. 

We had a power outage that lasted about an hour at the start of the thunderstorms Sunday evening, 11th August.  I have a homemade 12v UPS that keeps both the Fritz Box and the MikroTik router active during an outage.  So when the power went out, I was surprised to see my phone display "No Internet".  I logged into the router and saw it was trying to connect to a very 4G weak signal on band 8.  When I manually locked it on band 28, it picked up a weak distant signal and got a slow but usable connection:

   

I was awake most of the night with all the thunder and lightning and was surprised to see the power still on in the morning.  The West of Ireland looked like the aftermath of a severe storm on the ESB Power Check:

   

My other MikroTik router with the Three SIM was knocked offline with a "ps attach failed" modem error, however after a reboot and it was fine.

[Seán]

When I went on holidays in Majorca I took my Vodafone SIM with as it has a generous 35GB roaming allowance and as backup in case 48 gives issues, which indeed was the case!  48 had no access to any network the entire day on the 17th October.  The tests below were carried out on the 17th October, which was unfortunate as I was having a drink in an outdoor bar with clear line of sight of the cell towers with a strong 5G band n78 signal and SINR on Vodafone. 

To date I have not many 5G roaming speed tests posted, which is unsurprising given that 5G speed tests over 500Mbps can gobble over 1GB per test as what the following test consumed.  With roaming SIMs that typically charge €1 to €3 per GB, speed testing is very expensive for those that don't have free data roaming:

       

I am not sure whether there is some traffic prioritisation going on with Ookla while roaming as both TestMy and Measurement Lab max out around 300Mbps.  Then again, I would be delighted if I could get just 300Mbps at home!

       

Vodafone could only roam on Vodafone Spain.  My 48 SIM could roam on Vodafone, Movistar and Yoigi.  At the apartment I stayed at in Palma Nova, I had 5G on band n28 with Vodafone and 48 had 5G on band n78 with 100MHz bandwidth on Movistar.  As for Yoigi, it got 4G briefly and dropped to 3G!

One night when I woke up near 3am I checked my phone and saw NetMonster show just one 4G carrier band 20 on Vodafone, which means Vodafone puts the higher bands to sleep.  As it remained connected to 5G on band n28, at least I know my phone supports 4G band 20 as the anchor with 5G band n28 NSA.  The speed test was nothing special, much like I get back at home with 4G band 20+28 CA on my router:

       

After running a few speed tests, I ended up triggering the band 3 carrier to come online.  At least their Vodafone network turns on carriers when someone needs the bandwidth.