Why choose Vodafone broadband?
If the home broadband market were a street fight, Vodafone broadband would be the guy who brought the gun. At the time of writing it offers the cheapest fibre broadband in the country, without cheaping out on low-quality equipment or iffy customer service. Let’s take a closer look.
- Vodafone broadband focuses on fibre with no set-up fees
- Discounted pricing if you’re a Vodafone mobile customer
- Vodafone offers a speed guarantee or money off
- Vodafone broadband app makes managing your connection easy
- Home phone included in pricing
- High-quality router for such a low-price service
- Six months' free F-Secure anti-virus software
Vodafone broadband focuses on fibre with no set-up fees
Unlike the majority of its competitors, Vodafone doesn’t offer ADSL (slower, non-fibre) broadband at all. Instead, it focuses on delivering the standard two levels of fibre offered across all providers on the Openreach network – with average speeds of 35Mbps and 63Mbps – and doing so cheaply, effectively and with a minimum of fuss.
There are also, at the time of writing, no set-up fees when signing up to Vodafone broadband. That may sound like a small thing, but bear in mind that the likes of Sky and BT will charge you upwards of fifty quid for the privilege of hooking you up, suddenly that becomes a big deal.
Discounted pricing if you’re a Vodafone mobile customer
At the time of writing, Vodafone’s already super-cheap broadband deals are even cheaper if you’re already a Vodafone mobile customer. Is the difference enough to consider switching to Vodafone as your mobile provider just to take advantage of the discount? Unless you were thinking of doing so anyway, probably not. Nevertheless this is a nice bonus if you’re already a customer.
Vodafone offers a speed guarantee or money off
Bit of an odd choice of words, that: Speed ‘guarantee’. Vodafone isn’t really guaranteeing you a speed. If you sign up and are getting half the speed you thought you were going to get, Vodafone broadband isn’t guaranteeing they’ll bring your speed in line with your expectations, rather it’s offering a discount of 15% if it doesn’t.
Still, we’re not going to look a gift horse in the mouth here. No one else in the broadband market is offering any such thing, so Vodafone does stand out here in that respect.
Vodafone broadband app makes managing your connection easy
Apps are pretty common among mobile providers. Perhaps that’s why Vodafone has managed to get out a broadband app so quickly and with so many useful features. It’s available on mobiles and tablets on iOS and Android to all Vodafone broadband customers and allows you to do a number of handy things traditionally buried deep within the router’s irksome operating system.
You can change your wifi network name and/or password, set up separate guest, family or business networks and allocate bandwidth (speed) to them. You can view all the devices connected to your router and prioritise or ‘boost’ a certain device of devices – useful when your Smart TV or streaming stick isn’t getting enough juice, for example.
There are a host of other features that become increasingly techy as you go. You can manage all the devices on your network, split your wifi bands, set up a schedule for when your home network is on or off, check your broadband line speed and much, much more. It’s useful, easy to use and encompasses everything from simple adjustments to deep customisation of your home network.
Home phone included in pricing
This is common these days, but worth mentioning nonetheless. You don’t just get fibre broadband when you sign up to Vodafone broadband – you also get a home phone line. Sadly, though understandably at this price point, Vodafone doesn’t throw in any additional free calling packages such as call weekends, evening and weekends or free anytime calls. What you get here is pay as you go (PAYG) – you make a call, you pay for it.
However, should you want some form of free calling package added in you can do so at the checkout – just bear in mind this will add to a lesser or greater degree (depending on which calling package you choose) to the sum of your monthly payments.
High-quality router for such a low-price service
The Vodafone broadband router is very good for something at this price point. Sure, there are better ‘free’ routers on the market – BT’s Smart Hub and Virgin Media’s Superhub 3 both stand out from the crowd – but services from these providers are also far more expensive.
For the money, compared with the routers offered by providers charging similar money, Vodafone’s router is way ahead of the pack. It’s dual-band, meaning it operate on both the regular 2.4Ghz and the speedier 5Ghz bands, and it offers something rather special in the form of something Vodafone calls ‘beamforming technology’.
If you think of a broadband wifi router like a lawn sprinkler, firing droplets in every direction, beamforming would be like it quirting the water more in one direction than in any other, where the lawn particularly needs it. Or in the case of wifi, where a device particularly needs the extra power/range. Very handy.
6 months free F-Secure antivirus
Some broadband providers will charge you extra for their internet security suite. Not Vodafone. Well, not for the first six months at least. F-secure SAFE provides security for up to five of your family’s devices against hackers, viruses, spyware and other malware. And if your mobile is ever lost or stolen, it'll help you find it, lock it and wipe its content remotely.
