More home broadband woes as 10,000 Vodafone customers lose connection

The problem affected about 1% of Vodafone’s UK customer base, and though the issue was quickly rectified this is just the latest telecoms company to suffer sizeable loss of connection. 

A spokesperson from Vodafone told the BBC that they were ‘incredibly sorry’ for the outage, which lasted for a large part of a day but insisted that the issues had been resolved and people would, ‘already be seeing their connectivity return.’  

However, this is just the most recent example of widespread problems with broadband connectivity affecting a number of telecoms companies. 

Just last week, some 50,000 users of Virgin Media O2 also reported problems with their service. In 2022, users living in Nottingham suffered more than 70 hours of disconnection from the web – the longest combined outage time experienced in the UK. 

Figures show that by the end of 2022, there were nearly 28m fixed broadband lines in the UK. Such loss of service is disruptive, since good connections are vital to the way we now conduct most daily business.  

But it is particularly frustrating given recent price rises for broadband services. The price-comparison service Uswitch recently reported that some domestic customers have seen mid-contract rises of as much as 15%.  

In February, the Office for National Statistics published the results of its Opinions and Lifestyle Survey (OPN). This found that some 44% of us fully or partly worked from home over the preceding four months, with just 56% of those surveyed having travelled to work in the previous seven days.  

Of that 44% figure, the majority (28%) undertook hybrid working rather than being employed solely from home. But the evidence suggests that this kind of agile working is how we’ll continue to work in future, so long as the infrastructure is there to support it. 

The Government are all too conscious of the need for high-quality broadband infrastructure to both local and national business, and recently announced £14m investment in the New Forest as part of Project Gigabit.

Photo by Mathew Schwartz