Use Vodafone? You no longer get free wi-fi on the London Underground

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• VF HfP says:

  28 Jun28 June 09:34

  As a Vodafone customer, I’m gutted – living in London, the WiFi on the tube was great (even if it did take quite a long time to connect, meaning you’d often left the station by the time you were online and back on the app you needed).

  As a Vodafone employee, sadly I can completely understand it. Virgin Media/O2 run the network on the Tube and VF had to pay a significant sum to make use of that network – it was simply decided that not enough people used it to make that investment worthwhile. This was actually announced in March with access stopping on 1 April (people are only just noticing now as lockdown starts to ease and people are back in the office) and there was a bit of stuff on the website/social media but probably not enough. I agree it is a shame that it’s no longer available, but hopefully in a few years, the investment into bringing 4G to actual tunnels (not just stations) should be more useful and will hopefully lead to 5G being made available.

  I know it doesn’t help for this but worth noting that we’re one of the few networks still committed to not increasing roaming fees (after EE and O2’s announcements last week), so it’s just a case of us investing more into other areas which we feel our customers will value more

  • Pete M says:

    28 Jun28 June 12:33

    Interesting insight, thank you. Don’t suppose you know/could share a ballpark figure as to how much this cost VF?

  • NFH says:

    28 Jun28 June 13:36

    Yes, Vodafone is in the strongest position to avoid reimposing roaming surcharges because it owns many of the networks on which its customers roam. Of the four UK physical networks, EE is the only one whose brand isn’t on any networks in other countries. Therefore it doesn’t surprise me that EE was the first, and hopefully the only, UK network to reimporse roaming surcharges.

    • Lady London says:

      28 Jun28 June 19:31

      Erm … EE=Orange+T-Mobile

      • NFH says:

        28 Jun28 June 19:36

        Yes, exactly. BT bought EE from France Télécom (now called Orange) and Deutsche Telekom (whose mobile brand is T-Mobile). No networks in other countries are branded as either EE or BT, unlike Vodafone, O2 and Three, which all exist in many other countries.

• riku says:

  28 Jun28 June 11:14

  I moved to Finland in 1999 and even then they had full mobile coverage in the Helsinki metro, I think Finns don’t even realise that something special has to be done to make mobile networks work in underground railways since it just works seamlessly here.

  • Max says:

    28 Jun28 June 12:57

    Finland is home of Nokia – next to Ericsson from Sweden and Huawei from China one of the biggest network equipment developers in the world.

    • bafan says:

      28 Jun28 June 17:40

      And? Could we not contract with them before 2024?

      • Mat says:

        29 Jun29 June 17:47

        Cool, but you’re forgetting that LU only has 245 more stations than Helsinki metro (270 vs 25). And most of it has been built 100+ years ago and can barely fit the current rolling stock.

• RussellH says:

  28 Jun28 June 11:33

  On 28 June at 09:57Andrew said:

  > I want a reliable signal at my house, my office, my parent’s house
  > in rural Perthshire, and the areas where I tend to be out and about.
  > EE ticks all the boxes for signal.

  I was with Orange / EE for years, but finally had to dump them because the signal was always appalling, including rural Perthshire (2 miles from Dunblane), and, arguably, even worse in rural Cumbria and nearly as bad in rural Oxfordshire.
  Even in W4 and TW7, even if there appeared to be plenty of signal, call quality varied from poor to unusable.
  Here in Cumbria EE is even useless for SMS, which are essential these days.
  Switched to O2, who at least allow me to receive SMS. Voice calls still only possible outdoors.

  • Andrew says:

    28 Jun28 June 15:03

    Strong 5G Signal at M&S in Sunny-D this morning.

• The Original David says:

  28 Jun28 June 13:07

  Yes but since when did legal truth influence corporate press releases? See also: BA on BoB, data breach, IT failure, etc. If you tell consumers something, 90% of them will accept it without arguing…

• JAXBA says:

  28 Jun28 June 13:38

  Hertz Gold Plus Rewards > Accor ALL > Iberia Plus > British Airways works pretty well for me, with me only having to do the last step manually in Combine My Avios. Do I lose value along the way? Probably, but they’d be orphaned otherwise.

• NFH says:

  28 Jun28 June 15:30

  No, I haven’t misunderstood. Paragraph 2 of the wifi T&Cs states “You may use the Service if you’re a Vodafone Pay monthly or business customer with data as part of your plan or a Vodafone Pay as you go customer with a Big Value plan“. Section 50 of the Consumer Rights Act 2015 states that “Every contract to supply a service [e.g. the price plan T&Cs] is to be treated as including as a term of the contract anything that is said or written to the consumer, by or on behalf of the trader, about the trader or the service [e.g. the wifi T&Cs]“. Therefore Section 50 of the Consumer Rights Act 2015 causes the wifi T&Cs to form part of the price plan T&Cs.

• PH says:

  28 Jun28 June 18:46

  I just switched to O2 after 15+ yrs with Vodafone because tube wifi is non-negotiable for me.

• Alex Sm says:

  30 Jun30 June 00:37

  This discussion is great but how does relate to HfP topics of aviation travel, credit cards and hotels?

This article is closed to new comments. Feel free to ask your question in the HfP forums.