Vodafone Mobile Broadband review

This review was updated in September 2011 to reflect the findings of our latest survey

Vodafone’s mobile broadband packages have simple names like Occasional, Start and Premium, but the website rarely uses these names. There’s also lots of conflicting information about the download and upload speeds of each service, and Vodafone were unable to give us any clarity on the subject.

The Occasional package costs £19 for the modem and £3 a month, and a further £2 for each day that it’s actually used – with 250MB per day allowed. Use it for more than two days a month and you may as well go for the Starter package, which costs £7.50 for 500MB a month. That’s marginally the cheapest fixed-price plan currently available, and it also includes 1GB a month on the BT OpenZone WiFi service.

The two Standard plans provide 2GB allowance for £15 a month, and signing an 18-month contract trims £31.50 off the overall cost and doubles the OpenZone allowance to 2GB.

The Premium plan is another 18-month contract and costs £20 a month. However, while the OpenZone allowance is doubled again to 4GB, 3G use remains at 2GB a month. If OpenZone is crucial, O2 Mobile Broadband’s 2GB Pay & Go Starter Kit makes more sense.

If you exceed your data allowance, you’ll have to pay for another large chunk of data – see the table on the next page for details. These work out quite reasonably per MB, but it’d be annoying having to pay £15 for another gigabyte if you just went a couple of megabytes over.

The pay-as-you-go option makes more sense. It costs £25 for the dongle, which comes loaded with 2GB data that must be used within 30 days. There’s no monthly fee, and topping up costs £15 for 2GB over 30 days. There’s no OpenZone access, though.

Our customer survey revealed that Vodafone’s service was about average, although ease of setup was a little below the norm. However, we’re encouraged by a 30-day money-back guarantee for the pay-monthly services.

See the next page for a full break-down and individual ratings of Vodafone’s services and the results of our broadband survey.

Broadband survey performance results

These results were compiled from our online survey, where users were asked to rate their broadband supplier. In the case of customer satisfaction, this is an average of whether users would recommend their supplier and if they’re planning on staying with their current supplier.

Feature table (click to expand)