Archives for posts with tag: Vodafone

Wifi Calling

May 3, 2019 //
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I have appalling mobile reception in the west of Ireland. I use my mobile phone a lot. I work from home. It’s not a great combination. Having to wander around the house looking for an extra half a bar of signal when you really want to be in front of your laptop is unproductive. Thankfully, I had a Vodafone Sure Signal box to boost the mobile signal. Until it broke, with Vodafone no longer supporting it and no longer selling the boxes. Yay!

I have been asking Vodafone when they’re bringing in Wifi calling for about 18 months, at least. Wifi calling lets you piggy back on your wifi signal to make mobile calls. The infrastructure provider Eir has had it for ages. Every time I phoned or tweeted Vodafone the rep either didn’t know or said it was on the list but couldn’t give a date. Aargh!

I tweeted Vodafone again about it recently, and some kindly soul – not associated Vodafone at all – saw the tweet and said that Vodafone had actually been providing it for ages, at least for iOS phones, which I have. Well, would you believe it, it’s just a setting in your phone and takes 10 seconds to do. Found it, and now have blissfully clear mobile calls from the home. Hello 21st century!

Pity Vodafone Ireland isn’t a bit more joined up. According to this kindly soul, about half of Ireland’s mobile subscribers can use wifi calling to take and make calls, but maybe 1% know about it.

Make that 1.00001% :-).

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing

Vodafone Community

May 25, 2018 //
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I live in a country that has, supposedly, mobile coverage in the 90s per cent. That must be by population I imagine, since out of the cities and in the country there are plenty of pockets of poor signal.

One such pocket is my house, where our home and home office have enjoyed appalling mobile coverage for the last decade. All was not lost however, because several years ago we bought a mobile phone signal booster that connects to the landline broadband and is programmed by our mobile numbers for 5 luscious reception bars every time.

Except that 3 months ago the booster box broke and I discovered to my chagrin that the box is no longer sold or supported by Vodafone. Wifi calling is promised, which will solve the problem of poor mobile reception, but I’ve been working in tech long enough to know that roadmaps aren’t worth listening to at all.

I went onto the Vodafone community to look for discussion threads on the topic and found one, to which I wanted to comment and voice my disapproval. I had to log in to do that, and I was invited to do so either my mobile or landline account login. That was fine, but after I’d logged in I was taken to a general community page, and not straight back to the specific thread that I was on, as you would expect 9 times out of 10.

I then had to search for the thread again, and still it wouldn’t let me contribute. By this stage I was wise to the process and copied my contribution content in case I’d lost it.

After a couple more tries I gave up, since I got messages that it wouldn’t post. I returned back to the thread and my post was there, published.

Vodafone don’t seem to make it easy for you to post to their community portal. It’s almost like they’d prefer if you didn’t, rather like in the good old days in England when you could claim unemployment benefit between terms at University but the form was longer than War and Peace…

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Strategy

Spurious Messages

May 18, 2018 //
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Too many what?

I don’t know about you, but I’m fascinated by the spurious messages you get from software to explain away an error. I’m also frustrated in equal measure, mind you, as I’m sure many of you are when mission critical stuff like email doesn’t function as it should.

I use outlook on a mac, my work hosting provider is register365 and my telecoms provider for Internet is vodafone. I think my email account is a pop3 account. Put them all together and it’s really flaky.

It will often say that incoming mail cannot be received because another account is receiving it, so it’s locked by another pop3 session. I use the work email on my phone too, so why I can’t get email on both devices, and why they can’t sync properly like my other email accounts do, is a mystery to me. Also, and I’m not looking for free help here, but my work email doesn’t allow me to send outbound email when I’m not in Ireland, but it will receive mail? I’ve tried a bunch of support-suggested options, and I know it’s not an easy solution, for some non-easy reason.

Yesterday I got the message above for why a person-to-person email wasn’t being sent. Have you ever heard something as laughable? It doesn’t mean anything and is utterly irrelevant. Too many recipients of what?

Stranger than fiction.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales