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

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• Thywillbedone says:

  28 Jun28 June 08:01

  I’d take air conditioned carriages over connectivity any day of the week …maybe for my children’s children

  • MD says:

    28 Jun28 June 08:08

    This! Need to stand next to a window in summer, otherwise it’s just unbearable. The new Circle/Metropolitan/H&C etc trains with air con are so much more tolerable.

    • Rob says:

      28 Jun28 June 08:51

      Can’t easily be done because the clearance between the train and tunnel is too low to allow the equipment to be added to the cars.

      • Jk says:

        28 Jun28 June 09:51

        The plan for the new Piccadilly line trains is to have aircon under the floor. They’re moving to articulated bogies (2 axels per carriage instead of 4, like Eurostar trains) to free up the space to do this. Although it will be some time off before we see them now that TfL is basically insolvent and broke.

      • Paul Pogba says:

        28 Jun28 June 11:00

        Most SSL run spend vast parts of their route in the open air and much of the zone 1 route runs between gaps in buildings so the heat extracted from the train is dissipated to the atmosphere, on the deep lines it has nowhere to go. You’re effectively expending lots of energy transferring heat from the cars to the tunnels and platforms only to open the doors and let it all in again every 2/3 mins.

        Tens of millions (and probably a lot more) was spent on the Cooling the Tube project installing higher flow fans on the mid tunnel vent shafts but it had practically no impact on the air temperature and I believe it was quietly dropped.

    • Optimus Prime says:

      1 Jul1 July 12:23

      Agreed. It’s baking hot even in the DLR. That’s why I dread hot days in London.

• Arnie says:

  28 Jun28 June 08:16

  I’d like to have signal in the street where I live and work from via my 02 account and I’m in Westcombe Park with one bar of signal right now and 2 bars of signal on a good day. It beggars belief that in the middle of nowhere in Dorset last week I had full signal and yet in a London Borough its almost impossible to use without the signal dropping out. As for the tube well I just switch the phone off – its a waste of time and both Johnson and Khan should be ashamed of the lack of internet service on these services.

  • Will says:

    28 Jun28 June 08:47

    Completely agree. 2024 for a phone signal on the tube is at least 10 years too late.

  • Lady London says:

    28 Jun28 June 10:10

    Agree. It’s absolutely pathetic.

    I was in Shanghai 6 years ago and complete incredibly fast mobile on Metro there throughout. Did not vary in tunnels and the majority of young passengers did not look up from their phones.

    Compare this to strap hanging on an impossibly overcrowded tube train in London and at each station, taking your hand off the strap rail to reload on your phone before the signal is lost as the train leaves the platform into the tunnel.

    The alternative being to stand on the platform in an open air station like South Kensington District Line, open 3tabs on your phone for Headforpoints, quickly load 1 article on each tab, while the train is coming quickly check the bottom of the page and comments for each article in case there’s another page, if time before the train comes open another tab for 2nd page, repeat new tab for 3rd page etc. Comical.

    • John says:

      28 Jun28 June 10:41

      Well if London was mainly built in 1980 we could have nice things too

    • Chas says:

      28 Jun28 June 13:42

      Lady London – your description of loading up multiple pages for HfP is exactly what I used to do when I was commuting pre-Covid. Not only for the tube, but for my train journey too which always went through various dead-spots (and some very slow-spots).

      My recollection, for what it’s worth, of why we don’t have mobile coverage within the tunnels, is because TfL refused to let all the operators put their own kit in the tunnels (lack of space considerations?), and there were a mass of complicated commercial and regulatory (linked to frequency spectrums allocated to the networks) issues which made it hard for networks to agree to essentially roam onto another networks bit of kit. I can’t work out why WiFi hasn’t been used instead, other than where does the commercial return come from (who’s going to pay for it?).

      I think the only reason that mobile coverage ended up on the HEX was because the value of getting an Inbound Roamer (someone from abroad coming to the UK) on your network first, was much, much more valuable.

• Pete M says:

  28 Jun28 June 08:42

  I’d suggest moaning at Vodafone on Twitter and sending their CEO an email (ahmed.essam@vodafone.com). I did both and spoke to their executive complaints team last week – there was nothing they could do obviously, but they did mention getting a fair amount of contacts over the matter. The more people speak up, the more likely they are to review this.

  • Lady London says:

    28 Jun28 June 10:15

    VodaFone also seems now to mostly be taxed in Luxemburg as well.

    Wonder if any of the new digital taxation attempts intended for the likes of Google, Amazon etc will also catch Vodafone?

    The Corporate Social Responsibility / CSR stuff Vodafone put out looks good though 🙂

    • A Virgin customer says:

      28 Jun28 June 10:28

      Sorry but simply not true. Vodafone Group plc is registered in Paddington, and as such, is liable for UK taxes. In 2020, ~€250m was paid in tax to the UK govt – this would have been far more had the company not spent many billions investing in 5G spectrum, fixed line rollout etc. A key internal VF supply chain management is based in Luxembourg, and the expenses from that are written off against the parent company’s revenue to come up with operating profit, but all VF taxes are paid as they should be – against profit and not revenue.

    • DeB20 says:

      28 Jun28 June 11:31

      CSR should include their acknowledgement that they will pay their full taxes in every country they do business in! Most companies miss that out in their CSR/ESG statements.

  • Alastair says:

    28 Jun28 June 19:50

    I’m slightly surprised there is an executive complaints team; previous UK CEO Jeroen Hoencamp had a “send me your feedback and Iwill read it” page which I later discovered simply went to the same Indian contact centre as all the thousands of other complaints – it was just a complete lie. Thanks to the mobile phone oligopoly I can not think of a single company that cares less about its customers than Vodafone, knowing that they are unlikely to switch because the alternatives are no better.

• Jalpo says:

  28 Jun28 June 09:02

  I noticed Vodafone WiFi not working on the tube a week or two ago so logged in to Virginmedia WiFi instead, which seemed to work fine. Good if you have that option.

• NFH says:

  28 Jun28 June 09:11

  Virgin Media charges a whopping £15 per month for this service, which is poor value for money particularly given how unreliable it is. Does anyone actually pay this?

  • Tom says:

    28 Jun28 June 09:19

    I certainly wouldn’t pay that much, but If you have virgin broadband you get access to Virginmedia WiFi open the tube for free. A shame though, Vodafone WiFi always had the better connection – I recall having to do the splash screen on Virgin which was always a pain if trying to connect between stations.

    • Pete M says:

      28 Jun28 June 12:30

      Yup, spot on. The splash screen is still there and a right pain!

  • Paul Pogba says:

    28 Jun28 June 10:43

    I think most people will get it free with their cable tv and/or broadband.

• Jonny says:

  28 Jun28 June 09:11

  Well that’s a pain. I wondered why I haven’t been able to access it for the past week or so. Found it quite useful tbh

• Sam G says:

  28 Jun28 June 09:12

  I am very surprised only a “small” number of people used this, did they only start counting from March 2020?

  A cheapo sim will be £5-6 a month if it’s something you do use and can’t switch to 3 or o2 – check moneysavingexpert for deals, you wouldn’t need the sim in the phone if you use Three for example, just log in once using your My3 details.

  • John says:

    28 Jun28 June 10:43

    Good point, you can just get a payg (I think three discountinued the £2 min topup ones) and use it forever, or for the lifetime of three’s no expiry policy at least

• Chris says:

  28 Jun28 June 09:18

  This puts a Vodafone sim on the same shelf as low cost sims that exclude the nice extras.

  I suspect the tube WiFi provider has been trying to get them into an overly long contract (~5-10 years) whilst also having the 4G outlay and they figured it didn’t matter …. if they now have to renew their agreement no doubt they will have to pay through the nose.

  Poor form for not telling people before they was cut off, poorer form that they have attempted to keep this all as discretionary … I would not be happy if I had just taken a 24 month contract out!

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