Having relaunched its femtocell service earlier this year, Vodafone would appear to be failing to match up to its new marketing slogan - ‘Only Vodafone can guarantee mobile signal in your home', following user complaints about unreliable connections.
Users that have spent £50 to acquire the Sure Signal femtocell are said to be experiencing intermittent connection problems that can last for several hours. The company has responded by stating that customers would ‘notice changes to their Sure Signal service for short periods of time over the last few days during planned maintenance upgrades'.
According to a report carried by The Register, Vodafone is experiencing problems with the integration of the internet-based femtocell service into its core network. The complexity surrounding this issue is thought to have prompted O2 to drop the deployment of femtocell products despite having run extensive trials, and few other operators in Europe have jumped to follow Vodafone's lead.
The company, which is now said to be heavily subsidising the Sure Signal product because of the benefits in customer satisfaction and subscriber acquisition, updated its back-office systems in January so that the service provisioning was fully automated. Previously, customers had to call Vodafone to register their mobile phone numbers on the femtocell, which was then manually set up by the call centre.
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