Of course, there’s no point having unbreakable broadband if the Wi-Fi doesn’t reach every corner of your home. Thankfully, Vodafone agrees. The company will bundle a booster box as part of your subscription to ensure nobody will be left unable to get a good connection in their bedrooms or the garden. With the booster fitted at home and the Vodafone Pro router switched on, you really will be unstoppable.
Our only real problems with this new Pro Broadband plan are the speeds available and the monthly cost. Vodafone relies on BT-owned Openreach to supply its internet connection so, if you’re unable to get the latest full-fibre download speeds from BT or Sky …you won’t find them here either.
If you’re lucky enough to live in a street that’s recently been upgraded by Openreach (or you’ve moved into a new build), you’ll be able to pair the unbreakable Vodafone Pro Broadband with speeds up to 900Mbps. That’s 12.8x faster than the average home broadband speed in the UK. For us, the best Vodafone could muster was 75Mbps. That’s a measly 5Mbps more than the average home broadband speed and for busy households with multiple people working from home, backing up photos to the cloud, making video calls, talking to Alexa, streaming music and 4K series from Netflix, and more – it’s not really quick enough.
That costs £37 a month, which is more than you’ll spend for similar speeds with a normal, breakable broadband plan. Of course, you’d imagine that “unbreakable” broadband would cost a premium …but the same 75Mbps speed from Vodafone without Pro Broadband features and you’ll only need to spend around £22 a month.
Over the course of a two-year contract, that’s a saving of some £350. So, it comes down to whether you’re happy to spend £175 a year to ensure you never suffer an outage.
Only you’ll know how often your home broadband suffers an outage and how much of an impact broken broadband would have on your business, work or play time. If you really can’t afford to be without the web, it’s impossible to fault Vodafone Pro Broadband.
However, like with any insurance policy, you need to decide whether it’s worth that high price. For our money, we’d rather spend the money on speedier download speeds to stream blockbusters and boxsets a little sooner, and ensure we’re never stuttering on our next work video call.
