Getting sick of seeing the Vodafone error “HTTP Error 403: The service you requested is restricted”

Of late I keep getting ‘HTTP Error 403: The service you requested is restricted’ when I try to use my HTC Diamond2 mobile phone on Vodafone. I see the problem whether browsing the internet with mobile IE or Opera and also when using the phone as a 3G modem  from my Windows 7 laptop. Seems to happen every other day of late.

Interestingly, when I got the error shown above whilst trying to browse to Bing, a connection, on the same 3G link, from my PC to our Exchange server was working fine.

This error seems to be a reoccurring problem judging from posts on the various Vodafone forums. In most cases the problem just seems to go away if you wait long enough, which is my experience. I can find nothing I can do or set on the phone that makes a difference. My guess is a proxy error in the Vodafone cloud. They really need to get it sorted out.

I have been a happy Vodafone customer for years, since I first got a mobile phone in the early 90s, but this is happening too often and it is seriously making me think of moving. Mobile internet is becoming too important to be to have it as such an unreliable service.