topic Re: 4G Slow Speeds since tower maintenance in Mobile Network discussions

4G Slow Speeds since tower maintenance

stumpypete — Sun, 30 Jun 2024 11:24:38 GMT

In early 2023, I had a Mikrotik External 4G LTE dish installed as part of the Scottish Broadband Voucher Scheme (ie Government money) as wired internet was rubbish at my rural location. It has been great for the last 15 months or so with me regularly being able to get 80-90 Mbps down and 30-40 up. See below:

However in the last week, following some updates on the Tower apparently, my speed has dropped off significantly:

I have rebooted by router multiple times to absolutely no effect.

It is compounded by the fact that we actually have two routers in the house - the other being a TP-link with it's own SIM card, and it is suffering just as badly, so we know it's a problem with EE. (we were so pleased with the original Mikrotik, we bought a second router specifically for my son to game on).

I have checked the detailed stats on my router and they clearly show that there is no issue with the connection:

The dish appears to be connecting well to the tower and with a high quality signal, but yet the latency we are experiencing is still present.

What is particularly galling is that EE customer support has been poor. Despite talking to them absolutely nothing has been done to resolve the issue - I have spoken to the team on 150 and via twitter (oops X), and I am still in the same situation, they seem extremely reluctant to take any action and appear to be keener to lose me as a customer than actually do something to resolve the issue.

On reading around the community, this sort of thing appears to be a very common problem and in all the threads I have read, I have yet to see anyone having their issue actually resolved. It would appear that anything that falls into the difficult box gets tagged as "lose the customer, because it's going to cost too much to fix". If that is indeed the case then it is a shocking state of affairs given that my installation was paid for with government money.

I would change to another service provider if I could, but NONE of the other providers offer anything near what I was getting with EE before they screwed up the tower. It would appear that my only remaining option is to go to Starlink, which I really don't want to do, as I don't want to be putting money into an Elon Musk company. What I really want is for EE to restore the service that I had been extremely happy with for the last year.

I have another discussion with EE tomorrow, but I suspect it will be a deadlock letter and time to connect with OFCOM, but I'm starting to lose the will here.

Re: 4G Slow Speeds since tower maintenance

Northerner — Sun, 30 Jun 2024 14:47:17 GMT

Hi @stumpypete

Is the tower now just 4/5G having removed the 3G access. Have you tried connecting to 5G.

You can log issues on the EE network status page:

https://ee.co.uk/help/service-status

Thanks

Re: 4G Slow Speeds since tower maintenance

stumpypete — Sun, 30 Jun 2024 17:14:53 GMT

The issue has been raised with EE and logged. The tower has had 3G deactivated and it is not likely to receive 5G anytime soon due to its rural location.

Here is what is available on the tower:

Interestingly I tried an O2 SIM and it exhibited the same issue. I also went out and tried connecting on three of the actual cells that the Mast has, and all three of them had the same issue as well (I had line of sight in all of them and was never more than 700m away from the mast. Smells to me like it might be an issue with the Base Station or in the wider connection to the EE Network.

Re: 4G Slow Speeds since tower maintenance

bristolian — Sun, 30 Jun 2024 19:47:56 GMT

@stumpypete wrote:

The issue has been raised with EE and logged. The tower has had 3G deactivated and it is not likely to receive 5G anytime soon due to its rural location.

3G was sunsetted in January 2024. 5G on NR700 often uses the same rigging components as 4G-800.

Multiple MNO's will always have their own independent equipment, even when the tower structure is shared. Do you have any note of the 4G carriers/EARFCN/bands that were available prior to these issues, and now? A pre & post comparison of EARFCN may well yield clues.

Re: 4G Slow Speeds since tower maintenance

stumpypete — Mon, 01 Jul 2024 09:55:40 GMT

Sorry, I do not have data of how the tower was configured from earlier this year.

Re: 4G Slow Speeds since tower maintenance

bristolian — Mon, 01 Jul 2024 14:50:00 GMT

On closer inspection of your screenshots, your device is using Band20-EARFCN-6225 as a primary carrier, and Band3-EARFCN-1617 as secondary carrier - with a good RSRP value.

Unless the site you're connected to is a single carrier B20-only, it's unusual to be using CA in this manner - B3 should be primary with B20 as secondary.

I suspect the cases you've read about, are extreme ones.

Re: 4G Slow Speeds since tower maintenance

stumpypete — Tue, 02 Jul 2024 08:05:18 GMT

B3 is normally the primary, but that has been one of the symptoms of late where B20 is becoming primary, or sometimes not there at all.

Re: 4G Slow Speeds since tower maintenance

stumpypete — Sun, 28 Jul 2024 19:14:33 GMT

So after many weeks the problem was fixed for about 4 days, and then it failed again. EE are still saying there isn’t a problem, has to be said there approach to testing is extremely sub-standard.

Re: 4G Slow Speeds since tower maintenance

bristolian — Sun, 28 Jul 2024 19:21:15 GMT

Is B20 still reporting as primary carrier? I also wonder if satellite backhaul is part of the jigsaw, somehow.

The majority of faults do fit a templated approach, which won't necessarily identify obscure issues.

Re: 4G Slow Speeds since tower maintenance

stumpypete — Mon, 29 Jul 2024 09:37:30 GMT

It's reporting B3 as the primary these days - I was talking to a tech this morning who tells me that it is connecting to a slower frequency on the tower. But just as we were discussing I got cut off. Waiting to be called back.

Re: 4G Slow Speeds since tower maintenance

bristolian — Mon, 29 Jul 2024 09:50:52 GMT

@stumpypete wrote:

It's reporting B3 as the primary these days - I was talking to a tech this morning who tells me that it is connecting to a slower frequency on the tower. But just as we were discussing I got cut off. Waiting to be called back.

I think that CS agent may be getting their tech confused, albeit sounds like they're looking for the right things. Frequencies are neither fast nor slow, but rather high-band or low-band.

B3 allows for higher data speeds than B20.