topic Re: Quality vs price in Mobile Network discussions

Quality vs price

Garnelpatricia — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 19:29:18 GMT

I renewed my contract with EE. I also have a Lebara card for when I travel as roaming costs are free in the EU and India, a place that I visit often and intend to visit again. I’m in Bristol right now and I never in my life regretted the contract renewal like now. The Lebara network (uses Vodafone) 4G is substantially better than the EE 5G. I want to cry when I think of not only how poor the connections are but the price difference.
Never again!

Re: Quality vs price

bristolian — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 19:34:22 GMT

Mobile contracts don't "renew" as such, but you might mean that you have re-contracted onto a new minimum-term.

I'm "only" a 4G user, but if you were to compare VF with EE using the same technologies, I would generally expect EE to outperform VF albeit with local variations.

Out of interest, where in Bristol are you? And are you using 5GSA or 5GNSA?

Re: Quality vs price

Garnelpatricia — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 19:43:47 GMT

Yes re-contracted. I’m in Kingswood at the moment but, it’s not the first time I swap connections from my EE to my Lebara. I actually live in Dorset which is even worse than here. As for SA or NSA I have no idea.

Re: Quality vs price

bristolian — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 12:34:14 GMT

A 5G device/SIM combination should always fall back to 4G anywhere that 5G coverage is not usable. Are you finding that's not happening?

Re: Quality vs price

Garnelpatricia — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 15:40:46 GMT

It shows three 5 G bars on my iPhone. Never dropped to 4G

Re: Quality vs price

bristolian — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 16:28:07 GMT

@Garnelpatricia wrote:
It shows three 5 G bars on my iPhone.

Ok, so you're seeing 5G coverage. In that case ...... what're the service issues you're having? Can you be specific?

All you've said so far is "poor connection" which could mean different things to different people.

Re: Quality vs price

Garnelpatricia — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 11:18:30 GMT

It’s too slow

Re: Quality vs price

Peter_W — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 14:19:09 GMT

Welcome to the Community, @Garnelpatricia

There are a number of different factors here that can influence the quality of your data connection.

We'd expect to see you get good speeds over 5G, but this can depend on the amount of traffic on the network, orientation to the masts, whether you're indoor or outdoor, and potential network faults as well.

Have you checked this area on our network status checker to see if there are any known issues?

It's worth having a check to see if switching off 5G makes any difference too, but we'd expect this to be better than 4G.

If none of these make an improvement, I'd recommend downloading the Ookla Speed Test app and make note of the time, date, location, and whether it's on 4G or 5G.

These can then be logged with our customer care team for further investigation.

Peter