4G service degradation

[Pauleng]

I hope somebody may be able to help.

I live in a rural location in NE Scotland I went to EE 4g broadband a couple of months ago due to poor landline speeds and was blown away by the service.

90-100Mbps down, 30+ up 30-40 ping and <1 jitter.

So I cancelled my ADSL broadband and the day it stopped all went bad.

For over a week now the download is variable between 1-80 Mbps, but the jitter is 30-500!
There was a fault logged in my area at the same time which I assumed had caused this.

Unfortunately the fault was apparently fixed - and my problem remains.

I put in a ticket, but nothing seemed to happen so called customer services

The guy was really helpful - but ultimately couldn’t do much.

The 2nd line techs were not able to help either.

Jitter at these levels makes most things almost unusable - streaming, gaming even some browsing - obviously bigger files have more packet issues.

Packet loss is zero, so I assume a routing problem.

I get similar speed results on a Huawei B818-263 and my IPhone direct via 4g

The mast signal is good, just seems the routing has gone haywire

I’m sure I saw a post here which took months to resolve and ended up being a switching unit

I assume the techs just ping the mast and get a great speed so it’s fine?

Does anybody know how I can resolve this as I can barely use the service most evenings.

It does improve in the small hours - but the number of people on the mast cannot be high even at peak times - and it was so good before.

Im currently using a backup modem with a 3 PAYG sim, but EE blew the others away for the first few months

[Christopher_G]

Hi @Pauleng

I can only really suggest continuing to speak with our technical team. They'll be able to run through some diagnostic tests and hopefully get to the bottom of the problem.

Chris

[Pauleng]

Hi,

Yes, I did that and the guy tried he was quite frustrated that he couldn’t see anything

I think the problem is a ping to the mast is probably fine - just larger files.

it’s almost like a congestion issue - seems to clear up a bit in the early hours - but a relatively rural mast shouldn’t be getting that much traffic 

I guess can only hope it’ll clear up itself in a few weeks…….

[bristolian]

Hi @Pauleng 

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@Pauleng wrote:

it’s almost like a congestion issue - seems to clear up a bit in the early hours - but a relatively rural mast shouldn’t be getting that much traffic 

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Whilst this is true, rural sites may not have large amounts of capacity to soak up significant increases in demand.

Does anything report as awry on the status checker? You can use it to report suspect issues too.

Out of interest, and potentially by means of explanation rather than fixing, where in NE Scotland are you? Does your device software give any readout of your serving-eNB ID, or EARFCN?

[Pauleng]

I put a report via the service tool when it reported back the original fault was fixed with various details, but they mostly fixate on speed and often my speed is great - on small test files.

With the jitter as high as it is it’s awful.

I have LTEMonitor (so I have tried swapping bands, CA does activate etc) and the router gives some details - sent via PM

Just really annoying as I cancelled my (rather rubbish) broadband just before it went after running a few months to test for stability and was very pleased!

[bristolian]

I've taken a look at the location of this issue which were PM'd, and my initial suspicions have been, frustratingly, disproven to an extent

I'd normally associate routing & performance issues with being potentially core-network/routing related, and would suggest testing over a wide area to see if this is the case here.

I meant to mention via PM but it's probably better on the open board anyway - do you have an EE mobile at all, and is this similarly affected? That would help eliminate a device/software issue.

[Pauleng]

Hi,

Yes, I have an iPhone with an EE sim and it was the same running on 4g direct.

Interestingly, I have just done a speed test and it looks like it is back to how it was - pretty awesome!

93Mbps up, 30 down, 39 ping and 0.7 jitter

I’ll see how it goes and report back…..

[Pauleng · Accepted solution]

Well, whatever was done seems to have fixed it

I’ve had no trouble over the weekend and all is good now.

Hopefully it won’t fail again……