4GEE Home Broadband / Wifi - Speeds all over the place!

[MROB1974]

I have been an EE 4GEE home broadband customer pretty much as soon as it was launched 2 years ago. I live in semi rural Kent which, as like many parts of the UK, has just been left behind regarding UK IT infrastructure so 4GEE home broadband was pretty much my only option to improve upon the frankly insulting 4mb/0.5mb offered by BT.

To begin with all things were good, getting 40/40 pretty much all the time, but over the years as its popularity has increased quality has fallen down to BT performance levels. Im lucky to get 7/7 nowadays, which is tough as I work from home and use Zoom a lot where a good UL speed is essential. 

Ive tried EE customer support but all they seemed to be concerned with was getting me to run speed tests for about a week until the speed WAS good and they wiped their hands of the problem. Very poor.

The infuriating thing about the product is the fact my Iphone seems to get better speeds than my router- both on EE and theoretically both should be connecting to the same tower. Makes be beg the question is my external antenna ( installed by EE) still pointing in the right direction, but for some strange reason knowing where the best/closest EE tower is seems to be a state secret that you aren't allowed to know in this country. The baffling stream of different providers my router connects to rather than just sticking to the best one may be the problem. Who knows.......EE support certainly dont !

So all in all as soon as a viable option comes along I will be leaving EE. For the price I pay - 80 quid PM - it is shockingly poor value. I travel a lot with work, especially in the US, and I am shocked how our internet options stack up against theirs. Unless you are lucky enough to live in a city with  fiber, you are stuffed.  If you live anywhere relying on BTs ancient network you are dead in the water. 

[Christopher_G]

Hi @MROB1974

I'm sorry to hear that you're having some problems with your service.

I've sent you a private message to get you some help.

Chris

[XRaySpeX]

That is the nature of the beast!

[MROB1974]

[mikeliuk]

Hi @MROB1974 ,

Do speedtest.net and fast.com confirm the high variability in performance which you see?

I judge that the data usage of between 2 MB to 11 MB is far too low to get an accurate measurement of the measured bandwidth. The burst up to 81 Mbps suggests there should be some headroom for improvement and I would estimate 35 Mbps might be a more realistic measurement from a valid benchmark. Your tests were run over 26 s, 23 s, and 21 s which are all far too short (at least 60 s and at least 50 MB might be a minimal starting point but ideally until the measured bandwidth becomes steady).

You've reported that a different device without external antenna is already able to perform better which suggests a more capable 4G LTE router ordered online to allow an evaluation could perform better. I use a Netgear MR1100 so anything equal or better is likely to be ok. You could also gently detach the external antenna and restart the radios to sanity check the issue is the same, and not that you have a directional antenna pointing at a cell tower which has been decommissioned.