I just wanted to share the issues I'm having here as im getting incredibly frustrated with my EE experience. I switched from BT on the 900Mbps service which I would rate 10/10 and on the EE side its been like 1/10.
I initially had constant issues with the internet appearing to drop and occasionally all Wi-Fi devices dropping at the same time. I also noted that on my wired in PC I would eventually get bogged down with horrific ping on NATed traffic. I established this by pinging 8.8.8.8 and the smart hub at the same time and noting correlations in latency. The ping to 8.8.8.8 would gradually get slower and slower and occasionally drop packets, when it dropped packets, the local ping to the gateway would jump to 500ms. These ICMP results don't however tell the full story.
I complained to EE and got a £20 refund for my inconvenience which in the grand scheme of things is poor. I also had a replacement smart hub plus sent out so installed it and have it time to settle and noted that it had upgraded to the same firmware version as the previous hub.
Within about 4-5 days things things started to go bad again with the internet traffic essentially grinding to a halt on both wireless and wired connections. Restarting the Hub would resolve the issue without the ONT requiring any intervention although on a couple of scenarios I have rebooted the ONT as well for good measure.
I use Windows 365 for my work which is a remote VDI solution and the primary form of traffic for this is UDP once the session has been established. This has been useful for observing the issues when the connection goes bad as the session tends to remain up without any issues. My Teams calls run locally NATing out of the EE connection (despite being within the VDI) and also remain active, however when things go back I'm unable to receive calls or make new calls (this is because TCP is required to establish the initial connection).
To me its extremely clear what the issue is. The Smart Hub Plus has a memory leak issue. The issue doesn't cause too many issues for UDP traffic as this flow doesn't really have any overhead, whereas TCP on a stateful firewall (such as the smart hub) requires overhead to map the layer 3 inbound and outbound packets to a layer 4 protocol (TCP).
Now I don't want to appear as I'm being difficult with EE here but due to these issues and 'generic support' issues such as rebooting the device, the issue isn't resolving the problem despite the sticky plaster of having to reboot. The reboot can take quite some time too.
These issues have caused me to miss multiple crucial calls such as a key audit for my employer and in general lots of downtime. I know this is a consumer level connection which doesn't offer any sort of business SLA, but plenty of people work from home and I never had any issues when with BT. My employer is becoming a lot less patient with me as these issues go on and I am now starting to lose days of pay due to being unable to work.
I have read plenty of posts on these forums also with others having the exact same issues.
EE needs to shift focus from speed metrics post-reboot to overall customer reliability. The root of the problem lies with the Smart Hub Plus, not the connection to the ONT.
At this point I request transparency from EE and the Smart Hub Plus development team regarding this issue. Many customers, myself included, are clearly experiencing a subpar service, which is unacceptable.
EE must acknowledge these problems and provide a clear roadmap and timeline for resolving the firmware issues.
I hope this message highlights not only my personal struggles but also those of other customers who may not have the technical expertise to go beyond basic troubleshooting.
I hope EE see this and respond appropriately.
