I’ve been feeling exactly the same? I’ve been with EE since the days of Orange. I started with the old One2One network which should’ve been called One2None and coverage was pretty bad. Changed to Orange about 24 years ago and found the coverage was a lot better and the internet when it was 2G was quite fast. One year I took an old BT cell net contract out just to get a new Nokia phone but only used the sim if ram out of credit and the voicemail set up was rubbish and sometimes missed calls wouldn’t show up on phone till a few days later. When I finally moved to Orange contract at first thought their prices were much the same as the others, then a few years later maybe an extra £2-5 a month but didn’t mind as the coverage seemed the best back then and the 3G was quite fast. When 4G came out again the data speeds were really fast but since BT brought out EE, the price increases have jumped by a much more noticeable amount. But I’m due an upgrade now and was looking at the iPhone 14pro. The cheapest tariff I’ve seen was around £60 for just 5Gb. Although for 100gb it was between £65-£71 but then when you wonder why ones £6 more you realise that they have capped the 5G speed to just 100MBPS, I could get 500mbps on 4G. But I tried price comparison sites because in the past I could select to pay more upfront, I’d happily pay upto £200 of it could lower monthly costs by around £10 at least. But nope cheapest monthly price I think was around £60. On Vodafone you can get 350gb 5G data around £190 upfront cost for around £50 a month. If I keep on looking I could probably find even better deals. Also thinking of leaving EE broadband as it’s the basic copper line broadband as you can only get Virgin on fibre, but even for copper it’s only about 14mbps at best and we’re only 900metres from the exchange and the upload seems to be capped at 0.87mbps because we have had lots of power cuts with downstairs sockets tripping the speeds will drop, but if they’ve not tripped for a few months, the download speeds do improve, but despite the router showing that the upload speed has synced to usually 1160kbps and sometimes over 1220kbps, any speed tests I do the download can be between 11-15mbps but no matter what site I use the upload never goes above 0.87mbps. To watch a five min YouTube video in 1080p, if it’s around 6pm, it can take me around 10-15 mins to watch due to buffering. So I’d connect my iPhone and bridge the 4G with the ADSL connection and normally I can watch any 4k video with hardly any buffering but after 15mins I’ll get a text from EE saying I’ve hit 80% of my data allowance which is 105GB. I always used to think that paying a little more for a reliable and fast mobile service was worth it, but I think all the networks are going to be fairly reliable these days so paying an extra £10-30 a month just isn’t worth it. I actually hope that a lot of other customers do the same, then maybe in a couple of years EE realise they need to be more competitive with just the price and not just boosting speeds in the urban areas that are already quite fast.
