cancel
Showing results for 
Show  only  | Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

4G D/L speed consistently dropping from 180mbps to ~4 mbps between 8:30 - 23:00

acharlwood
Investigator
Investigator

Hey everyone, scratching my head with this one and have been hesitant to contact EE support just because explaining this over the phone may be a challenge. Wanted to get some advice here first hopefully.

I have a 5G unlimited data sim. I've been using it in my Huawei CPE Pro 2 for about 9 months now and it's been fantastic. I went from ~25mbps to ~180 overnight and it's been extremely reliable. 

A couple of weeks ago (~15th March) we started noticing pretty bad speed issues. Nothing had changed on the internal network in the last week or so. LAN speeds were fine, so determined it was the EE connection.

Reported issue with coverage to EE on the 17th as it still hadn't resolved, and was told everything was fine in my area.

I've been doing regular speed tests with a docker image on my local network. Note, the x axis is misleading, originally I was testing every hour, and the container stopped at certain periods as I tried resolving the issue by playing around with DNS servers or VPN tunnelling. I switched to 15-min interval testing a couple of days ago (which starts about halfway through the graph).  Total of ~116 tests.

TL;DR: The tests showing speeds of ~4mbps all start from 08:00, and stop at around 23:00. 

download.png

Obviously, I expect fluctuation in data speeds, that's normal. But the consistent <5mbps speed for >12 hours a day is clearly more than a fluctuation.

 I've ruled out any changes to our network internally in those times. I do work from home, but I'm more of a night owl so the speeds drop significantly before I'm even on the internet, and if anything my usage increases after 23:00 to make use of the speed boost whilst I have it. So I don't think it's a local bandwidth issue. 

What is weird - which prompted me to to write this post, is after taking the sim card out of the router and putting it in my phone, I was getting decent speeds again. As soon as i tethered from my phone to the PC I could barely get 2 mbps download.

I don't think it's an issue with switching between 5G &4G masts, as with the phone test I described I restricted network connection to 4G only (which is what I typically connect to on my Huawei router).

Am I being throttled? I would have thought i'd have been notified by EE if I broke some sort of fair use policy and they were throttling me this much.

 

30 REPLIES 30
qwertyuiopasdfg
Investigator
Investigator

Acharlwood,

Thank you for the post on SIM-only router speeds. It is indeed odd that speeds improved when the SIM was placed into a phone. I believe the UK is not ready for 5G router technology just yet. For some reason, fiber is being pushed. Maybe they are using existing BT lines where the copper can be quickly replaced with fiber, whereas a 5G mast costs money to install and maintain. They are not cheap.