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.
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.
@AdamInt Out of curiosity, for your setups do you restrict to an IPv4 address or use both 4 & 6?I ask as I was having a bit of a mare with IPv6 when setting up my router - so restricted it to only IPv4. I wondered if you did the same? My understanding of CG-NAT is limited, but I just wondered if IP allocation is somehow different during peak times. Having said that it doesn't explain the upload speeds/ping which have been normal throughout this.
Just tried enabling IPv6, didn't help - never mind!
Just discovered something really weird. I thought it might be worth using different speed test providers (as I've been largely using just Ookla). I find google's to be fairly unreliable so tried fast, nperf and BT wholesale. Got some really odd results.
fast.com:
nperf:
BT:
Weird eh? Having re-run the BT test a few times the download swings between 50-70mbps download.
Sorry to spam notifications, was trying to maintain in one post but the time to edit has expired. Nperf's 15% packet loss seemed weirdly high, some further investigation via packetlosstest:
(This isn't a wired connection, but the 0% upload packet loss indicates the wireless connection is working fine)
And speed.clouflare.com:
