Barely usable internet for about a week

[ArmitageShanks]

I am located in North Bristol. My household has 5 mobiles on EE (3 Android and 2 iPhone). We have 5G SIMs. I also have a (work-supplied) Mobile Broadband router. It's in my loft and connected to an external antenna that is mounted above my roofline.

For well over a year, everything has worked fine - I typically get about 150-200Mbps on the mobile broadband and latency is low enough.

About a week ago, connections became slow and unreliable. I started to get errors reported in my browsers of various kinds. It felt a little like DNS resolution issues as sometimes connecting to new sites wasn't working, but I switched to Google's DNS servers and nothing changed. If I turn off the Wi-Fi on my phones, they normally get decent speeds from both inside my house and in the garden. For the last week or so, all 5 phones also have the same Internet connectivity issues (whether connected to my mobile broadband router or not). I have established, therefore, that this behaviour is occurring for 6 different devices in total.

Out of exasperation, I bought a Teltonika RUTX50 in case my router was on the blink (even though the phones are showing the same symptom). I have replaced my EE-supplied mobile broadband router with the Teltonkia device, and I get the same issue.

I then sought to rule out the external antenna by using the antennas supplied with the RUTX50. The signal is "Good" according to the RUTX50 UI - see screenshot below. I still get the same issue.

EE have told me they've found nothing wrong in my area. I do not believe them. The service has been fine for a long time and suddenly I am having issues with 6 devices at once.

I now have a SIM on the way from ID Mobile and if that works, EE will likely lose my business (and my company's business) as their response has been frustrating and disappointing. I figured I'd see if the community can help me though. Any suggestions?

[Rach_H]

Hi @ArmitageShanks,

Welcome back to the Community!

We know how important it is for you to be able to stay connected, so I'm sorry to hear about the trouble you're having. Have you used our Service checker to see if there is any work being carried out in your area which may be causing this?

Rach

[ArmitageShanks]

I have used the Service Checker many times @Rach_H.

Per the screenshot below, it just reports that everything is fine. EE have reported that they've found no issues when I've raised support tickets yet clearly something somewhere isn't right, given 6 devices all started having issues with Internet connectivity via EE at the same time.

If I don't get this sorted soon, my kids may demand I move out, hence I've now reached the point of taking it into my own hands by spending a fortune on a router that has achieved nothing and ordering a SIM on another network so that I can (hopefully) prove it's an EE issue. 

[bristolian]

When you refer to raising support tickets, do you mean submitting a report via the web-status-tool? Or do you mean EE-CS raising an INC fault case into networks, for further investigation?

The site you've been connecting to, by fluke, happens to be one I pass by quite frequently - without any problems. I'll conduct a few tests when I'm next passing.

[ArmitageShanks]

I've raised support cases via both routes. I'm super grateful for your kind offer to do some testing as you pass by. Unfortunately, I fear it's entirely likely you'll find that everything is fine as the issue is intermittent. I can get 10-15 minutes of seemingly good connectivity and then something goes wrong. I can also hold video calls on Teams for over an hour - established connections seem to stay up. Likewise, when my kids are gaming, things seem to mostly work but if they try to start a new game or do something different, things go wrong. To be clear, this is PC gaming either connected to the mobile broadband router or connected to a mobile phone running in hotspot mode.

I'm gonna try calling EE again. Wish me luck...

[bristolian]

Make sure you have 2-3 timed examples of the problem, over 2-3 day period.

That's a pre-requisite for INC fault cases, and strengthens your case somewhat.

[ArmitageShanks]

Thanks @bristolian. Timing it is tricky as there's no pattern. It's even the case that one session can be fine (say, a Teams call on my work PC) while my wife shouts at me from downstairs as she's unable to do a bit of casual web browsing. There seems to be something around new versus established connections (hence my suspicion of DNS-related issues) but there are no strong patterns. Maybe I just need to keep a record of any time my wife shouts or one of my kids does the same!

[Rach_H]

Hi @ArmitageShanks,

Thanks for letting me know a little more about what's been happening. When you've spoken with the team what have they advised the next steps would be?

Rach

[ArmitageShanks]

I variously get told that tests show there are no issues in my area of I get some vaguely-expressed allusion to some kind of known issue but when I then press to be given specific details about what the issue is, where it is, who its affecting, what the nature of the issue is, what incident/ticket numbers exist and so on, I get given word salad in return.

I think it's going to be really helpful for me when I have the ID Mobile SIM. If everything works fine then, I can prove that the issue is upstream of my house, I can prove that the performance is different between 2 networks, and I can explain that for over a year, it's been fine.

[Rach_H]

I'd recommend getting back in touch with the team @ArmitageShanks and asking to make a complaint. They will then be able to look into the times when this has happened, and get to the bottom of what is going.

Rach