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?

[bristolian]

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@ArmitageShanks wrote:

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.

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To be fair to CS, they're walking a tightrope here.

The vast majority of customers simply want a working service, and aren't interested in how that's achieved. For the majority of customers, the majority of the time, this is achieved and no further intervention is required.

The technical detail of many faults will be of no interest or relevance except in a small minority of cases where personnel need to ascertain whether the symptoms reported, are related to the known problem or not. The more unique the symptoms, the more investigation may be required, and the more specialist the skillset needed to be sure either way - the more likely that skillset is within support areas which are not customer facing.

[ArmitageShanks]

I think I've kind of, sort of, maybe made some progress. Someone in support has now advised me that a widespread issue is known to exist affecting 5G broadband customers generally, rather than only local to me. I asked for a ticket number for that issue as I'm not convinced I wasn't just being fobbed off but I was then told that they can't share it "because it's an internal ticket number". As a result, I now have a complaint number that I've been told "has been linked to the internal ticket" but I've been told that there's no estimated date for resolution and I've been told nothing that leads me to suspect that anyone has any idea what the issue is. Quite why the service status page indicates that everything is fine when there's supposedly a known issue, I'm not quite sure. The person I spoke to said "We've had thousands of calls about this issue since Saturday" so I'd have thought that would merit some kind of acknowledgement on the service status page.

Hopefully it'll be a case of all's well that ends well. The ID Mobile SIM should arrive in the next day or two, and there's a chance I end up with a better connection than my EE connection was (when it was working properly) at around half the monthly cost.

[bristolian]

The service status page has only ever been intended to report local radio network faults.

I've never known any network openly publish known issues as you suggest, one major downside is that customers are less likely to report issues that they diagnose are already known.

ID Mobile is a 3UK-MVNO.

[ArmitageShanks]

I guess the issue that is that it's not really a service status page, then. The service that I consume incorporates the back-end elements that need to be working adequately for the service that I consume to be working without issues. If the back-end isn't working correctly then, from my point of view, the service status is not OK. Perhaps EE should rebrand it as a "Local radio network status" page and perhaps if there are issues affecting (supposedly) thousands of customers, they should publish that somewhere so that people don't go on a wild goose chase, trying to persuade people that the issue is their end rather than it being some issue that requires me to do a factory reset of my 5G router (something that was recommended to me until I pointed out that I'd gone one step further and bought a new router, out of exasperation). Sure, other networks are also probably rubbish at reporting the status of back-end elements of services, but I don't see "They're rubbish so it's fine that we're rubbish" as being a particular strong defence.

I'm fascinated to see how the 3-based service performs to EE (when EE is working well). I typically get 150-250Mbps down and 30-40Mbps up. Fingers crossed I end up with something better and this ends up ultimately proving to have been a blessing in disguise!🙂

[bristolian]

One small point from reviewing this thread again - in the first post, your screenshots suggest your devices are using CA across L2100, L1800 & NR700.

Does your device have any option to lock to 4G-only or 5G-only?

[ArmitageShanks]

I have the following options available to me in the RUTX50 admin UI. The option in pale blue is what's currently selected.

VoLTE: Preferred network type:


5G mode: 

Band selection:

[ArmitageShanks]

As of the last hour or so, I appear to have been able to bodge my connection into working by disabling IPv6 (on the mobile side of the router, as opposed to the local side of the router). Will EE catch that this is the case and recommend it as a potential workaround to affect users or will they continue to tell people that the service status indicates that there are no issues? I think we all know the answer to that question...

[ArmitageShanks]

Above is what the setting looks like on my Teltonika RUTX50 router. Since switching from"IPv4/IPv6" to "IPv4" for the "PDP type" on my device, things seem to have become stable. I'm not convinced the bandwidth is back to where it was a week or so ago but it least the unreliability and intermittent connectivity is seemingly worked around for now.