Smart 5G Hub - No Upload Speed & Constant Connection Drop Off

[49BW]

Hi all,

I’ve been with EE for some time now and while the service has occasionally been patchy for a day or two, over the past month it has become close to unusable. We are using the Smart 5G Hub, while download speeds are generally strong (between 30–100 Mbps), upload speeds are consistently slow, typically between 0.01–0.1 Mbps.

We’ve tested the router in various locations around the house, turned off 5GHz, disabled 5G (running solely on 4G), various combinations of all of these, and haven’t seen any improvement. At this point, the connection is so unreliable for every 30 minutes of use, we’re experiencing around 15 minutes where websites and video calls simply won’t load.

I’ve attached a few screenshots which I hope are helpful. Any thoughts, suggestions, or fixes would be greatly appreciated.

[Chrstphr]

I expect that you've reset the hub already, but did you leave it switched off for a while?  I dont know if this affects 5G connections, but the upload speed of my old FTTC connection improved after I waited 20 mins before rebooting the router. 

[49BW]

An update here. We recently bought a GiffGaff Sim card to try this in the router.

EE sim:

Continuously no upload speed regardless of switching to IPv4, moving the router to different locations, ringing EE etc.

GiffGaff (O2) Sim:

Lower download but substantially higher upload speeds.

Now the question is, can the GiffGaff sim maintain these speeds & if it can, how difficult will it be to get out of an EE ~£50p/m contract which should supposedly provide high speed but hasn't for the past >3-months.

[Rach_H]

Hi @49BW,

What have the team advised when you reached out to them about this?

Rach

[49BW]

Hi Rach,

The update we received was that a nearby mast is undergoing critical infrastructure upgrades and will be out of action for the rest of the year. We’re now connected to a different mast that’s supposedly “almost” as close, so we were told in theory, this shouldn’t be affecting our speed noticeably.

We were offered an engineer call out to assess whether an external aerial could be installed on our building, the visit would cost £20, and the aerial itself £100, regardless of whether it makes a difference.

Given we’re paying £50 a month for a service that’s delivering around 1/100th of the quoted upload speed, and has substantially deteriorated in the last four months, we’re not looking to pay more for a fix that even the support team said might not work.

Overall, it’s been pretty disappointing, speeds are still low and the only proposed solution is to wait and see if things improve when the mast upgrades are completed at the end of the year. Frustrating and certainly not £50 a month worth! 

Still very open to trying other solutions if anyone in the community has any. 🙂

[Rach_H]

Hi @49BW 

Thanks for getting back to me about this.

I'm sorry to hear that the team haven't been able to help when you've gotten in touch. Did you raise a complaint when you spoke with the team?

Rach