Declining Signal Strength Lake District

[SteveT11]

Postcode LA22.  Data download speed early morning is 50 mps.  Over the course of the day it declines until it is 250kps early evening and unusable.  Seems to be a repeating issue. Can anyone help?  

[Chris_B · Accepted solution]

@SteveT11  Have a look at THIS and click the check status tab.  You can use this to also file an issue with EE. 

[bristolian]

The subject of your post reads "declining signal strength" but your post refers to data speeds.

Are your on-screen bars remaining the same, or are they changing also?

[SteveT11]

No change in the bars at all.  It’s happening every day. Good signal in the morning,  declines during the day to next to nothing in the evening: congestion on the network? Does EE have enough capacity to properly manage this area?  Have two separate EE mobiles and they both do the same. 

[SteveT11]

Data speeds not signal strength I guess 

[rkelly1]

It does sound like congestion if it happens at certain times. You will need to raise that with Technical Support. 

[bristolian]

If data speeds are varying with coverage the same, then that's almost certainly a capacity issue. As to when it's deemed as congested, would depend on a few factors.

Is there any specific location within LA22 that's problematic? And how long has this been a problem?

The faults checker previously linked is a good place to start.

[SteveT11]

LA22 9NP is where we are located but it seems to be the EE mast that postcode is pointed to as we haven’t found anywhere nearby where the data speed improves. Faults checker not helpful as it just says no fault.  The problem here is the gradual decline in speeds over the day; every day is the same.  Is EE assuming so much usage based on annual stats and this is the middle of the Lake District, so that when tourists are here it maxes out the allotted data coverage?  I am guessing that holiday makers start using data during the day and peak in the evening: I don’t know how it works.  Whatever the problem I don’t really want to have to pay a lot of money for 250kps and not be able to watch anything.  I tried a Vodafone sim in my router and got much higher speeds in the evening.  Needs to be fixed! 

[bristolian]

That location looks to be on the edge of coverage from 2 sites, I'm not familiar with the specific local geography enough to make any additional judgement. You've made a very good guess as to how data capacity works - the on-screen bars are just a guide to the quality of the received radio signal. That signal will be made up of one or more radio "carriers" of varying bandwidth & frequency. The frequency dictates the coverage, the bandwidth dictates how much "space" there is for all the users to share - in simple terms.

One of those sites is a single-carrier 4G800-only site, thus only has a single 5Mhz carrier. If your location is primarily served from this site (broadly to the west of the postcode you cite), and this site comes under heavy load, then this could easily cause reduced data speeds.

[SteveT11]

Thank you. It sounds like you might have found the issue. However it suggests this problem is not going to go away as the increasing daily heavy load issue is persistent.  Perhaps I switch to a more consistent carrier? I mentioned I put a Vodafone SIM in and had no declining data speeds.