Hi,
I have been with EE since around Feburary 2023 and it's been great until recently.
I used to play on my Xbox as did my son and we were getting around 45-50ms network latency (ping), now it is regularly around 300-400ms!
Since the 25th of January this year (which is also when work was done on our local mast) my pings have been horrendous. I've contacted EE numerous times. They changed my plan, sent me out a new sim card, etc etc but nothing has changed.
They did say they found something and changed the MHA and said the problem has now been fixed. Yet my problem remains unchanged. I have then called them quite a few time since only to be told they can't find a problem and it could be down to weather conditions or the infrastructure in the area.
Yet the weather conditions and infrastructure was fine for 8 months prior to this!
I have spoken to my two neighbours who live around 1/4 a mile from my location, who are also on EE 4G as we live in a rural area and there is no broadband or fibre available so the 4G internet is our only option. I asked them to do some ping tests and they also are experiencing the same issue, yet EE keep saying there's no problem.
My Xbox is connected to a gaming router via an Ethernet cable, a cable then runs from the Ethernet router which goes to my 4G Ethernet modem.
Everything works fine at 2AM in the morning! and the problems usually start to show around 6pm until 11pm on a weekday, and pretty much all day at the weekend. I've attached some pictures below of ping plotter, screenshots, etc.
I had none of this prior to 25th of January when work was done on the tower. Everything was working great for 8 months prior to this.
This is getting so frustrating for me, as it just feels like I'm being fobbed off when clearly there is an issue.
Hopefully someone can help...
Hi Chris,
there isn't really any other side affects, as TV will play OK due to the large buffer the streams use. I guess if I were doing a zoom call that would be affected or if I was doing VOIP or any other real time thing where network latency was important that would also be affected.
8 months prior my son and myself used to play on our XBOX's every night, and I always had the ping displayed in the top left as on the screenshot. I used to get 40-50ms. Since the 25th January the xbox has been unplayable now apart from if I play it at 2AM! It is like there is some bottleneck in the system that was not there prior to the 25th Jan.
If I manually ping a server such as google DNS (8.8.8.8) I also get terrible results at these times where it used to be constant 30-40ms.
Ping during peak times:
Ping from a few moments ago (which still has a few spikes in it)
But seeing as I'm paying for a service that worked fine for 8 months prior to this, and now doesn't.
I've emailed support again today, next step will be the ombudsman.
Phoned EE again, they said they need more people to complain before they will investigate...
Another ping plot from today... same issue as usual...
Asked my neighbour Ben what his ping is like (He is on EE 4G too)
Asked my other nearest neighbour Mark what his internet was like too..
XBOX won't even connect it's that bad...
This is so frustrating. I am basically using this thread to document all of this.
Hi, first of all thank you for replying 🙂 I'm glad there is someone here that is technical at last.
The stock UI on my modem unfortunately doesn't show any of the data you requested.
However I spent about an hour firing up an old laptop to boot Linux and then ran some shell scripts to get the data from the device as the stock UI doesn't show all of the information.
This is the data from the shell script:
{
"network_type": "LTE_A",
"mcc": "234",
"mnc": "30",
"rssi": "69",
"rsrq": "-8.0",
"lte_rsrp": "-95",
"wan_lte_ca": "ca_activated",
"lte_ca_pcell_band": "3",
"lte_ca_pcell_bandwidth": "20.0",
"lte_ca_scell_band": "20",
"lte_ca_scell_bandwidth": "5.0",
"lte_ca_pcell_arfcn": "1617",
"lte_ca_scell_arfcn": "6225",
"Z_SINR": "24.2",
"Z_CELL_ID": "366",
"Z_eNB_id": "5079809",
"Z_rsrq": "-8.0",
"lte_ca_scell_info": "196,2,20,6225,5.0;"
}
According to cell mapper I should be connected to cell 1 but I'm not too sure how reliable their data is. I can see the selected tower from the window where the modem is situated (and it has two external antennas).
I'm a bit confused as it says on Cell 1 that the EARFCN should be 1667 but my modem reports 1617 ?
I must admit I'm not too up on cell tower infrastructure.
Yes I am quite persistent. I'm the same when repairing electronic devices (down to component level) on my YT channel and have around 32K subscribers.
I look forward to your reply 👍
I've just got back from one of my neighbours, who did a few tests on his equipment, bearing in mind that it's not usually that bad at this time of day, and it a lot worse in the evenings. He usually get's around 40-70MB download, also see his ping.
This is his phone, on his router / EE sim, on his EE account at his home which is around 1/4 mile away from me.
Here is another ping plot from last night showing the lag again very similar to the last few days.
