Claims I have 4G but literally unusable slow.

[Demonswilldrown]

I have been having this issue for a year now and EE have been less than helpful. 
Whenever I am in my local town, my phone states I have 4G signal, but when I try to do anything (google search/send iMessage/text message/open apps, whatever it is) I get connection errors and failure notices. If I try to do a speed check it times out, and it is as the title says, utterly unusable.

i am paying my bills every month and yet EE refuse to acknowledge there is even a problem because not enough people are reporting the fault. Of course they’re not, the vast majority of people in my town on any given day are tourists and they don’t know any better and just wait until they leave.

we have screenshotted all these things and spent literal hours on the phone to EE and they have fixed nothing.

I don’t think I would be so annoyed if it just said no signal. But it doesn’t, it says full 4G. EE need to fix this because right now they’re taking our money and not providing the service.

[bristolian]

If you've discussed this with EE CS, that's the correct course of action. Have any fault tickets been raised for further checks by networks teams?

You've not mentioned whether service improves out of daytime hours, but have implied so - which would be a good symptom of congestion caused by insufficient carrier capacity. The resolution for that would be additional spectrum deployment and/or new site builds - the former can sometimes be a quick fix, the latter is rarely so.

Out of interest, where is this?

[Demonswilldrown]

Hi, 

thanks for your reply. We have indeed had endless discussions with EE CS and they have essentially said they will not be doing anything to fix the issue and have refunded our first few months fees and now have released us from our contracts 18 months early because they have no intention of fixing it.

we are in Orkney and it is mostly an issue in the main town Kirkwall. We get a fair number of cruise ships and so all customer services will say is that “there are hundreds of thousands of people using the tower and not complaining”.

apparently there needs to be a certain percentage of users complain before they will even consider doing anything, but the problem is that the visitors won’t complain, they just put up with no signal for their day visit and then they leave. It’s utterly atrocious customer service. 

EE need to do better. As you say they could easily boost capacity and fix the issue but sadly theyll not bother and the people who actually have to live here will suffer unusable signal in town.

[bristolian]

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@Demonswilldrown wrote:

EE need to do better. As you say they could easily boost capacity and fix the issue but sadly theyll not bother

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Whilst its understandable that users think this, it is often not as simple. If fixes are simple, then by nature they're easy and a network operator has nothing to gain by intentionally not implementing them.

Adding capacity may require a physical reconfiguration of the site including hardware swapouts. It may require additional TX/backhaul which can come with long lead-times. Reconfiguration of towers can require legal processes to be followed.

Adding capacity to existing sites is a rolling process network-wide, and the vast majority are relatively straightforward.