EE's network has gone backwards by 10 years

[Profile closed]

As the title says. EE has, certainly in my area, gone backwards by 10 years.

We are supposed to be improving, with the need to stay connected to the internet being greater than ever before.

But no, EE has gone backwards, to the point where I used to be able to get a faster speed on a Virgin Mobile SIM in a Samsung Galaxy Ace Plus! 

This was when Virgin Mobile used EE's 3G network - and the handset was a 3G HSDPA handset which topped out at 7.2Mbps. The 3G SIM used to constantly hit 2Mbps.

EE's speed today:

https://www.speedtest.net/my-result/a/7909941303

This is not fit for purpose as "the UK's best network for the eighth year running". In actuality, it is the UK's WORST network, and has been in my area for the last 4-8 weeks!

Previously, in my area:

EE 3G (pre-4G days): 15Mbps Band 1

EE 4G (initial, single speed): 30Mbps Band 3, backhaul limited

EE 4G (up to Sept/Oct 2021): 70Mbps Band 3 OR 10Mbps Band 20

EE "4G" (recently): 15Mbps (max)/8Mbps (average) Band 3, 5Mbps (max)/2Mbps (average) Band 20, signal strength significantly weaker than any of the above (even 3G).

Under days of high load, such as events:

EE 3G (pre-4G days): 2Mbps

EE 4G (up to Sept/Oct 21): 5Mbps (min), 10Mbps (average), B3

EE "4G" November 2021: 6Mbps B3, <0.5Mbps B20 (see Speedtest link posted above!).

Note that the 3G tests were previously done on a Samsung Galaxy S4 (DC-HSPA and LTE compatible). The 4G tests were carried out on a Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge or Samsung Galaxy S9+ (both DC-HSPA+, LTE-CA, and VoLTE compatible). The Virgin Mobile reference above was on a Samsung Galaxy Ace Plus (HSDPA 7.2 only) with a 3G SIM card.

Until recently, EE 4G has been absolutely fine.

Recently, EE 4G signal strength has gone down significantly. 

2G is now barely average, though 2G is not fit for purpose in 2021/2022 due to low quality calls and slow data rates.

3G is still strong - I can only assume it is using the same old mast panels, whereas 2G and 4G are using new panels.

4G is considerably weaker: Band 3 is significantly weaker and only receivable in one room of the house. Band 20 is strong, but still weaker than before, and completely swamped/overloaded - see the speedtest link for an example of what to expect in my area!

This is NOT a weak signal area: EE Band 1 3G is still strong, coming from the same mast (and faster than 4G!), Vodafone is strong and offers 120Mbps peak, O2 is strong and offers 90Mbps peak, and 3UK seems to be strong as well (at least according to their coverage checker).

3UK uses the same mast, and same antennae, as EE, due to MBNL, so how is EE becoming so poor as of late?!

I have submitted a request on the EE network status website and am very tempted to give EE a phone call just to see what they can do. Failing that, I may be leaving and going to Vodafone or O2, as they are stronger and faster. EE want to take a payment from my account in a few days, for this month's allowances, well if EE donb't fix their issues it will be the LAST payment they take from my account.

EE need to do something, and fast. (Or slow, if their network team is as bad as the coverage and speed here.)

edit: Good, my minimum term is over, so it's a case of improve, or I move to Vodafone and get 20GB data and Spotify Premium thrown in for £16 per month.

[Profile closed]

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@mikeliuk wrote:

Hi @Profile closed ,

I was with Three for 24 months up until about 7 months ago. Unfortunately, the nearest cell tower was a little far away and the network somewhat congested at peak times to below 1 Mbps which I judged to be unusable but switching to 3G would reliably get me a survivable 7 Mbps.

In your case, I feel the measured bandwidths don't make any sense until you can get unloaded latency down to 60 ms, or lower, as high latencies such as 600 ms should only be seen on a saturated link. 5700 ms loaded is cuckoo land and reminds me of Hyde Park Winter Wonderland when essentially all networks suffer DDoS with the high number of attendees.

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The same is happening currently in my area! 3G is outperforming 4G because (a) virtually no one will force their handset to 3G only now, (b) 4G800 is higher priority than 3G, (c) 4G 1800 is beyond useless in terms of coverage and (d) 4G800 is now bearing the brunt of being the base layer for coverage of Higham Ferrers, Northamptonshire. Of course, when you have just 5MHz of spectrum for a reasonably sized town, the network won't respond very well, and if you have any sort of event, the network will totally collapse. Vodafone, on the other hand, held up fine!

There was no DDOS or anything like that, it's quite simple actually in principle:

If you take this (note the 1800MHz signal strength): 

https://imgur.com/a/vxjAGIo

And you combine it with this:

https://www.highamferrers-tc.gov.uk/local-events.html#item-1512824

You get this!

https://imgur.com/a/wvJcq9V

Or this:

https://imgur.com/a/6QeTDqO

Note that with the coverage check screenshot, it is clear that 1800MHz just doesn't have the strength to cover the area properly, and as such 800MHz is bearing the brunt of the load in the area. What we really need is 1800MHz or 2600MHz.

(We don't need 2100MHz 4G because that would result in the loss of 3G, the only service that actually works with usable speed, capacity, and strength.)

EE need to do something to this area to bring it back in line with what it should be - and fast. I'm just a phone call away to switching to Vodafone, either directly or via Lebara. Heck I might even use Giffgaff (O2), they provide 90Mbps at home under normal circumstances!

[bristolian]

Additional 2600Mhz B7 deployment is unlikely to be the primary solution here - If B3 has poor field strength, then additional B7 is unlikely to achieve better results.

Re-farm of B1 from 3G-4G service is continuing with an ultimate view to 3G switch-off.

[EssexBoyEE]

How are you measuring different Frequency Bands ?

[Profile closed]

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@bristolian wrote:

Additional 2600Mhz B7 deployment is unlikely to be the primary solution here - If B3 has poor field strength, then additional B7 is unlikely to achieve better results.

Re-farm of B1 from 3G-4G service is continuing with an ultimate view to 3G switch-off.

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The ideal primary solution is to turm my mast back to how it was about 2 months ago, when Band 3 4G was giving a good strong signal! Then add the second Band 3 4G carrier to give 40MHz 4G spectrum on the 1800MHz band. That would have resulted in a nice uplift in capacity, as well as good coverage.

Instead, we have this mess that is substantially weaker 4G Band 3 coverage, almost non-existant 4G Band 7 covergae, a strong 4G Band 20 signal that gets very swamped very quickly (how can you even use data with speeds as low as I quoted before, and loaded pings of over 5 SECONDS), and a 3G signal that is nice and strong, but if switched off as you say, will leave Higham Ferrers with absolutely NOTHING from EE that is worth using.

I've seen Band 3 4G masts in the sticks, such as this one, giving well in excess of 100Mbps, yet EE can't deliver  good coverage on Band 3 in a small town, can't deliver 15Mbps on Band 3 4G, and can't deliver 5Mbps on Band 20 as it is being relied on for general coverage, and therefore being totally overloaded!

How about actually turning on the amplifiers? Or turning the power up? Or doing something to improve coverage of Band 3? Even improving coverage of Band 20 would be nice, because EE's Band 20 is no stronger than Vodafone's Band 20, yet the latter has double the spectrum, and therefore actually works!

[Profile closed]

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@EssexBoyEE wrote:

How are you measuring different Frequency Bands ?

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For standard testing, I just open up the speedtest app with whatever the phone locks itself to.

If I want to test a particular band, I use an app called Samsung Band Selection - it works nicely on my Samsung Galaxy S9+. It also has a couple of other handy options, including "LTE ALL" (essentially locking the phone to all 4G bands), and my default mode, WCDMA/LTE. 3G works absolutely fine for most things (especially now so few people are using it), 4G works fine for most things (or at least should do if the mast configuration isn't borked somehow), but 2G is so bad for both data speed and voice call quality that IMO, it shouldn't even be in use anymore.

However, band locking or not band locking, it still doesn't resolve the problem of exceptionally weak coverage in my area, and therefore low speeds.

[EssexBoyEE]

I thought you might be Band Locking or Band Selecting, problem with doing this is you can potentially restrict your Network Carrier Aggregation and possibly mess up your Download multiple MiMo which can restain your download speeds.

[bristolian]

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@Profile closed wrote:

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@bristolian wrote:

Additional 2600Mhz B7 deployment is unlikely to be the primary solution here - If B3 has poor field strength, then additional B7 is unlikely to achieve better results.

Re-farm of B1 from 3G-4G service is continuing with an ultimate view to 3G switch-off.

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How about actually turning on the amplifiers? Or turning the power up? Or doing something to improve coverage of Band 3? Even improving coverage of Band 20 would be nice, because EE's Band 20 is no stronger than Vodafone's Band 20, yet the latter has double the spectrum, and therefore actually works!

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It may be helpful to separate out the coverage issues from capacity/spectrum ones.

From your description, the coverage of B20-800Mhz is not the problem, the amount of spectrum and therefore available speeds, is.

The capacity of B20-1800Mhz in your area doesn't seem to be a problem, but is hampered by an inability to use it due to poor coverage.

This coverage issue could be caused by a variety of factors, has there been a degradation over time or a step-change, for example?

[Profile closed]

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@bristolian wrote:

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@Profile closed wrote:

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@bristolian wrote:

Additional 2600Mhz B7 deployment is unlikely to be the primary solution here - If B3 has poor field strength, then additional B7 is unlikely to achieve better results.

Re-farm of B1 from 3G-4G service is continuing with an ultimate view to 3G switch-off.

---

How about actually turning on the amplifiers? Or turning the power up? Or doing something to improve coverage of Band 3? Even improving coverage of Band 20 would be nice, because EE's Band 20 is no stronger than Vodafone's Band 20, yet the latter has double the spectrum, and therefore actually works!

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It may be helpful to separate out the coverage issues from capacity/spectrum ones.

From your description, the coverage of B20-800Mhz is not the problem, the amount of spectrum and therefore available speeds, is.

The capacity of B20-1800Mhz in your area doesn't seem to be a problem, but is hampered by an inability to use it due to poor coverage.

This coverage issue could be caused by a variety of factors, has there been a degradation over time or a step-change, for example?

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Hello,

Band 20 (800MHz) 4G is good in signal strength, but abysmal in speeds. It used to give close to 10Mbps on Band 20 when no one was using it. Now, it is 5Mbps on a good day, 2Mbps on an average day, and on a bad day, just look at the Imgur links I posted further up the thread...

Band 3 (1800MHz) 4G used to be perfectly good in signal strength and give about 70Mbps off peak or 40Mbps peak, signal was maxed out. It is now barely 1 bar 4G strength (will get the dBm figures later on when I am at home), sometimes 0 bars, and in some places upstairs (and everywhere downstairs) it will switch to Band 20.

Speeds on Band 3 are now always less than 15Mbps, mostly about 10Mbps, but sometimes even less than this. The upload speed on Band 3 4G is also abysmally slow and is worse than the 3-4Mbps that Band 1 3G provides.

Band 1 (2100MHz) 3G is perfectly fine and is the only thing that works properly in the Higham Ferrers and Rushden area of Northamptonshire. Speeds are around 15Mbps download and 3-4Mbps upload on single carrier 3G (i.e. 5MHz capacity). Bringing us back to 10MHz 3G (there is no Band 1 4G being broadcast) would improve things further, to the point whereby there is actually something that works at a good speed on EE. 

As currently, 4G on any band certainly isn't cutting it, due to the weak strength of Band 3, and the overloading of Band 20 (as the latter is being heavily relied on for raw coverage).

Even OUTSIDE in my local area, the phone stays on about 3 bars of Band 20 (confirmed via the Samsung diagnostic shortcut) as Band 3 is just far too weak in this area. 

This was not a gradual change, it was fine one day and then the next day (about 2 months ago?) the signal strength and speed just plummeted. It seems to coincide with new panels on the mast, as I have observed changes to the panels on the mast.

[mikeliuk]

Hi @Profile closed ,

Many thanks for updating and sharing your thoughts and experiences.

I'm a relatively new customer to EE and my contract is not up for renewal for another 18 months but I'm interested in the items you report on even though the observations will be very location dependent.

I feel that the benchmarking performed needs to be requirements-driven so a 4G LTE router should achieve at least 25 Mbps to allow Disney+ to stream and function responsively (I find it's more demanding on and sensitive to bandwidth availability than either Netflix or Amazon Prime Video).

A mobile handset need only achieve the bandwidth to carry out the most demanding application that would reasonably run on a handset, e.g. 15 Mbps to 20 Mbps for handset streaming. I can well imagine that handsets routinely streaming more data than they are able to display losslessly on small screens is a waste of network bandwidth that impacts on other users by causing both bandwidth and latency to be worse for other users.

I think it's very important to at least report the SINR parameter when discussing signal issues and performance issues, especially where high latency is seen.

[jimwillsher]

I've just come across this thread, and make no apologies for bringing it back from the dead.

I'm in the same boat, and went as far as chatting to EE's tech support guys at 4PM on Xmas eve about it.

6 months ago I was able to get 109Mb download and 40Mb upload. In the days leading up to Christmas I was still able to sometimes get 20Mb down but was struggling to get better than 3Mb upload, which is pathetic.

I've done some sleuthing today with cellmapper.net and my Teltonika RUTx09 router. I can now identify exactly which mast I am connected to, which is 8.3Km away from my house. There are six EE stations nearer to me, one of which I can see, however looking at Cellmapper it's not actually transmitting in my direction. I am using an omnidirectional antenna on the roof.

The breakthrough today has been to configure my router to only connect on Band 3. Previously, I could see that I was connecting on Band 3 and Band 20. So for whatever reason, Band 20 was dragging my connection to its knees. Forcing the connection to only use Band 3 is now giving me 50Mb down and 25Mb up, which for this time of day on a public holiday is fairly representative. I will try it again early tomorrow.

Hopefully this helps others in the same boat as me and the OP.

Jim