Poor coverage/data speeds (4G/5G) - East London

[Fainbrog]

Hi all,

I've got a number of EE mobile devices and we are getting awful coverage in our area; slow download speeds and call quality is pretty poor, especially at home.

I've tried reporting issues in the area and they repeatedly come back with there's no issues. We are in London, so, I understand things might be congested, but, on the other hand, I'm in London, so would expect there to be better coverage than this (oh, how entitled I sound).

Doing a speediest on my iPhone 15 I'm getting 4Mbps down and about the same up, if I'm lucky on 4G, 15 down and 2 up on 5G.

From doing some digging, I can see that we seem to be on the edge of the signal for a couple of cell towers, which might explain things, but, I'm curious if EE does regular coverage reviews to make sure that customers get the best service and how one might encourage them to boost the signal?

I am using Wifi Calling indoors, to the extent that I have an automation on my phone to enable airplane mode when I get home as call quality is poor.

RSRP is showing as -112, RSRQ -11, which I understand to be pretty poor.

[bristolian]

A few bits in here. I'm curious what research you've done, to believe you're on the edge of a couple of sites/sectors.

The main difference between network design in London, or any other dense urban area, is that you need greater density of sites. Both to provide overlap in the event of outages, but more importantly reduce the average sector size and thus increase overall capacity. You're right on one point though - planning issues aside, rural users should be as entitled to expect good service as urban users. Urban areas tend to have a handful of strategic umbrella sites, with a low-level grid of small sites - rural areas tend to only have the macro grid without micro reinforcement.

You'd also need the SNR value to make a complete judgement, but I'd say those values are in the low-mid range of radio quality. The myEE app does have an option to log poor coverage for submission, but radio planners do tend to have a fair idea of where coverage improvements are needed, backed up by in-house and independent drive & walk tests.

The "report a problem" link on the webtool is generally for unexpected losses of coverage, rather than - I suspect in your case - coverage isn't what it should be and I'd like improvements?

[Fainbrog]

Thanks for the reply. So, I recall a while ago looking at a few websites (which, of course, I can't remember) which showed the signal patterns - I'm uneducated on such matters so could have been reading ancient Egyptian, but it seemed to point to being on the edge of coverage for 2/3 towers, none of which are exactly close by. I can also see from the EE coverage map (subject to question of accuracy) that we are literally on the line between Good indoor coverage and Good Outdoor coverage for 5G, but 4G is supposedly Good.

SNR is showing as 2.0.

Yes, I'd assumed as such with the report an issue function, but have tried again. Could you point me in the direction of the logging poor coverage, please? I can't spy it easily.

[Fainbrog]

Just done another test on my phone;

Band 3
Bandwidth 20MHz
RSRP -120
RSRQ -17
SINR0 -2.1
SINR1 -4.1

[bristolian]

There's a few websites out there which claim to provide site mapping, one or two notable ones a lot better than most. One of the better ones is only supported on Android, due to restrictions in iOS. I like your ancient Egyptian analogy! One of the more reliable independent crowd-sourced websites is certainly not user-friendly unless you have some basic radio knowledge.

The option to log poor coverage is on the myEE app, under Settings > Settings > App Settings > Share device location

Your figures there, suggest edge-of-cell conditions but on an 1800Mhz site. 800Mhz service is not universal, but would likely provide some improvement if it were available... definitely a case for VoWiFi indoors!

The main issue with the website coverage map in urban areas especially, is often the granularity. There's always got to be a limit where you say that extra detail is unnecessary.