Quality vs price

[Garnelpatricia]

I renewed my contract with EE. I also have a Lebara card for when I travel as roaming costs are free in the EU and India, a place that I visit often and intend to visit again. I’m in Bristol right now and I never in my life regretted the contract renewal like now. The Lebara network (uses Vodafone) 4G is substantially better than the EE 5G. I want to cry when I think of not only how poor the connections are but the price difference. 
Never again!

[bristolian]

Mobile contracts don't "renew" as such, but you might mean that you have re-contracted onto a new minimum-term.

I'm "only" a 4G user, but if you were to compare VF with EE using the same technologies, I would generally expect EE to outperform VF albeit with local variations.

Out of interest, where in Bristol are you? And are you using 5GSA or 5GNSA?

[Garnelpatricia]

Yes re-contracted. I’m in Kingswood at the moment but, it’s not the first time I swap connections from my EE to my Lebara. I actually live in Dorset which is even worse than here. As for SA or NSA I have no idea. 

[bristolian]

A 5G device/SIM combination should always fall back to 4G anywhere that 5G coverage is not usable. Are you finding that's not happening?

[Garnelpatricia]

It shows three 5 G bars on my iPhone. Never dropped to 4G

[bristolian]

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@Garnelpatricia wrote:

It shows three 5 G bars on my iPhone.

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Ok, so you're seeing 5G coverage. In that case ...... what're the service issues you're having? Can you be specific?

All you've said so far is "poor connection" which could mean different things to different people.

[Garnelpatricia]

It’s too slow

[Peter_W · Accepted solution]

Welcome to the Community, @Garnelpatricia 

There are a number of different factors here that can influence the quality of your data connection. 

We'd expect to see you get good speeds over 5G, but this can depend on the amount of traffic on the network, orientation to the masts, whether you're indoor or outdoor, and potential network faults as well.

Have you checked this area on our network status checker to see if there are any known issues?

It's worth having a check to see if switching off 5G makes any difference too, but we'd expect this to be better than 4G.

If none of these make an improvement, I'd recommend downloading the Ookla Speed Test app and make note of the time, date, location, and whether it's on 4G or 5G.

These can then be logged with our customer care team for further investigation.

Peter