I moved across to EE from Vodafone back in March 2023. One of Vodafone's strong points was unlimited roaming, including tethering, in 83 countries across the world with no speed cap or any kind of throttling. It genuinely works as if you are on your home network. I assumed - seeing as EE is the other. major network in the UK, and I was paying for a contract which promised equivalent service (use my UK plan as if I was at home in EU, US, Canada etc.) - the experience using EE would be similar.
I was wrong. The service EE offers whilst roaming is far worse than that offered by Vodafone. Why?
1. It's very clear EE employs speed/traffic management i.e. throttling on users who are roaming. In central Washington DC and Manhattan last week I was testing speeds using the Google service (searching "speed test" on the search engine and then following the built-in prompts) and getting 2-3mbps download despite having a full 5G signal. If I switched to the Ookla app, I got better speeds (up to 300mbps in some cases in the same location), but with 300ms+ latency and it took some time for full speed to be reached i.e. the 'speedometer' ramped up very slowly, rather than flicking to the speed available almost instantly like it does at home.
2. EE have also very poor network agreements. On arrival in the US you can use either T-Mobile or AT&T and IME it will switch to T-Mobile first. Unfortunately however the speeds available via T-Mobile are so slow as to be almost unusable. So you must manually switch to AT&T. It's a similar case in Germany, where inexplicably EE has done a roaming deal with Vodafone DE who only offer EDGE, so you need to manually change network again in order to be able to do anything. I do wonder whether those at EE responsible for doing these deals actually travel to the countries they're responsible for?
All this in comparison to Vodafone which in my experience as 10+ years as a customer travelling all over the world, 'just works.'
I will be moving back as soon as my EE contract is up in March.
