topic Re: Massive speed drop after 5pm in Broadband

Massive speed drop after 5pm

bigjim — Mon, 04 Dec 2023 12:09:41 GMT

I've been a three 5g home broadband customer for ~2 years now. I've had my problems but it's always been fairly decent... up until about a month ago.

We had a day where we could only get the slowest ~3-4mbps) download speed but it turned out there was work happening at the mast (info gotten from support phoneline and the network status checker). 5g came back up in the evening.

Since then every single day, once it hits 5pm my download speed drops from ~130 Mbps to ~8Mbps and my ping jumps from ~40 to ~240... clearly they have changed somethig.

I've tried moving the router to ever square inch of my house, restarting it, factory reset etc but no luck. Live chat isn't helpful - they just tell me to move it or restart it - they don't seem to understand and just seem to read from a script.

Has anyone else encountered this? Feels very much like some sort of rate limiting / throttling. Sadly I've no fibre options so it's this or Starlink which is considerably more expensive.

Re: Massive speed drop after 5pm

sc1999 — Mon, 04 Dec 2023 12:21:57 GMT

Have you checked the network status checker, it's possible that they are starting work at that time if there are a lot of business users. Contention ratio is another potential issue as people are arriving home and turning things on. One of your local towers, or an antenna on a tower is at fault so more traffic through the other cells. I know of a case where a Vodafone tower was down and they did not know as all traffic was going through another tower a few hundred metres away.

Failing all of this then you need to contact three.

Re: Massive speed drop after 5pm

bigjim — Mon, 04 Dec 2023 12:49:12 GMT

Network checker says no issues. I've tried contacting Three with little success. Live chat support is non-existent and phone support just ask if I want to cancel. Might give it one more try today.

Re: Massive speed drop after 5pm

Officina-red — Tue, 05 Dec 2023 00:43:36 GMT

Do you have a 5g phone, does the speed drop on it as well ?

Re: Massive speed drop after 5pm

bigjim — Wed, 06 Dec 2023 09:27:39 GMT

No, my phone is with a different provider and does not get a 5g signal at home.