5G Broadband Drastic Speed Drop & Throttling to 120mbps after Settings Changed by customer service!

[Mattyk66]

I have replied to other peoples posts multiple times about this but thought I would start another post as well to keep up the pressure on Three as they are refusing to admit they are throttling connections, yet multiple users have posted on the community site about this and stating they can now only hit 120mbps download when they used to hit much higher, these are different people in different parts of the country, being impacted exactly the same.  

I live right next to the 5G mast in my area, literally 30meters away. When I first went with three 5G broadband in October 2022 and up until November 2023, I was hitting anything from 600 to 900mbps download, all the time, even peak hours, I still have all the results recorded on my Ookla speed test app/account on my mobile phone.

In November, Disney plus stopped loading on my TV stating I was out of region, nothing I did/changed could get it to load so contacted three to see what was going on, they advised they could fix the issue by making some changes to my account settings and to restart my router and try and open Disney Plus again on my TV. Sure enough Disney loaded after the they messed with the settings, but from that exact point on (14/11/23) my download speed is stuck at 120mbps, won't go any higher. It jumps sometimes to around 400mbps when the speed test initially starts and then immediately and dramatically drops down to 120mbps with a second or two and stays there, clearly this is throttling and limiting the download speed. 

I contacted them on multiple occasions over the next few months and they were giving me all sorts of excuses and said they had changed settings and to try again, and another said they were working in the area but it would be back to normal in a month. I ran a speed test every week and nothing has changed, stuck on 120. I have had a month refunded and a month half price but all this time they are still claiming they do not limit the download speeds which is obviously absolute rubbish.

As someone else has mentioned on the community site, when I do a speed test on my phone when I am not connected to the Home broadband, and I'm also with three for my mobile contract, I still hit the usual 500mbps+ and nothing has changed with the speeds on my phone, just my broadband from November onwards. 

At the time I googled and couldn't find any posts on this so thought it was just an issue in my area, but after a speed test earlier, stuck on my 120, I googled and found this. Now I know this is happening to others I am going to contact them again and keep up the fight! Since I originally posted this only a month or so ago I can see there are new posts popping up weekly from people experiencing the exact same issue, so it seems to me Three and rolling out this download throttling across the country now. 

For those that want to leave three, due to the speed decreases, who are stuck in contract, they agreed with me that I could leave with no charges due to the change in service. When you first sign up, you get 14 days no quibble trial to see how it works and what speeds you get and you can send back if you not happy. So, if the speeds you are getting now, do not match the ones when you first got it, you can argue this and say you want to leave without a charge!

A further update to this - I made three send me out a brand new replacement router only 2 weeks ago at the start of Feb 24, so I could rule out that being an issue. I have a brand new replacement router (Zyxel NR5103), brand new sim card, and nothing changed. exactly the same and stuck at 120mbps. I have attached screenshots of speeds tests below and you can clearly see the moment they made the changes at their end on the 14/11/23, and from this point on my speed has been throttled to 120mbps, when the speed only 3 days before that was 544mbps.  I have also added screenshots of speed tests from Feb 2023, compared to speed tests from Feb 2024 and the differences are striking. My speed used to vary, as non throttled speeds should, between 400mbps up to 900mbps depending on the time of day/load on the network, as you would expect. Now, my download speeds have no variation at all, 7pm on Saturday evening at peak times, 120mpbs, 3am on a Sunday at the quietest time possible, still 120mbps. If speeds were not being throttled there would be a variation to the speeds I could hit. When I do the same speed tests on the Three mobile network when not connected to the home broadband, I get much quicker speeds, as previously mentioned, and I get the expected variation depending on the time of day. As I am about to post this, at 1:15am on a Sunday, I have ran a speed test on the 5G Mobile network and just hit 656mbps download, and then the speed test when connected to my home broadband, 119mbps, five and a half times slower!! Admittedly the upload speed was the opposite way around hitting 30.3mbps on mobile and 63.3mbps on the home broadband, but this again just shows that the speeds are being controlled and throttled. And again, I have attached the screenshot of this test below. 

I would like someone from Three technical support team to respond and finally admit that they are throttling speeds on the home broadband now, may be they are doing this as the network is getting busier as more people have joined over the last 12 months, but they need to admit this and stop the lies. 

Speed Test Results showing change in speeds on 14/11/23 immediately after Three changed the settings their end - 

Three Home Broadband Speed Test Results Feb 23

Three Home Broadband Speed Test Results Jan/Feb 24

Speed Test Comparison Three Mobile 5G to Three Home Broadband 5G

[sc1999]

Have you got 10 years to wait for a payout of 50p? Your problem sounds like too many connections chasing not enough bandwidth. If you read posts on the community London does not seem to get any preferential treatment when it comes to 3's investment policy. I would complain to Michael Gove as he is responsible for levelling up.

[XLBully]

It could be too many connections. And that's Three's explanation. 

But - it doesn't really explain / make sense - because the drop off was really sudden. Like within a month or so. I can't really understand what has changed so quickly. 

[_duncan_]

I'm having the same issues reported here, as well as a few others that don't seem to be mentioned anywhere but feel very related, and (almost all) started at the end of January.

1. Speeds are being capped at 120Mbps down and 60Mbps up. Similar to other commenters, I'm about 50m from the local mast and used to get substantially better speeds. The router hasn't changed, moved, had settings changed, or anything other than where noted.

Here's the download speeds shown from a daily speedtest from my monitoring over the past 6 months:

And upload speeds:

You can see a substantial drop-off at the end of Jan.

2. I got a new router from Three around the end of November (switched from a Huawei one to a Zyxel one), and connection speeds did drop a bit then from consistently around 900Mbps to nearer 6-700Mbps. On the graph above, that's what the vertical blue line indicates. It's running the latest firmware but I wonder if there is maybe some issue there that should be investigated.

3. Pings are failing. I used to be able to ping things like google.com and bbc.co.uk, but now pings just time out.

4. There's an IPv6 address now. My internal network is still all IPv4 so I'm not fully using it, but I've tried switching the router to IPv4 only, IPv6 only, etc, and not seen speed improvements.

5. Inbound connections are failing. I'm guessing CGNAT is in place now as mentioned by a few other posters on the forum, which makes sense with IPv6 there but is causing some minor problems for me.

6. VPN connections seem to have even more restricted upload speeds. I'm not 100% sure what I'm seeing, but it seems my work's VPN is being capped at 30Mbps uploads, and connections to Windscribe appear to be capped at about 10Kbps(!) upload with IKEv2 protocols which makes it almost unusable. If I try it using wireguard or Windscribe's "Stealth" profile the speeds increase to nearer 60Mbps.

I've tried contacting customer support about it but not got anywhere other than a suggestion to get a new sim card, which I've not had a chance to try yet. I did also try the APN thing but it refused to route traffic unless it was set to 3internet with IPv6 enabled.

[Mattyk66]

Hi Duncan - Please send @JonathanB a private message providing all the info that you have posted here and I'm sure he can investigate further and try and help. He replied back to me thinking that it could be some old legacy settings, from pre-5G that have been inadvertently added to the accounts limiting them to 120mbps. He is keen to investigate and get the bottom of it to ensure that it doesn't happen to others and that everyone on the '3internet' APN have unlimited speeds. 

As my old account with the restrictions has now been closed, they cannot investigate further as to what is causing it but they could look further into your account and hopefully resolve the issue!

[XLBully]

I have messaged JonathanB - will see how it goes

[fashric]

My experience with changing the APN is exactly the same...Tests done 2 minutes apart, just using different APN! Absolutely disgusting from Three, I too will be getting in contact with Ofcom and the ASA (with whom I have had very good experiences with in the past). Three cannot be allowed to simply get away with this dishonesty and false advertising. This all done using the same equipment, so the ONLY explanation is that they are indeed using speed throttling on certain customers/sims/numbers despite specifically stating no speed limits. Scumbags.

[Mattyk66]

Throttling Tests & Resolution with APN Change

Hi All – I spoke again to technical team on 21/02/24, who were useless like usual, who passed me through to the complaints team again as they said they could not work out why my connection was maxing out at 120mbps and why it had changed and were still adamant they don’t limit or throttle connections! I’m being more convinced now that the technicians truly believe the connections aren’t being throttled, but there is something going on higher up above them doing this, that they have no control over!

Anyway, after I had finished with the complaints team, I did a little more digging around and went into to the router settings to check the APN Access Point Name) which there are many posts about and has been mentioned on here. The APN was set to automatic and was ‘3internet’. On reading up it seems ‘3internet’ is the standard one used for broadband.  I changed to manual rather than automatic APN and used ‘three.co.uk’ instead, and then did a speed test and 584mbps!! After all this, for me all that was needed changing was the APN, and I should have checked this earlier as other posts suggested.

I tried the following APN’s and all of them worked without a download limit apart from the ‘3internet’ one which is clearly being throttled-

3internet – 120mbps
three.co.uk – 543mbps
3broadband.ie – 567mbps
3ireland.ie – 532mbps
open.internet – 578mbps

So frustrating that no one from the Technical know this or could have suggested changing the APN and even more frustrating that everyone from Three are still adamant there are no speed limits and they don’t throttle – it’s obvious they do, and even more so from the further testing I did below!

Before I realised that it was just the APN that needed changing, I said to the complaints team the only thing left is to cancel my current contract and start a new contact with a brand-new sim card to see if that fixes the issue, as it has done for others, to which they agreed. This is the only plus point I have out of this whole charade as I was going to be paying full price for the next 8 months and I now have a new contract, 6 months half price, and I also ordered via TopCashBack and have already had the £102 cashback confirmed, will be payable in a few months!

 So, I ordered a new contract, and a brand-new router and sim card were delivered the day after, so I started testing! My current or old router as such is the Zyxel NR5103e, and the new router they sent me was the updated version of this Zyxel NR5103eV2. I will call them V1 and V2 moving forward.

So first off, I tried a speed test with the new router (V2) and new sim card, and on checking the APN was automatically set as ‘3internet’. Speed test was pretty normal with a very high upload speed 472dowload/110upload. I then put my old sim card into the V2 and ran the same test and the results were just as with the V1 – 119download/61.9upload!! I replicated these tests using my old router (V1) and had similar results with the speeds being unlimited on my new card, and limited to 120 download on the old card when accessing via the ‘3internet’ APN.. If this isn’t clear evidence that Three are throttling connections on certain accounts I don’t know what is?? Three has clearly throttled my old account when using the APN ‘3internet’ but my new card hasn’t been throttled, YET, so I can get varied and what appears to be unlimited speeds. When I use any of the other APN’s on either sim card the results are all similar with no throttling.

As an additional test, I put the broadband sims in my mobile, and changed the APN from three.co.uk, which is the standard for mobile devices to ‘3internet’ and the results were identical to above. Old sim card throttled to 120mbps, new sim card no limit!

I am collated all of the information and speed tests I have and will reporting this to Ofcom next week as Three are still advertising their 5G with no speeds limits, which clearly, for many people, is not true!

NR5103e VS NR5103eV2 Testing

Whilst I had the opportunity, I went deeper into testing the two routers to see which one I wanted to keep for my new contract. The new router is much smaller which is a plus point, it is also worryingly much lighter, does that speak for the quality of the components?

I placed each router in the exact same space on my windowsill where I get the best signal. It didn’t take long to notice that the NR5103e (V1) had a better and much more stable signal than the newer NR5103eV2 (V2). I will refer to them as V1 & V2 moving from now on.

The V1 would be at a constant 87-89 RSRP, 15 SINR, 2/3 RSRQ and it would always be on a continual 5G connection, rarely dropping to 4G.

In comparison the newer V2 was so temperamental with the signal. It would generally stick at around 93RSRP but occasionally dip to 88 at random, then up to 96 and moving around all over. SINR 13, RSRQ was worse at 11. But what was really noticeable was the constant jumping between 5G, 4G+ and 4G. There was rarely a moment when I was looking at the signal where it was on 5G constantly and would change every 30 seconds or so and would dance about between them all, which can’t be great for a reliable connection surely?

The speed tests were actually ok for both. The download speed was noticeably quicker on the V1 which regularly would hit 200mbps higher than the V2, this could simply be down to the fact the signal was more reliable. But to put in perspective, even the lowest download on the V2 was still 300mpbs. The highest on V2 was 575, highest on V1 was 860mbps! One thing where the V2 did sometimes shine though was the upload speed. At times the upload speed would be 90-110mbps on the V2 where as the V1 could only manage 75-85mbps. The V1 was a constant upload speed though with no dips, whereas the V2 dropped as low as 60 sometimes. All I can think of here is the V2 is better at handling uploads compared to the V1, so when it has a strong, constant signal, it will achieve a higher upload speed.  Either way 60 being the lowest recorded upload speed, it still incredibly quick and more than enough!

Overall, either router would probably work fine for most people, although this depends on your signal and how close you are to the mast. As I have mentioned in previous posts, I am very lucky, that although I don’t have clear line of sight to the mast and there are a couple of houses in the way, it’s almost irrelevant as I am approx. 50m away from it. For me, the extra 20mbps that I sometimes get on upload with the V2, is negligible in comparison to the constant reliable signal that the V1 gets, and the extra download speeds it regularly achieves over the V2 are more useful. There have been a number of posts backing up my findings on the V2 that the signal is all over the place and not reliable and drops out, and for that reason, I am sticking with the trusty V1 for my new 24-month contract.

I hope you find my post useful!

[fashric]

I will try the APN setting

[SimonG]

If you look at my post, I said the same, they refuse to admit they are throttling the signal and then say they are doing work in the area. This has been going on for more than 2 months now. If you change access point to three.co.uk you will have better rates but still u will face random disconnection. I will submit tonight the second official complain. I have similar speed connection checks to yours. They are a joke.

[Soooo]

The stability of the new routers is also shockingly bad. I am literally watching my router go from a 5 bar signal to having no signal every few mins. I have been having real issues with this since we got out new ZTE MF286D router at the end of Dec 23. I also had to manually change my APN settings and for most people who just want a plug and play internet connection that should t be a thing.