I've had a super frustrating past few days with our broadband, especially whilst being ill currently, resulting in the service being unusable for me for anything other than very light youtubing which is low bitrate and web browsing. Unable to download large game updates (my main game currently has a 200gb update to do before I can play!), cloud stream gaming, nor any type of better quality bitrate full HD and 4k steaming services, kids are giving me hell as they cant video chat etc, nor my work vpn having a strong enough connection. Long story short, my speed has dropped from around 600mbps+ to 20mbps (BUT......with an interesting caveat on multi files which may be misleading them to think there are no issues with the service). Now it supposedly has now been logged with the networks team, but for reasons I'll get into later, I worry they will look at it, and think we get 250+mbps.
The error is not just for my hardware, my neighbors have the exact same issue about 20meters away, as does a family member about 1km away, so multiple routers and other hardware. I've had this router for 2+ years now without issues for the most part apart from a couple of cell tower faults that at least were acknowledged to be faulty a few month back.
I am about 250-300meters from the connected tower, and the router shows as being 5g connected still. I've had several runarounds (including where they terminate the chat randomly from not replying within about 20 seconds (maybe the person had finished his shift?) and being told there is no reported faults). My house address is 1 postcode but it faces a different postcode at the intersection, so ie, I could leave front door, walk 3 steps and I'm in the next postcode
On/around the 1st of October (maybe the day prior as I was ill) the Network status page said "Our systems haven't reported any network problems", while the adjacend postcode was "We're working on the network in this area at the moment.....etc". By the end of the day, they both said "Our systems haven't reported any network problems", yet the issue was still there. Obviously time dragged on then started trying to check for updates and look at issues
Historically when the 5g tower goes down, it would revert to the distant tower on a 4g connection (which is too weak to even load webpages 95% of the time but.....thats a different tale), however the router still reports as being on a 5g connection, with signal strength of -81 to -85dBm
Things done (and also neighbours and relatives have done "some" of the less technical steps that also have the issue too - they connect to the same tower:
- Rebooted router (many times)
- Alternative APN of three.co.uk, with/without ipv6
- Only connecting a single device to the router (obv via ethernet) - both pc/linux and also other devices (by default I use it connected to my personal router so its own wifi etc is disabled)
- Several browsers (as requested by chat) Opera, Chrome, Brave, Firefox, Edge, Safari, etc
- Full factory reset of the Three router and then direct tests
- whatever else obvious that I've forgotten to hand
Obviously some of these steps pointless as I can go to my neighbours house and replicate the exact same issues, its not specific to me, but did all the obvious steps
Speed tests are always generally around 15-20mbps, which tallies up with downloading any file getting around 1.9megabytes/sec.
Multiple different speed test sites, googles own, speedtest.net, speedsmart etc also report the same ballpark speeds (obv with the expected variances)
eg
and downloading actual files from test sites eg
So the reality is, for just about everything, I'm getting a usable speed of 15-20mbps
Now - where it gets a little more interesting, and this makes me concerned that the engineers could look at the total speed being sent out and be "thats not too bad?". When you go to a site like speedtest.net, it defaults to a multi file/stream test. This reports higher, for example
So....of course that itself is still also way lower than I would normally receive, but that potential speed is not usable speed to me when trying to stream a movie, or download a file or update, only 20mbps is!! And I hope this isn't going to result in the engineers closing the ticket as no issue when there clearly is, its easily replicated.
The saving grace, I can get by with low bitrate youtube.....but I cant watch any movies etc, which is especially frustrating while off work sick too to pass the time unless I'm willing to watch at SD resolution levels
Has something been deliberately changed to cap single connections?
Frustratingly, the postcodes even a few days on are still saying no issues found on the network status checker, when there is clearly a fault, and I know I'm not the only one to log it (sadly been unable to log it in the 3rd location yet for the relatives account as the account owner is currently out of town)
