Alright, let's begin with some context: When I signed my 3 contract back in 2023, connection speeds where I lived were decent for a countryside village that relies on one local transmitter for most of its networking needs. Prices were cheap (and still are by today's standards) and everything was well. For the past year and a quarter, I've been able to take calls, send texts, even browse the internet fine with download speeds of 15mbps and upload speeds of 3mbps - Not great, not terrible and most of the time these speeds were achieved on 3G.
Cut to the recent 3 outage involving calls taking place, obviously that was an inconvenience but it wasn't catastrophic personally. Yet, ever since they resolved those issues, my download speeds have dropped to 2mbps and my upload speeds to 1mbps. Whenever looking up my postcode to check 3s network status, I just get a notice saying that this area can be busy and therefore fluctuations can happen.
Now, I've got fibre internet and so this isn't an inconvenience... Until the speeds are so terrible and my signal is so poor (about -110 to -120dbm) that it can't hand off my calls to my WiFi like I used to rely on, therefore rendering 3s service completely unusable at home.
When I'm travelling, it's fine and it's actually the reason I've yet to terminate my contract because the 5G in nearby towns is incredible, it's just home usage that's become a pain in my behind because I can't even receive verification codes for services that I use half the time, which has resulted in me taking out another contract with EE and using that phone number to receive all of my important calls and texts.
I've also made the curious observation of not being able to use 3G anymore in my area, despite it still being active in my part of the country, which is partially responsible for my speed reduction as I used to be reliant on H+ for everything, at least until they seemingly shut it off or cut off the data part and it no longer works for internet access whenever I force my phone to use 3G.
I'm not here to beg 3 for a contract price reduction or an early termination, I'm just here to see if anyone else has experienced similar issues as of late and to see if I can get any form of closure in regards to why this is happening.
My only solid guess is the fact I might be in one of those areas where 3s 4G coverage sucks but I don't see how that could impact my 2G coverage and the ability to receive text messages or calls. Either way, it's quite strange and hopefully an answer comes my way in due time.
