cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Sudden Drop in 5G signal and performance

Gagandeep
Active

Cross post from broadband forum as affecting all my devices.

Hi all,

Looking for some advice. I have a ZTE home router and a few 5G enabled mobiles. Recently, the performance on all of them has fallen. Typically I used to get over 300/25 via my home router and similar, if not faster on my mobile, but now this performance has dramatically fallen, with typical speeds of 60/5, and now 40/2. The placement test on the ZTE has gone from "excellent" to "poor" without any change in its position. My 5G phones all never report the same speeds they used to

Looking at Cellmapper, I am connecting to a mast that is around 300m away (straight line distance) I am not sure if this is the mast I used to connect to, but I would be surprised if it was not. I think there is a mast further away that the devices sometimes flip to that then causes performance to dramatically increase. There are apparently working going on in that location.

My suspicion is that the mast is now oversubscribed and this is why my performance has dropped so significantly. I have also noted on cellmapper that the coverage fields projected from the mast now no longer cover my road. I think they used to before. Finally, my router now only seems to connect to a 4G network:

4G Frequency: 99
4G Connected Band10.0MHz@2100(B1) + 20.0MHz@ + 15.0MHz@1800(B3)
4G Signal Strength-99 dBm
4G ECIO/SINR2.6 dB
4G PCI4
4G Cell ID784967

All fields relating to 5G are blank.

Seeing as I am stuck in a contract that is now not delivering, is there anything that I can do to try and restore performance before I look into potentially having it out with Three. I have already submitted a complaints form. Any other ideas are welcomed

11 REPLIES 11
Gagandeep
Active

I've checked the network status and in my area there is no problem identified. In adjacent areas though, there are works ongoing. How long these works have been going on for is unknown.

Is there a way to see how congested a mast is?

sc1999
Local celebrity

By adjacent areas do you mean other postcodes? Unless you have multiple masts in your area I would expect surrounding postcodes to be affected. Only 3 can tell how congested, or oversubscribed, you local mast is but is a way to try and work out if it is the case. I was with EE and I got 100 meg at 6am and it was down to 1 by 10 am. An engineer, really they give that title to anyone these days, blamed my phone. When I emailed him near identical numbers from another phone he did not respond. So if you wake up during the night run a speed test and repeat it during the day. If ping and speeds vary a lot then it may indicate that your nearest tower is heavily used.