Xbox Live Issues Plague Three UK’s 4G Mobile Home Broadband UPDATE

Some customers of Three UK’s home 4G broadband service, such as those with their Huawei B535 or other mobile WiFi routers and “unlimited data“, have since the end of February 2020 been suffering from problems when connecting to and downloading content from Microsoft’s XBox Live service.

Several ISPreview.co.uk readers first raised this issue with us via our forum on 29th February 2020 (here) and since then we’ve received a steady stream of similar gripes. The main problem appears to be that those connecting to the XBox Live (multiplayer video games) service are struggling when it comes to successfully downloading content (especially large downloads – smaller downloads seem to be more intermittent).

Customers who initially reported the issue to Three UK appear to have been given a variety of curious responses. Some were told that the operator had blocked downloads via XBox Live, while other agents claimed it was because Huawei’s routers couldn’t cope with the speed of 4G (it can) or that the issue was Microsoft’s fault (it isn’t). A few also flatly denied that any such problems existed.

Complaint Sample 1 (ORbit):

“I’m have the same issue as you, I thought I was going crazy – I spent some time chatting with Xbox customer support and concluded it was Three performing some traffic shaping shenanigans. I’m actually using my personal Huawei 525 but xbox live is being blocked (so I doubt they have just excluded 535 routers, that seems like BS). PSN and Steam are fine, and the Xbox itself reports all services are available.”

Complaint Sample 2 (rubbra):

“Spent ages chatting to CS rep on the webchat thing. First denied all things. then said it was a problem specific to Xbox Live and their problem, then acknowledged that it was weird that it works on 3G and not 4G, then did some tinkering ‘cos he thought there was an account configuration issue at their end with my 4G profile (i.e. not my APN settings). Upshot is 2 hours of time wasted either on hold or texting CS people, and no further forward.”

At this point ISPreview.co.uk decided to get involved, although initially the operator’s media team said they would be “unable to investigate the incidents” unless we shared with them some private mobile numbers from those affected by the problem. Frankly this should not be necessary to check for such a network a problem, but nevertheless we got the necessary consent and supplied the information.

Sadly Three UK were unable to furnish us with a response by our deadline of 5pm last Friday and similarly there has been no response so far this morning. Despite the lack of response from their PR agents, Three UK’s social media teams do now appear to be at least acknowledging that a national connectivity issue exists with XBox Live.

One of the operator’s support agents said on 7th March 2020 (Twitter): “We’ve recently become aware of an issue which is affecting some customers trying to download content on Xbox. Our engineers have been working to resolve that asap. Sorry for any inconvenience caused.” In another response a support agent added that they don’t yet have a time-scale for when this issue will be resolved.

In the meantime some customers have managed to work around the problem by manually switching their router back to a slow 3G connection, although this too eventually runs into problems. Others have also been able to use VPN tunnels, although none of these semi-solutions are ideal. Meanwhile we continue to await a solid update from Three UK.

Mobile operators that hope to serve the home broadband market via 4G and 5G connections really need to be much quicker when it comes to resolving such faults.

UPDATE 12:45pm

We’ve now got the official line from Three UK. A spokesperson told ISPreview.co.uk, “Due to a technical issue, large downloads of X-Box Live files are not working for some customers when connecting via the Three network. Streaming and playing games are unaffected. Our engineers are working hard to fix the issue and we apologise for any inconvenience caused.”