Three Reviews

I have started using 3 back in November 2022 to present. Since then I have pointed out some cons of this network.

The main con for me is 3G only areas. once I see my phone on 3G, a living nightmare starts! B1 (low coverage), limited capacity, slow speed and many others. Seeing this in rural areas are like "meh" until I realise this is fairly common in rural areas and urban areas. Knowing that 3 has practcally abandoned these sites relying on sugar daddy Vodafone to pay them off to upgrade. Also 3's 3G switch off certainly didn't help as customers were panicking, non volte phones no longer work and 3 had upped their 3G fallback threshold to basically naught so your 4G needs to fully run out before using their 3G.

Second one is congested areas. My hair falls out my head everytime I wonder why has 3 not invested enough where most of their customers use their network until I realise that in the 3 universe, FUP is poof, gone! So hippies will hog TB's of data causing raging oversubscription. A FUP needs to be done.

Final one is band thresholds. 3 has upped their B3 to B20 threshold so high that you can't really use their network half the time. If you're in an area where B3 is -124dBM which is borderline useless at this point and there's -110dBM of B20. It will not likely instantly kick in unless you make a call. This should be reveresed back to the old threshold settings.

I'd used 3's LTE/4G broadband service for 3 years - and it was OK. Last August we sought advice on options from their local store. Fellah suggested that perceived decline was likely due to age of Huawei router and recommended a follow-on contract which would provide a new, better router. So we signed up for this.

He undertook to cancel the old contract and also the monthly DD. The new contract c/w new DD would start same day. I cancelled the DD instruction with my bank, as advised.

Some weeks later, I started receiving email demands from 3 for 'unpaid monthly fees'. Eventually, I managed to hunt down a Complaint Adviser who was quite intransigent. I 'hadn't terminated the contract in the approved way'....

She insisted on my paying a sum of £20.06 (?) in final settlement, which I did there and then to complete the matter. The new contract and DD payments had started and continued smoothly.

I then discovered 3 had posted a 'default notice' with several credit reference agencies - that I had 'missed a payment'. A formal letter of complaint posted to their head office was ignored. Eight weeks later, I have complained to The Financial Services Ombudsman for redress.

I don't need or want credit, but this calumny is affecting my relationship with banks, solicitors and estate agents.

After several attempts to get the ZYXEL NR5103e to get a decent speed i am now getting 51 5download and 105 upload ping 24 I have a pair of KaserLPDA 4g5g mimo on a small mast at the back if my garage drilled a hole for cable to come in Mast is 1.5 miles line of sight with only the Menai Straights between us
As advised on this forum i have the antennas (cost £60 ) off ebay on ports 1 and three and stubs on the other two ports. Extremely pleased now to cancel Plusnet
Unlimited 18 month sim was £140 on Amazon will save about £250 first 12 moths happy bunny

Hi all,i would like to tell you about my experience with three broadband.it is bad,bad is not the word to describe it.it is diabolical.i've had it since april and have had nothing but trouble with it,ill give you all a warning just what you can expect,i did an speed test this morning,i hope you are all sitting comfortably.right download speed,1-48mps upload speed 5-24mps.with VPN on.download speed 4-10 mps,upload speed 3-98mps without VPN on,how's that for speed,some people on these sites say there are getting over 100s off mbps i just don't see it.on my three broadband you cannot run anything properly at the speeds i've shown you. nothing works properly at all,smart TV,PC,security cameras,and as for the customers services just don`t bother they are so bad it`s hard to describe.so i will tell you all keep clear of this company as you will regret it

Only been a broadband customer with three for one week. Previously on copper through Vodafone max at 45mbps.
Not far from a recently upgraded mast (about 200m) getting about 350mbps on 5G phones.
After installation speeds next to router are running at approx 250mbps. So far the signal seems stable and the difference in up/down speed is very welcome. The ZTE MC801A router is a sturdy piece of kit.
However I have encountered one major flaw which support were unable to help with or believe that the problem should even exist.
Trying to use any streaming services (prime, iPlayer, YouTube ) is not possible on devices such as nvidia shield, firestick or smart tv, some will kick into action with a vpn turned on (not prime with my vpn). In addition we couldn’t access gaming servers or web based email ( we are both nhs staff).
from the main forum I found some information what suggested changing apn setting to ipv4 instead of ipv4/6 as it default on the router. Then all of the above issues resolved. Without the fix I would have cancelled. Three support refused to believe this was the issue.

Moved our Broadband to 3 a couple of years ago

Was getting a solid 60mbps down 30up for £16 a month. On a 4g connection

No download limits

Area was recently upgraded to 5g and now get a solid 450mbps down 20mbps up

Still at £16 a month unlimited

So much cheaper and more reliable than Virgin Fibre

There is known, recurring, frustrating, fault with the H3G core they refuse to fix. I have a 3 unlimited SIM in a Draytek 2860Ln. I’m only about 500m line of sight across an open field from the 3 tower (I could actually sling a wire to it!) so RAN connection/signal is not issue. DL peaks up to 120Mb with 30Mb UL. All good so far. However, the issue is an ongoing KNOWN packet loss issue. Changing DNS, MTU, band, access tech (3G/4G) make little difference. However, using a VPN almost completely eliminates the problem.

I wrote an app to hit a list of 10 URLs every minute. At worst, I see over 25% failure with an average of 9-10%. It's a consistent packet loss issue. To compare, EE MBB shows less than 0.05%. There must be a serious flaw in the 3 core.

Many calls to 1st and 2nd line get 'we don’t know how it works’, ‘we can do nothing about it’ and ‘would you like to cancel?’ responses. It’s as though they view their core as some sort of magic they won’t question. Escalation requests are get 'I don’t know how to do that’ or ‘we are not allowed to do that'. They DO NOT DESERVE TO BE IN BUSINESS with that attitude. I stated MANY report the same thing, country-wide, but with no interest.

Tip - use ‘3internet’ as the APN, you get a dynamic public IP, that u can use with a DDNS service.
reached 1400 limit - See my posts in forums for more.

I’m on Sky now, but copper cables so decided to try Three 5G, as I was a past relish customer. First off the download speeds are great 50-100MB, I’m in Barnsbury near the Kings Cross 5G mast.

But the broadband is not usable. The upload speed is around 1% of the download speed. I was testing with 100% score on the built in position checker (the thing was dangling out of a top floor window) and with ethernet the upload speeds were terrible (maxed out at 5Mbps).

I’m not sure why they decided an asymmetrical speeds are usable, because as soon as anyone tries to use it for anything other than streaming it will grind to a haunt, it’s not even enough to do a video call.

Ended up cancelling and retuning on day one.

Well, I'm fairly disappointed to say the least. I moved house around two to three weeks ago and we needed broadband. After looking around and the current situation of OpenReach, I decided to trail Three's 4G home broadband option. After signing up with their non-contract, unlimited data option, I sat patiently for the router to arrive. I didn't get any dispatch notification so was a little worried it wasn't going to arrive - sure enough, it arrived as promised. So far so good.

After opening the box, sticking in the SIM card and turning the router on - we had internet! A solid 5 bars and a nice 70 down/30 up. Again, brilliant.

After using the internet for some time though, things started to go downhill. We started to incurr a minor issue wher things would need to be refreshed a second time to load. The page would begin to load but then "fail" with no error. I have to manually stop the browser and reload - the page then loads instantly.

The connection or speed can't be faulted but it's the intermittent issue that makes it unbearable to use and work with. I've tried numerous restarts, a factory reset and also a third-party router plugged into the modem but neither work.

I'm still, at the time of this review, trying to get second-level support to fix the issue and as a result will be cancelling in the cooling down period.

https://youtu.be/qa-gynCK5J4

I was so impressed with three 4G for £16 a month I made a video... as far as I can tell, this is the best value useful speed solution!! Well done three... independent review!!

https://youtu.be/qa-gynCK5J4

DuB-EnG: Huawei b535-232 4G/LTE Router and £16 4G SIM Unlimited Data on UK Three Network best speeds

https://youtu.be/qa-gynCK5J4