There is known, recurring, frustrating, fault with the Three service that H3G refuse to fix. I am in a rural area where the 3.5+ km distance from the green cab means I barely get any copper broadband at all – trying to work from home is a nightmare, so I have a Three unlimited data SIM in a Draytek 2860Ln. I’m only about 500m line of sight across an open field from the Three tower (I could actually sling a wire to it!) so RAN connection / signal is not an issue. Download can peak up to 120Mb with consistent 30Mb up. All good so far. However, the issue is, as many have noticed, that accessing web sites and services it a totally miss and hit experience. Failure to get DNS, failure to negotiate TLS, timeouts, packet loss all conspire to make the service pretty much unfit for purpose. Changing DNS, MTU, band, access tech (3G/4G) make little difference. However, using a VPN almost completely eliminates the problem – except that unless you spend alot on a full SLA’d commercial VPN the speed is crippled and connection is unreliable.
So I decided to write a monitoring app to hit a selection of 10 URLs every minute and log the results - which are amazing. At worst, I see over 25% failure to complete the URL transaction and the average runs at about 9-10% failure rate over time. It appears to be consistent, random packet loss issue. The BEST I have seen over a rolling 1 hour window is about 3% error rate. Those failure rates, as far as I am concerned, do not even fall within the ‘best effort’ small print. For comparison, EE runs at less than 0.05% failure and even the dribble that I DO get from BT also runs at less than 0.05% failure rate.
This all suggests there is a serious design flaw in the Three core; probably an under-specified / overloaded backbone or equipment – but it’s difficult to speculate.
I have spent hours on the phone to various 1st and 2nd line support ppl in Three, but after getting through the dumb ‘have you turned it off and on again’ scripted response, all they will offer is ‘we don’t know how it works’, ‘we can do nothing about it’ (WON’T do anything?) and ‘would you like to cancel?’ (and return that c**p Huawei router). It’s as though even the 2nd line view the network core as some sort of invisible magic they can’t touch and won’t question. Any request to escalate to core engineering is met with ‘I don’t know how to do that’ or ‘we are not allowed to do that’ depending on who you are talking to. They DO NOT DESERVE TO BE IN BUSINESS with that sort of attitude. I have pointed out that MANY of us suffer the same experience, all over the country, and that they REALLY need to take a look at why it's happening - but with no takeup whatsoever. I guess the majority of Three customers use phones and just put the necessity to retry down to ‘bad signal’ – when it is really a fundamentally broken service. The fact that a VPN over Three works without these errors shows that the RAN (and your home equipment) is not the issue.
AVOID THREE (and Smarty) AT ALL COSTS!
(fwiw, I used to be a cellular core engineer)
Hello,
I wanted to detail the steps i have taken to improve my SMARTY Connection. I am somewhat technical but not a patch on you so please excuse me if my suggestions seem odd.
Context: I changed to smarty after being with Virgin 200 fibre for 8 years as over the last 2 years the network was down at least 18hrs a week during peek times and maxed out at about 12mbps. With SMARTY i experienced pretty much what you are experiencing, ridiculous packet loss, connections timing out and failure to resolve address’. I also suffered issues using streaming services such as Netflix and YouTube.
Distance to Mast: <100m
Obstacles between mast & router: one building, brick construction (1920s)
Hardware: TPLink Archer MR200 (v4) - firmware updated Feb 2021
SMARTY: Unlimited data
Tried but didn’t make a deal of difference: Cloudflare DNS on router and Cloudflare warp on devices. Google DNS.
The signal showed as strong (2 to 3 bars, 3 being the highest signal) but in addition to the packet, dns etc issues, my connection peaked at 1mbps.
Today in a fit of aggghhhh I decided to do a physical mod to my router, I know this shouldn’t have any effect on the way their network handles traffic but it has taken me from an unusable connection to better than the Virgin Media connection i was replacing so i want to detail it for you.
I built 2 small reflector dishes out of cardboard and tin foil (Blue Peter baby!) and mounted them to the antenas (picture attached).
My connection is now very stable, every page is loading as expected, streaming services no longer show loading and jump immediately to HD. Further my connection speed has increased to a minimum of 12mbps DL 20 UL but sometimes tickles 20mbps!
I’m now finding that WARP is limiting my speed such is the change so ive tossed it in the sea. Feel free to call me a tit and that this doesn’t make sense but it has worked for me, god knows why but its worked. Took 5 mins and is a lot more enjoyable than fiddling with TPLinks cruddy control pannel.
I know some may say this has perhaps improved my signal and that was my issue but the signal, as i say, was strong before and hasn’t improved any, at least as far as the TPLink control panel would suggest.
For those still hunting for an alternative provider, Lebara have an unlimited data package that runs on Vodafone and that will be my next port of call if this improvement is just a blip.