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Will Three address mast contention? Lets find out!

The overcrowding is not as bad as we think. The vast majority of UK land is not built-up. I think less than 10% of England is built-up, less so in the other nations. To be honest, given how compact built-up areas are you'd think they'd be easy to cover.
In comparison a lot of the European cities are more dense as the high-rise/block of flats is more popular.

It's a different story for farm land and people living there.. PS: but starlink will soon fix that ;-)
 
@Buggerlugz As long as you don't want to speak to a manager!
 
It maybe, but saying anything inappropriate doesn't make it not true, just lately probably makes me a Karen, (not that I'm bothered one bit, hell saying thats probably inappropriate too!) :).
The West seems to blame China for everything and then the media flocks to ridiculous conclusions, giving people ideas.

I was in China at the start of the whole pandemic thing and flew to the UK. Everyone knew it was a thing, everyone knew it was bad, China was doing extensive screening on outgoing passengers to stop it spreading internally or externally, however when arriving in the UK no one asked anything, no one checked anything, meanwhile the UK government was spreading the message that no one should wear masks because they don't do anything.

Honestly the popular media just creates headlines which don't reflect reality in a lot of cases.

Even before the Huawei ban, Three had an inability to manage their 4G network. It was bad then, it's still bad now. It's got nothing to do with Huawei or China. Blaming China for all of the West's problems isn't going to fix anything. The UK should do more to increase it's own capability of producing things and making money.
 
Or possibly "the party" knowing the plague was in Wuhan back in September of 2019 should have stopped anyone flying out of the country, rather than infecting the entire planet and being responsible for the deaths of almost 3 million people?

But then again saving face by any means necessary is always the number one priority for the party, isn't it? (Li Wenliang, W.H.O.)

I wasn't blaming China for the West's problems, I'll be the first to say we should be building our own infrastructure projects ourselves here in the UK, but if (because of either they're ineptitude or deliberate actions) it costs the party (not the people of China) financially by means of a Huawei ban then I can live with that.
 
Just a quick post from myself here, I’m still waiting for the new local EE/3 mast to get its antennas installed. It was built in December and still hasn’t been touched (it’s now April)
What I have done though is ditch the net gear power line adapters I was using to link my 3 supplied 535 to my pfsense router and run a new Ethernet cable around the outside of my properly to link the 535 in “properly”. I’d done done various iPerf tests to work out the max speeds that I could attain over these adapters and device to device it would get about 70mbit which I figured was plenty as the speeds the current mast couldn’t give me anywhere near that speed. Doing this change has given me another 20mbit out of three at off peak times (so 50 or so mbit). Vodafone unlimited max sim in the same router would get me about 50mbit using the same adapters, I can comfortable see 120mbit now using a proper Ethernet cable. Quite astonishing to me that they were hindering the performance that much even though iPerf tests indicated I had enough over head to cover it - clearly not!
Another bonus is I’ve managed to blag a rolling monthly discount from 3 for this “fault” in my area as in their words: “the signal isn’t as strong as we’d like it”. This means I’m only paying 5 quid per month for their service, so in one way I’m hoping they don’t actually fix it!
 
My experience with Smarty has been an utter disappointment. I get great signal (B3, occasionally B1), but speed fluctuates tremendously 0.5 to 30m. Even worse, I get frequent timeouts, page load fails, speed test fails. I noticed that my public IP changes literally every few seconds. Tried NextDNS and Adguard DNS and I ended up with even more frequent page load failures (Safari saying unable to establish secure connection).

EE (plusnet sim) gives a rock solid 60m any time of the day. Wish they had an unlimited bundle.

Lebara (Vodafone) seems to be a reasonable compromise for me now.
 
My experience with Smarty has been an utter disappointment. I get great signal (B3, occasionally B1), but speed fluctuates tremendously 0.5 to 30m. Even worse, I get frequent timeouts, page load fails, speed test fails. I noticed that my public IP changes literally every few seconds. Tried NextDNS and Adguard DNS and I ended up with even more frequent page load failures (Safari saying unable to establish secure connection).

EE (plusnet sim) gives a rock solid 60m any time of the day. Wish they had an unlimited bundle.

Lebara (Vodafone) seems to be a reasonable compromise for me now.
Smarty (3) works great for me where I live. Solid 100 DL and 30 UL. That's without being tied to a contract, £20pm no contract.
Vodafone gets about 40 DL and O2 is just poor. IDK about EE but I'd guess similar to Three as they share masts. EE is much more expensive.

It depends where you live and what works best for you. Try one with a PAYG sim, if it doesn't work try another. Everyone will have different results.
 
Just ran a speed test, achieved a less than impressive 2Mbps down, 1.2Mbps up, so went on Three web-chat, explained the ongoing contention issue, was transferred to "customer relations", was credited "another month", told to ring 500 in the morning and speak to the broadband team.

Pretty convinced I just spent 15 minutes chatting with a bot.
 
Just ran a speed test, achieved a less than impressive 2Mbps down, 1.2Mbps up, so went on Three web-chat, explained the ongoing contention issue, was transferred to "customer relations", was credited "another month", told to ring 500 in the morning and speak to the broadband team.

Pretty convinced I just spent 15 minutes chatting with a bot.
You get through to real people at www.three.co.uk/support/thankyou
 
Just ran a speed test, achieved a less than impressive 2Mbps down, 1.2Mbps up, so went on Three web-chat, explained the ongoing contention issue, was transferred to "customer relations", was credited "another month", told to ring 500 in the morning and speak to the broadband team.

Pretty convinced I just spent 15 minutes chatting with a bot.
Honestly the amount of times I spoke to customer service - it seems their sole job isn’t to actually resolve the issue (I mean they can’t, really) but just to tide you over.
 
I agree TTJJ, I mean its totally not about them crediting my account, but if they have to credit me every single month until they resolve my masts contention then so be it.

I absolutely expect it to not be resolved come September in which case I'll be begrudgingly heading back to Virgin.
 
I agree TTJJ, I mean its totally not about them crediting my account, but if they have to credit me every single month until they resolve my masts contention then so be it.

I absolutely expect it to not be resolved come September in which case I'll be begrudgingly heading back to Virgin.

thats what im doing so far. However ive noticed they've brought the "fix" date of my mast forward by nearly a month (Jun 1st-4th). Not that Ive found this out from three but using one.network website and checking planned works
 
Thats interesting Gandi, I just checked my location using one.network, nothing planned but traffic lights for the next 12 months in my location.
 
My speeds on 3 seem to have taken a bit of hit in the past week. Generally "passable" speeds of mid teens to low twenties (40+ in the small hours) but in the evening around 9/10 pm I can sometimes only pull 3 mbit down if that
 
My speeds on 3 seem to have taken a bit of hit in the past week. Generally "passable" speeds of mid teens to low twenties (40+ in the small hours) but in the evening around 9/10 pm I can sometimes only pull 3 mbit down if that
I used to to get 60 - 90 on 3 Gandi69, but for a few months now, the best I can get is around 15, my 2 year contract is up next month so thought I'd try Voxi and now I'm getting 60, so it looks like it's bye bye to 3.

Don't think i'd ever go on a long contract again, plenty of monthly MVNO's now.

If they ever get their finger out here in North Ayrshire, there's always Smarty. :)
 
I used to to get 60 - 90 on 3 Gandi69, but for a few months now, the best I can get is around 15, my 2 year contract is up next month so thought I'd try Voxi and now I'm getting 60, so it looks like it's bye bye to 3.

Don't think i'd ever go on a long contract again, plenty of monthly MVNO's now.

If they ever get their finger out here in North Ayrshire, there's always Smarty. :)

Ive got under a month to wait until they finally get the new three mast built so i'm going to wait it out- if that doesn't speed things up i'll attempt to cancel my contract and go with someone else. A Vodafone sim in this router is giving 95-120 mbit solidly.
 
Ive got under a month to wait until they finally get the new three mast built so i'm going to wait it out- if that doesn't speed things up i'll attempt to cancel my contract and go with someone else. A Vodafone sim in this router is giving 95-120 mbit solidly.
Yeah, lucky you, I think all the networks have forgotten about 5G in North Ayrshire. :rolleyes:
 
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