Finally got 4G+ today!

[Buggerlugz]

So I had a mess about with LTEHMonitor440 today and it appears Three have installed a new mast about 1 mile from me, which is about 200ft higher up than my location.

I've been stuck on a mast only allowing band 3 access (which is only 300 yards from me) since I joined Three Sept/Oct of 2019. I struggled to get anything other than band 3 and could only connect to a Band 20 on another mast 5 miles away if i disabled band 3.

Connecting to the new mast it appears I am getting bands 1 and 3 simultaneously and I'm seeing the + icon on my router page all the time now.

Whilst the SINR has dropped from 20 to around 12, My first impressions are a positive improvement browsing wise, everything seems snappier, webpages are not hanging and it appears the page loading issues have vanished. Speed wise I've not yet seen any major improvement with everything hovering around 50-60mb most of the time, however latency has improved drastically to only 45-50ms.

Will see how things pan out over the next few days....

 

[Darsuke]

Congrats

 

[GavinAshford]

Nice! Have you seen any planning applications for the mast, or if it only B3+1, or potentially more?

Do you know if your (300m away) mast has microwave backhaul? If so, and the new one doesn't (or is of a newer, faster type, or is one less step in a daisy chain) that could explain the improved latency. The improved latency is likely also why everything feels snappier too.

Edit: also, give it a bit of time if it is indeed brand new, speeds may improve - when B1 was added to my mast for the first 4-5days speeds only jumped from ~65 (old B3) to ~80, but then something must have been reconfigured and from then on I am getting ~125.

 

[Buggerlugz]

I'm not aware of anything "microwave backhaul" with the 300m away mast. Just its massively oversubscribed because it served most of my village (around 4k-8k homes). (Hopefully that ones next on the list of upgrades now they've installed the new one just half a mile away from it!)

I've seen it maintain stability at 80Mbps this morning for a brief period with a quick 5 minute jump to 110Mbps which I haven't seen since last year, so things are improving still. If it'd behave like cable and sit at 110Mbps all the time it'd be awesome, though that's probably me expecting too much!

It does seem more stable when I'm hammering the bandwidth though, not bouncing up and then sinking back down by a huge margin (10-60Mbps) like it was . Also even at max download speed it still allows snappy browsing and lets me to watch you-tube at the same time now, unlike before.

Edit: Went to check out the new mast. The country road its on is scheduled to be closed tomorrow, I presume so they can lay a line across it to the mast. So it may be up and running, but looks like it'll be getting another cable to it which I'm hoping will be more bandwidth capability.

Sadly I'm too far away from it to get 5g, though I'll definitely be close enough to my old band3 mast if they decide to upgrade that one in the future.

 

[Buggerlugz]

Well things seem to be going the other way today so far. I'm still getting 4G+ but now maxing out at around 50Mbs whilst bouncing up and down to 30Mbps. Like before I'm unable to surf or watch you-tube whilst downloading anything. My SINR has now risen to 21 though, so its looking like the new mast is already getting contended.

On the old mast on just band 3 I would get 60-70Mbs for a few hours at this time of day.

Though, I guess there is a possibility they've turned off my old mast to upgrade it after commissioning the new one?

Is there any way to specify which mast you want to connect too?

 

[GavinAshford]

Go for a walk and see if you can see any works happening on your old mast? Do any of your devices connect to the old Cell ID?

No way to specify which mast to connect to with your router, but you can with a rooted Android device with a Snapdragon chipset and Network Signal Guru (though you need the 'ultimate'/paid version).
Also, I think the Mikrotik Chateau LTE12 router mentioned a few days ago can be configured to do so too.

 

[Buggerlugz]

Noticed this morning my router had switched back to the old mast now but with the 4G+ remaining. It was dog slow and back to hanging webpages yet again. It appears that because its signal is stronger than then new mast its now happy to aggregate bands 3 on the close mast and band 20 on another the far away one. The resulting + proves useless with latency back to 70ms+.

Only by manually forcing bands 1 and 3 I can get it to move over onto the new mast (My close in mast only has band 3). This seems to improve the situation.

Will see how it goes.

 

[GavinAshford]

Are you sure 3+20 is coming from different masts? I think Three were testing inter-eNB CA late last year, but I haven't heard since if its been deployed.

 

[Buggerlugz]

Pretty sure, the close in mast is definitely only capable of band 3.

If that is the case, I suppose it could be doing band 1 on the new mast and band 3 on the close in one.

 

[GavinAshford]

I checked with someone and as far as they're aware inter-node CA was being tested by Three last year but has since been abandoned. I'm dubious that you'll be getting it, though I guess you may be in a test location if they still have it enabled.

 

[Buggerlugz]

Well it didn't last. Over the past few weeks my speeds have dropped again and the page stalling issues have slowly returned. Last night around 11pm my xbox was managing 10Mbps with no one else on the home network. So this morning I ran a few tests during the least contented part of the day.

Turns out right now I can get 35Mbps on band 3 in most speed tests, However it drops to around 20Mbps now when I add band 1. I swapped between 4g and 4g+ a few times and got the same result seeing a 10-15Mbps drop whenever band1 was added each time.

Weirdly if I throw a torrent at it I can see it fluctuate from 50-60Mbps just on band 3. Add band 1 and it just loses 20Mbps.

So I've set it back to band 3 only now and its an improvement.

I think this shows that Three is using traffic sense over HTTP ports which means any results on speed tests are pretty meaningless. One could generalize that with contention and traffic sense working against you, regardless of how good your connection to your mast is, you will more than likely end up with a slower speed test result than what the mast is actually capable of giving you on any web-based speed testing.

So splashing out on that 5G CAT 20 router probably won't yield anything beneficial.

At least not on Three.

 

[Darsuke]

I think this shows that Three is using traffic sense over HTTP ports which means any results on speed tests are pretty meaningless.

I stopped using the normal run of the mill tests as they just varied wildly so much.

Last couple of weeks been using https://speed.cloudflare.com/ if you haven't tried yet. Might be placebo but feels more consistent for me.

 

[MrDave]

I stopped using the normal run of the mill tests as they just varied wildly so much.

Last couple of weeks been using https://speed.cloudflare.com/ if you haven't tried yet. Might be placebo but feels more consistent for me.

That speedtest said the 10kb download was 87Mbps, I wish. true value is about 15-20Mbps which it shows on the other tests.

I also use https://projectstream.google.com/speedtest which seems accurate.

 

[Darsuke]

That speedtest said the 10kb download was 87Mbps, I wish. true value is about 15-20Mbps which it shows on the other tests.

I also use https://projectstream.google.com/speedtest which seems accurate.

In the space of moments I got

16Mb - projectstream
34Mb - cloudflare
4Mb - ookla

I give up

 

[Buggerlugz]

Its exactly what I expected. Three is throttling port 80.

 

[kommando828]

As most sites are https then port 443 as well.

 

[Buggerlugz]

As most sites are https then port 443 as well.

Yeah, the majority. Anything http or https coming from a browser I believe is throttled.