rik130
Regular Member
@Buggerlugz The OP is talking about EE here, not Three.
@rik130 (pretty much) all network providers use 'traffic management' to one extent or another, to ensure that the service they are provided with maintained and the type of traffic is generally what gets prioritised depending on how urgent they deem it to be e.g. P2P = low priority, VOIP = highest, etc.
They probably throw in some of the popular speed test sites into the higher categories so as you say, when someone tests their speed (or when speed test reports get publicly published) it looks good.
It might be in the wake of the coronavirus that EE have altered their management policies to reduce the strain on their network and ensure voice calls/VOIP/VoLTE as the highest priority, and as a result you're seeing reduced speeds as everything else is much lower priority.
Combine that with the potential that your local area is seeing a higher population since no-one is moving around during the day. The serving masts in your area might now be handling more connections/users than usual - that too could result in each device now getting a smaller slice of the limited pie. Though, saying that, I'd have thought mobile data usage would be reduced, rather than increased, since more people would be on their home wifi.
If you had a VPN to connect to, I'd expect you'd see speeds increase again (though how much would depend on the speed of the VPN), as VPN traffic is usually high priority and the tunnel created would avoid any traffic management policies of the network provider.
Hi Gavin, that is a particularly useful post! Especially your final paragraph. I've just blitzed through a bunch of VPN extensions for Chrome and had just about given up as 80% of them require a sign-up and the other 20% were giving me woeful speeds. Just tried a Russian VPN service and selected their UK VPN. Oh look :

Yeah the ping is gnarly, but I don't care for ping when I'm downloading a 20+ GB files.
Just to prove that it definitely works, here's my speed direct to EE just a few moments ago. :

What a farce ! So would I be right in thinking that despite it allegedly being an 'unlimited' connection, EE are doing some behind-the-scenes shaping/restricting here but at the same time making sure that st.net get given the full beans in the hope that we won't notice and think we're imagining the slowness because st.net shows all is well. Would that be a fair analysis?























