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Testing: EEs 4G - MVNOs

Bubblesthefish6

ULTIMATE Member
Hiya everyone, Today me and @JitteryPinger are doing a bit of a Collab on this one.


We are testing To The Moon Mobile's 4G service. They are an EE MVNO if you have never heard of them and they are one of the few EE MVNOs that have access to their 800Mhz (B20) spectrum for long range coverage.


The are a budget offering who also happen to deal cryptocurrencies within their app. They have plans such as 10GB for £10 which is quite a good deal.

I haven't really been out to test them yet, but from the few speedtests I have done indoors, I could never really get above 50Mbps which points to maybe an AMBR Speed cap on their network?

I am shortly going up to the mast to do some testing, we will post our results from the different masts on this thread

Happy reading :)
 
Here's the mast i have just been up to test. I am sorry i couldn't get great photos as it was behind a bunch of trees, and the other side points towards a farm.
IMG_20210311_155738.jpg


The speeds were very slow, and confirmed my suspicion that there was speed limiting in place. They were fluctuating wildly too. I was stood in the same place for all three tests.
Screenshot_2021-03-11-16-27-29-108_org.zwanoo.android.speedtest.jpg

I will attach what cellmapper shows in a separate post.
 
This was the cellmaper results and you can find this mast here.

Screenshot_2021-03-11-15-57-58-230_cellmapper.net.cellmapper.jpg
 
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Great write up @Bubblesthefish6 so a bit of insight into your device makes me think it might not be capable of Carrier Aggregation hence you only locking onto Band 7 and the upload not being so good, this could also explain the speed topping out but also may not.

The picture of the mast seems to suggest there is 5G available and judging by my findings on coverage checkers I think its EE's though Three does seem to have activated 5G on this one here

Your testing will be useful if you don't have carrier aggregation as this gives insight into the capability of a single bands performance.
It is capable of Carrier Agreggation, i get it with 3. It has appeared every so often but for some reason not this time. I get CA all the time with BT Mobile.
 
Great write up @Bubblesthefish6 so a bit of insight into your device makes me think it might not be capable of Carrier Aggregation hence you only locking onto Band 7 and the upload not being so good, this could also explain the speed topping out but also may not.

The picture of the mast seems to suggest there is 5G available and judging by my findings on coverage checkers I think its EE's though Three does seem to have activated 5G on this one here

Your testing will be useful if you don't have carrier aggregation as this gives insight into the capability of a single bands performance.
Its three only 5G, i have used it and it was awful, at my house at least. It would drastically change between 1-2Mbps to 100Mbps in the space of about 5 minutes.
 
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Hmmm interesting, I wonder if there is limits on the sim then, or if the device has some restrictions to which bands it can aggregate, for instance some devices won't aggregate certain bands such as 3+7 and some network configs may not aggregate 7+3 with BT Mobile it could of been aggregating with band 20 in the lead.

I do get a feeling though that this sim is going to be BS, but maybe that's the negativity coming out.

Just waiting on snail mail I guess.
Just stuck my BT SIM in and straight away, carrier aggregation.
 
heheh as for the rubbish speeds... well looky how great vodafone are for me ... not even 1 mbit upload :ROFLMAO: cat 20 handset btw.

7127161996.png
 
Could you screenshot CellMapper?
Sorry, it doesn't have any throughput on that sim as it is the sim from my Mini hub. it only connects for like 5 seconds before it is kicked off as BT blacklist it whilst your internet is working
 
heheh as for the rubbish speeds... well looky how great vodafone are for me ... not even 1 mbit upload :ROFLMAO: cat 20 handset btw.

7127161996.png
Yup, EE and their 'We're so great and so fast' yeah luv, vodafones band 20 is faster in both directions than this 🤣🤣🤦‍♀️
 
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Post here @dabigm, also do you have NSG or CellMapper?
I've got cellmapper yes. I've got NSG too but my phone isn't rooted as it breaks google pay and my santander bank app.

Local mast has B1 and B20 but only a 10MHz slice on each.

When I used to go to my office (Central London) .. voda easily did 150-200mbit that's why I bought it. At home? rubbish. Mast is about 800m from me.
 
Yeah I was seeing that today up north with Vodafone, it seems to be O2's territory :D

Will be posting my finds on Vodafone shortly

Same story on O2 here. Although the mast is even further away, B20 only and literally both of them are on an A road over a mile away. Terrible throughput. I'll make a post in your voda thread when I can take a walk to the mast and give the best possible speed. But yeah apparently O2 has 5G here I suppose I should test that one too.

Only three and EE have decent 4G speed, and only O2 and three have 5G here. But 10MHz of voda is pretty bad yeah still, I could work with 20mbit down if I needed to , but not even 1mbit upload is shockingly bad.
 
UPDATE: 1 Email to support later about speed caps and this is what they replied with:

Hello Bubbles,

Thank you for contacting us.

Please note regarding our speed limits, as we run on EE network our speed limits are exactly the same as in EE (40 Mbits per second upwards).

Should you have other questions we'll be happy to assist.


Make of it what you will, I think they are trying to imply there are speed restrictions on EE it's self to make it look like they don't have any when in fact they do.
 
Thanks for sharing @Bubblesthefish6

I too have made contact this morning with TTMM, I asked 3 bulleted questions....

  • If I can get 100-200mbps on EE's 4G will this be the same with TTMM?
  • Your help pages say that Band 20 (800mhz) is also usable on TTMM is this correct.
  • What is your refund policy should TTMM not fulfil it requirements?
I made them aware I was testing this for a review and also as a potential everyday network moving forward.

There response:

I've responded with the following,

"Could you please confirm what you mean by limits please, EE doesn't have limits on their network so would this mean I can go as high as 200-400mbps that I see with EE? "

Despite the quick response to the oringal email, I've not yet had a response to the latter...

However the TTMM sim has just arrived and so far I can't get any 4G signal with there free 500MB package.

It's not looking promising at the moment and I'm not forking over money until I get what they promised which is a free 500MB test, and I stopped testing 3G many years ago.
I got my data from

www.tothemoonmobile.com/digitalspace

Thank me later ;)
 
Email Update: TTMM


Well let's see about that when I start testing in a couple of week I guess.

In the meantime I still have no service in LTE mode so have asked them whats going on there.
I have a PAYG EE sim. I might take it up to the mast and see if there is any speed differences at some point to see if they are lying. I have a sneaking suspicion they are, and the ts&cs are pretty messed up as you mentioned before.
 
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I have just managed to gain CA with them on my second sim. the speeds were no different really as to when i was up at the mast

*Note i did this test at my house, about 150M away from the mast, no LOS.
IMG_20210312_161801.jpg
 
I have sent them the email asking this question

Hiya, Will i currently get 400Mbps down and 80Mbps up on EE. Will i be able to get the same speeds with you guys?

I sent it from a different email to the one i used before (Work one hehe :)) so lets see what they reply with (If they do lol)

EDIT: God i just noticed my bad English in the email 🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️I'm not foreign, I just type too fast!!!!
 
Alright then, I'm chiming in now with an initial test and impression.

So after some initial oddities with activating the sim, but some assurance from TTM customer service... see email below...



We have 500MB to test the network, so thats what I did, saving it for a couple of masts that I know are loaded with bands and have performed in the 200-400mbps region for me in the past...

First we tested in Longbridge, Birmingham (the new build mast in the area)

preview

preview


So this mast is pretty new end of 2019 build and is 5CA capable, with my now deceased Samsung S10e (4CA) device, paired with an EE Smart Plan I whipped the 400mbps mark on speed tests multiple times in 2020, but that wasn't the story with TTM today...

7133283801.png

7133285473.png

7133287333.png

7133288939.png


Quite consistent results right, well also headed over to Kings Norton and looked at another high performing mast...

preview

preview


Unfortunately during the first test I ran out of data but I did manage to get a consistent reading from the download as it ran out on the upload test,

preview


So my initial impress is, Hmmmm, do I want to wast another £20 topping this up, not without some assurance of a refund NO...

What else can I say about the service, well I've yet to take it to my 800mhz test bed area but when trying to force Band 20 use it don't connect though it did on first try yesterday but then was disconnected by the mast, So maybe a config issue with EE or there masts know that I'm well within range of Band 3 :)

This one will need a follow up to completely satisfy my verdict but I'm pretty sure its not as its told to be.

I'll be asking for further clarification on their limits with EE and some honesty as I'm actually prepared to use a bandwidth limited service, but as of yet I haven't seen proof of any working VoLTE (with calls impossible in LTE Only mode) and also that 800mhz band not connecting spells danger for me as it's what sets EE apart from the others at one of my significant usage locations.

If the forum's conditions allow it, I welcome To The Moon to join the discussion if something is genuinely not right here.

Thanks for reading :)
I can confirm, VoLTE doesn't work. I have it enabled for both my Three sim and my TTMM sim and it only works on the Three. No VoWIFI either. If you PM me your address I have a spare 7GB sim I can send to you that i got from where I put before.
 
Hmmmm, OK :cautious:


I appreciate the offer but I'm going to be moving a number to this sim in the next week and I'm going to end up hashing this out with TTM so having my own account is going to be key.
Same here - VoLTE and VoWiFI are absolute godsends as our house has awful 3G and amazing 4G, and making calls was no existent. You can only pick up B20 4G in my kitchen and lounge but it's so much better than EEs mess. Best of luck with your house move, hopefully you can stick it out with TTM till you move to Canada.
 
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