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Three 5G - Borderline coverage

You must have high ceilings! 6m drop sounds scary:)
Someone else is having weird upload speed issues like yours when comparing smartphone to laptop albeit with the older ZTE MC801A router. Must just be down to the hardware/wifi card in laptop/pc I'd say.
Victorian house with a loft hatch on the landing, recipe for disaster especially when you're as clumsy as me!


I don't think it's a hardware issue, I'm guessing it's some weird Windows 11 issue as it's the same over WiFi, Ethernet, and an external WiFi adapter.
 
An update:

I finally built up the courage to go up into the loft!

Turns out when we partially rewired the house a few years back we disconnected the power to the loft, so I had to spend much longer up there than I'd have liked to get it wired back up.

I'm not sure whether Three are just having a bit of a moment, but 5G has decided it wants to be 3G today, and I'm getting 10mbps if I'm lucky. On my phone it's even worse, I'm getting around 5mbps, whereas the other day I was getting 500mbps.

Luckily, when it falls back to 4G+, I'm still getting 200-250mbps, but the upload speed has increased considerably to between 40-80mbps.

Ping has also dropped to a reliable 25-30ms, whereas when I had the router downstairs it would often get up to 35-40ms.

I've also noticed that turning or tilting the router even a few degrees can have a massive impact on speeds. I knocked it and it turned about 10 degrees and the speeds dropped from 200mbps to 80mbps.

I'll leave it up alone overnight and see if the speeds pick up
 
Another update.

I needed to download some large files for work, so I thought I'd give Three a bit of a workout. And I had some strange results.

I had to download from an IONOS drive, so I wasn't expecting any blazing speeds.

I first started downloading it over Three, and while the speeds were all over the place (according to Task Manager anyway), but it averaged out at around 25mbps.

I then connected back to Virgin, and while the speeds were more consistent, it was only downloading at 12mbps!

Given this is the laptop that seems to hate Three, I was very surprised by the results.

Is it usual to expect spikey graphs over 4G/5G? Looking at the graph below, you can clearly see when I switched over to my Virgin connection.

 
I guess there is more variance in speed over 4g/5g so probably perfectly normal, pleasant surprise that it's twice as fast as VM as well!
 
Yet another update.

2.4Ghz WiFi is absolutely pathetic, even right next to the router I'm lucky to get 15mbps down on any device, upload seems reasonable at 25mbps though.
I've never had an AP before that the 5Ghz range is considerably better than the 2.4Ghz range. I'm guessing I may have a defective unit since I don't think I've seen anyone else mention the poor WiFi.

I'm wondering if that could also be the culprit for the crap speeds on my laptop?

Here are the results of a quick and dirty test around the house. Bearing in mind it's an old house so all internal walls are solid brick

 
I guess there is more variance in speed over 4g/5g so probably perfectly normal, pleasant surprise that it's twice as fast as VM as well!

Yeah, that really surprised me since I was getting pretty much identical speed test results on speedtest.net, Google and Bing speed tests.

I wonder if Three have a particularly good link to IONOS, or if Virgin just have a bad one
 
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I'm looking at trying an external antenna to see if it improves the speeds.

Now, me being me, I just went on Amazon, sorted price lowest first with next day, and ordered a NEDIS 5G / 4G / 3G Antenna for £50, not expecting it to be any good.

Just trying it in the loft, all it did was at most match the download speeds, but near enough half the upload speeds. Faffing about with the different antenna jacks on the back, I managed to get it to match the upload speeds, but half the download speeds!

Realistically, would actually mounting it outside make any difference. It's a slate roof so I'd imagine it would have some impact on the signal.
Should I just scrap the idea and use the internal antenna, or should I spend more and buy a better one?

I have a Sky dish mounted at the front of the house just under the gutter, and an aerial on the chimney, neither of which are even connected. The Sky dish mount would be relatively easy to reuse and get the cable into the loft, but the aerial on the chimney is a bit more of a faff. Would the extra 3 or so metres of height make much of a difference?
 
Not sure it's worth the bother but only one way to find out, the antenna ports are very fragile so if they are broken already that maybe explains the poor performance, you would think that extra height would help with the right antenna pointed the right way but who knows. I liked your house diagram, weird how good 5G is compared to 2.4 but your (5g) speeds look to be perfectly useable.
 
Not sure it's worth the bother but only one way to find out, the antenna ports are very fragile so if they are broken already that maybe explains the poor performance, you would think that extra height would help with the right antenna pointed the right way but who knows. I liked your house diagram, weird how good 5G is compared to 2.4 but your (5g) speeds look to be perfectly useable.

Given it's not too difficult to get to the sky dish on the front, I might give that a go once I figure out who I leant the tall ladders to!

The 5ghz is more than useable, but I have quite a lot of stuff that needs decent speeds on the 2.4ghz, I have cheap IP cams that I use to monitor 3D prints etc.

Realistically, I knew I'd probably have to go for a different AP solution given it's in the loft. But my Virgin, Vodafone, and TalkTalk routers never had a problem.

I'm starting to think the unit may just be a dud given I seem to be having issue with poor signal on both the 5G and the WiFi. If my phone can pick up 5G, then surely a dedicated 5G router should!
 
So I got in touch with Three this morning, and because they are carrying out work on the mast in the town centre I have to wait until that work has finished before they'll replace it, despite it clearly being a WiFi issue.

Luckily I still have another 2 weeks with Virgin so I can keep 2.4ghz things connected to the old router. Either that, or I just plug in one of my many old TalkTalk routers, it's not as if I'm going to get much faster than 100mbps over 2.4ghz anyway
 
I'm looking at trying an external antenna to see if it improves the speeds.

Now, me being me, I just went on Amazon, sorted price lowest first with next day, and ordered a NEDIS 5G / 4G / 3G Antenna for £50, not expecting it to be any good.

Just trying it in the loft, all it did was at most match the download speeds, but near enough half the upload speeds. Faffing about with the different antenna jacks on the back, I managed to get it to match the upload speeds, but half the download speeds!

Realistically, would actually mounting it outside make any difference. It's a slate roof so I'd imagine it would have some impact on the signal.
Should I just scrap the idea and use the internal antenna, or should I spend more and buy a better one?

I have a Sky dish mounted at the front of the house just under the gutter, and an aerial on the chimney, neither of which are even connected. The Sky dish mount would be relatively easy to reuse and get the cable into the loft, but the aerial on the chimney is a bit more of a faff. Would the extra 3 or so metres of height make much of a difference?
Is there 4 external antenna ports, I'd have ordered a second for that price.

is the 2.4ghz wifi set at 20Mhz or 40Mhz?
 
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Is there 4 external antenna ports, I'd have ordered a second for that price.

is the 2.4ghz wifi set at 20Mhz or 40Mhz?

Yes, there's 4 antenna ports. Although, from what I've read on here the top and bottom two are for different things? (I don't really understand the technical details lol)

Given I'm in between 2 5G masts, if I bought 2 would pointing them at the same mast give different results than pointing one at each?

With regards to the WiFi, it's currently set to Auto 20/40 as it's been giving me the best results, when I set it to 40mhz the speeds half, and the ping shoots up to 150ms, 20mhz is more or less the same as Auto, so I'm guessing it's choosing 20mhz?
 
So I've had it set up for nearly a week now, and I've been averaging 150-200 download with 50 upload, not bad at all considering it barely gets 5G and over relatively dodgy WiFi.
I've managed to borrow an AP (none of the ones I had laying around had gigabit ports!) so I'm going to give that a try tonight.

One thing I have noticed is it doesn't really like doing two things at once, if I'm streaming a YouTube video on my phone, the internet feels really sluggish on the laptop, despite having plenty of bandwidth available. Has anyone else noticed this, or could that be down to the iffy WiFi?


I also took it to my mother's today to give it a try at hers, and despite her house actually having 5G coverage on the checker, it refused to connect to 5G
 
Sounds like iffy wifi to me. I use a USB dongle on my PC and getting a better one made a big difference.

As regards 5G coverage I treat those maps as advertisements rather than the results of careful tests. Certainly where I live in SW6 they are totally wrong.
 
Sounds like iffy wifi to me. I use a USB dongle on my PC and getting a better one made a big difference.

As regards 5G coverage I treat those maps as advertisements rather than the results of careful tests. Certainly where I live in SW6 they are totally wrong.
Yeah, I just connected up the AP, and the speeds are slower overall (its a £30 AP, so no surprise there), but way more consistent.

The issue with my mother's house is it's surrounded by trees on one side, so I'm guessing that has a bit impact on the 5G. Although, the mast is actually on the opposite side to the trees, so maybe not.

I do get pretty good 5G in the garden on my phone, but even with the hub in the window, it picked up nothing. Even the 4G was crap, it could only manage 7 down and 1 up! Strangely, it had better speeds further in the house compared to the window

Brought it back to mine and it's same speeds as usual
 
Unfortunately I don't think I'll be going ahead with keeping the 5G home broadband with Three.

Speeds seem to be all over the place (although that could be because they're apparently working on the mast), and the hub that I have is obviously a dud.

While I do think it's a great option, I'm probably just too far outside of the coverage to make it work reliably without investing quite a bit in an antenna and the effort of fitting it.

Virgin offered me the M200 package for £22 a month, which is pretty much what I get with 5G when it's working properly. Not the best deal on the world, but I've accepted it.

I'll keep the 5G Hub for now, but I'm not sure whether to just return it in the 14 days, or keep it for a month and see if they ask for it back!
I've heard stories about them not bothering, but I can't imagine they'd let me keep it after 1 payment!
 
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