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Three 5G Home Broadband New Download Limit 120mbps

I experienced the exact same issue with them last year.
I was having issues with losing connection 3 times in a row every hour (turns out it was unrelated) however the guy I spoke to the said he was going to IIRC disable ipv6 on my SIM card.

Afterwards I had exactly the same issue, throttled to 120Mbps.

Replacing the SIM had no effect and eventually cancelled the contract and immediately purchased a new SIM straight afterwards and was back to normal.

Yes, it is an account issue and is related to the 3internet APN.

Yes they are clueless and cannot fix it either.
 
As I described in my post and something that has been experienced by others these speeds limits are clearly being placed on individual accounts and have nothing to do with the local mast or anything else.

Nearly a week later after having my new sim card/phone number/contract with Three, all is still good. No limits and I'm hitting around 600mbps download 70mbps upload all of the time, even during peak times, speed test 10mins ago (20:30) was 544 download and 71 upload, so I'm happy, as it stands. But how long will it be before I'm no longer a new customer and they decide to limit my speeds again, if this is the reason, they do it that is, but they are definitely limiting people's speeds on an individual account basis, and I cannot see another reason why?

One of the things that the majority of the people who have posted about having a limit appear on their account all of a sudden seem to have in common, is that they are all close to the 5G mast and would get extremely high download speeds, 500-1000mbps. So, I wonder if Three are highlighting these people in particular as taking up too much resource and limiting their accounts. Whatever they are up to, they won't admit for one minute it is them and are adamant they don't throttle speeds.

I messaged one of the Three moderators/techs on the Three community site which I have posted on with all of the evidence with the tests above from last week, proving that my old account was limited, and my account wasn't and asking his thoughts on whether he still believes Three don't throttle connections....and he has yet to reply!
 
I replied to the other similar thread, but should probably also mention here that I am also convinced Three throttle some heavy users. I can never ever go above about 120 now, it’s always around that and definitely feels and behaves like a hard limit. Have tried 3 routers (current is an external MC7010 on my roof). Used to get between 200-300 consistently, occasionally towards 400. Haven’t bothered speaking to CS, it’s always been a pointless exercise listening to their script. Change of APN makes no difference. Oh well, at least it’s a solid and reliable 120 and suits our needs (family of 5 using as main connection, always on the internet streaming Netflix 4K sometimes at the same time). Just annoying they are so secretive and say there is no limit.

Last nights speedtest result attached.
 

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Same issue - was working fine. One day there was some drops, rang them, mast issue in the area.. they changed a setting and I never got above 120 Mbps since. I am wondering if ThreeUK are using a technicality to limit - it appears that CA (Carrier Aggregation) is not enabled on my account for 3internet APN. This stops the router from making multiple connections to the mast to increase throughput - and I suspect a single 4G and 5G connection saturates at 120mbps.

The other APNs are faster - so we can rule out my network - it's their end, although they're shared with mobile phone customers so they vary a lot and they are carrier NAT'd so you get a 10.x address and nothing Internet routable.. also you keep hitting the "Are you a robot?" prompts on Google where you have to click bridges etc because someone else on the network has malware on their device... so it's not really usable.

I've rung about 3 times asking them to look at it and they always default to asking me to factory reset my modem, telling me to just use another APN or telling me that 120mbps isn't fast - which is true it is fast - but the whole point of me having the account was because my home broadband is limited to 80mbps and if Three were better than that then I was excited - the difference between 80 and 120 isn't that great that I might as well cancel.. but I did go down the path of getting an outside 5G aerial fitted and the router (ZTE in my case) has been put in my unboarded loft so it would be difficult to return the equipment.

My friend brought her Three hub along (also a ZTE). I plugged that in and did a speedtest and absolutely blazing speeds.

Thanks for confirming the SIM card replacement did nothing - I was tempted to try that on mine.

Oh and regarding the IPv6 stuff - I believe they can set the device to go do a different datacentre, their old and new network and what they did was migrate me to the new one - the IPv6 based one. They said everyone will get moved across eventually and they do them in batches - they said there was no option (yet) to revert back but that is what we should ask for. This has nothing to do with whether or not you have IPv6 turned on - pure backend stuff.

BT are planning on doing full fibre in my area within the next year so I will just ditch Three then. Half tempted to buy another ZTE off Amazon/eBay and then add another EE SIM to my account.
 
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I have the same issue, this is on 4 different sim cards, 3, Scancom and Smarty with 4 CA bands showing.

Restricted to 100/50 on my local mast. :unsure:
 
I come with an update.

So, if you are using the "3internet" APN and have the PDP type of "IPv4" set - then if your account has been migrated to "the new IPv6 network" (as in your SIM is set to connect to their new 5G mobile network core (MNC) data centre), then you will typically be limited to 120 Mbps.

There will be no Carrier Aggregation (ZTE shows this always as "No CA" irrespective of load) so I believe this is probably the limit from a single connection - there may not even be any deliberate limit beyond this technical limitation of a single 5G connection to the mast.

However if you switch to "IPv4v6" then your MTU will drop from 1380 to 1352 (due to the additional size of the IPv6 packet that encapsulates your IPv4 packet) and you will not get a public IPv4 address (instead the network performs DS-Lite so IPv4 packets get wrapped into IPv6) and more importantly 5G Carrier Aggregation will be active which will unlock significantly better speeds (depending on congestion).

Obviously having to infer a lot here but I wonder if the IPv4 PDP is just for legacy devices and devices which have compatibility issues with things such as CA. It's a pity that this seems to be the only way to get a public IPv4 address on Three. Could also just be a bottleneck of the 5G IPv6 MNC having to reach back into the 4G MNC SGSN/PGW/GGSN.

A lot of people get confused by the 192.0.0.2 address you get allocated, confusing it with the 192.168.x.x private network (RFC1918) range.. but this is the correct IP for DS-Lite (RFC6890) and outside the other private network range.

The IPv6 address I believe is public but I'm struggling to get DHCPv6-PD to work (perhaps ThreeUK don't support it). That's a different topic.
 
That MTU drop causes some problems with Torguard VPN - have to reduce Wireguard MTU to 1300 or ebay.co.uk won't connect and my tuta email keeps losing connection. Fixed on Linux/Wireguard but can't change the MTU on Android so have to drop the VPN sometimes.
 
That MTU drop causes some problems with Torguard VPN - have to reduce Wireguard MTU to 1300 or ebay.co.uk won't connect and my tuta email keeps losing connection. Fixed on Linux/Wireguard but can't change the MTU on Android so have to drop the VPN sometimes.
Shouldn't need to change the client's MTU.. a good router will tell the client to re-adjust for a connection. I have EdgeRouter set to failover between 2 ISPs. The Three interface it knows has a lower MTU and the BT one it knows full 1500.. if you try to send something larger the EdgeRouter tells it via ICMP that it's too much and to drop back.

Dicking around with:

ping google.com -f -l 1324
ping google.com -f -l 1325

Shows me what the maximum I can send is (IPv4 + ICMP headers is 28, so add 28 to whatever number it starts failing on).. on the EdgeRouter-X it auto-detects on startup and sets the interface accordingly but on EdgeRouter-4 it either doesn't auto-detect or I haven't rebooted it while on the IPv4v6 PDP to find out.

Make sure you're not blocking or firewalling all ICMP.. should allow some of the proper codes to come in for MTU errors to flow right.

Few other things I've learnt, if you're not on the new network (I got a friend to change theirs) then selecting IPv4v6 breaks your connection until you change it back.. and also yes the IPv6 is publicly routable, I tapped into my EE (with the WiFi off of course) iPhone in Safari the IPv6 address in the address bar and then I started getting IPv6 firewall drop events on the EdgeRouter for that connection... so you can host IPv6 stuff off it - just can't work out how to make it share out that address range with the clients using IPv6 PD yet.
 
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Didnt think 3 had a FUP - They market it as unlimited still as such.
Dug into all their T&Cs and they truly are unlimited still (As off today until otherwise proven :) )
 
Didnt think 3 had a FUP - They market it as unlimited still as such.
Dug into all their T&Cs and they truly are unlimited still (As off today until otherwise proven :) )
It's just the Scancom three Unlimited data SIM that has a 1000GB FUP Fkofilee, it just stops until renewal day, which is usually the 7/8th of the month.
Unlimited direct from three, is truly unlimited (y)
 
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My 3 scancom sim stopped working the other day, although it's also very possible I may have hit the 1000GB FUP
I have a Scancom 3 "Unlimited" SIM and it says "Fair Use Policy of 1000GB Every Month Set By Three" on the Amazon page, I've just looked.

But when I bought it, I'm pretty sure it said 850GB.
 
I have a Scancom 3 "Unlimited" SIM and it says "Fair Use Policy of 1000GB Every Month Set By Three" on the Amazon page, I've just looked.

But when I bought it, I'm pretty sure it said 850GB.
Hi Alan4848333299,
Yes you're correct, they did previously have a FUP of 850GB on their Three unlimited SIM's, but recently in all their descriptions it now states 1000GB :)
 
I can confirm the issues you're experiencing here. The 3internet APN appears to be limited to 120mbps, except when you're using a VPN and the likes so it appears to be a bit of DPI going on. Switching over to the Three.co.uk APN the speed jumps up to around 500mbps.
 
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