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Three broadband slowed down.

Mreed1988

Member
Hi I tried 3 mobile broadband .... in the first 2 to 3 months it was great speeds between 30 and 40mbs all the times of day. Now I am experiencing as low a 2mbs rendering the Internet un usable between the hours of 20:00 and midnight. But then from 00:00hrs to 00:30 hrs the Internet speeds up and a speed test shows 20mbs plus and first thing in the morning it's always over 40mbs. My question is are 3 now slowing me down at peak times?
Marr
 
Sounds more like congestion on the network as those would be peak times for people streaming video and using the internet. I doubt they are throttling you, just high contention ratio.

Are you quite a distance from the mast?
 
I have been running tests on Three and Vodafone over the last four weeks. My Three figures are blue and my Voda figures are red..

Yes Three gets higher highs but is has far more extreme drops. This is in London SW6.
Speed 16.10.22.jpg
 
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Sounds more like congestion on the network as those would be peak times for people streaming video and using the internet. I doubt they are throttling you, just high contention ratio.

Are you quite a distance from the mast?
I'm 2 miles from the mast. I understand what you mean regarding peak times but that dosnt explain the first few months of decent Internet at all times of the day and now it's rubbish. They give you 4 weeks cooling off period and it's as if they wait for that period to end and then reduce u down once your formally into the contract.
 
What I have never seen explained on this forum is what sort of capacity these 'masts' might have.

When most of us were introduced to cellular phone systems they were there to make phone calls. If we are now getting businesses using them to back up their daily data to the cloud each evening how many of these might it take to clog the system?

This is my chart of useage for yesterday evening. From about 19.00 to 22.00 were were streaming iPlayer. The big spike around 15.00 was when I ran a SpeedTest. Is the 'mast' or its supporting network capable of handling the equivalent of masses of these all at the same time.

Speed streaming.jpg


What I am wondering is whether a few new big clients nearby might be your problem?

FURTHER THOUGHT.

If you think your Three contract is being throttled why don't you splurge out on a £6 Smarty card and see if that runs as fast as your existing one did? If it does then you have a case to challenge Three with.
 
Last edited:
I'm 2 miles from the mast. I understand what you mean regarding peak times but that dosnt explain the first few months of decent Internet at all times of the day and now it's rubbish. They give you 4 weeks cooling off period and it's as if they wait for that period to end and then reduce u down once your formally into the contract.
Three say they don't throttle customers, and from what I have experienced, I believe this to be the case. However, they do have contention/congestion issues. For example, a mast has 100mbps back haul. If only one customer is online, they will see a max speed of 100mbps. However, if 100 customers are all online, they will each be limited to 1mbps, so the more users your mast is currently providing service to, the slower each will be. As 8pm to about midnight is considered peak time, all users would see speeds drop during that time. Of course, this is very dynamic and average speeds will change constantly depending on how each user is using the service.

But the information you gave suggested to me that the router might be shifting Bands (ie dropping a higher Band like 1 or 3, down to 20) This happens when on the outer fringes of the cell. Basically, the mast determines you are not within the threshold for the higher band and hands you off to Band 20 which tends to be slower. It is very noticeable, speed wise. You can get around this by locking to the higher band. Have you ever tried restarting the router when this happens?
 
I'm 2 miles from the mast. I understand what you mean regarding peak times but that dosnt explain the first few months of decent Internet at all times of the day and now it's rubbish.
It only takes a few bandwidth hogs to come along and join your mast for your service to degrade.

Many providers, but Three in particular, are marketing 4G/5G as a fixed line replacement, to businesses as well as consumers.

You can understand them wanting to pick up any possible revenue stream to help recoup their investments - but to me it seems pretty short-sighted to burn their limited spectrum capacity this way.
 
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No reply to the recent suggestions so I guess we have lost the OP.
Some people have lives and may be busy
Hi I tried 3 mobile broadband .... in the first 2 to 3 months it was great speeds between 30 and 40mbs all the times of day. Now I am experiencing as low a 2mbs rendering the Internet un usable between the hours of 20:00 and midnight. But then from 00:00hrs to 00:30 hrs the Internet speeds up and a speed test shows 20mbs plus and first thing in the morning it's always over 40mbs. My question is are 3 now slowing me down at peak times?
Marr
It's contention nothing more, off peak i get around 800MB/s during the day i lose 300MB/s+
 
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