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Three is finally working properly OMFG.

richi

Casual Member
After months of frustrating random timeouts/retries when loading pages, Three seems to have fixed it (at least from where I sit).

Holy mother of dog.

Dunno if this is network-wide, or confined to certain masts: They sent me an SMS a few days ago, saying they'd be working on my mast (I connect to cell 3143426 / eNB 12279). Things were pretty ropey over the weekend, but from Monday morning onwards, I've not noticed a single timeout/retry loading a web page.

One thing I did notice—and I think this is a change—is the true MTU has dropped to 1400. So if you have, say, 1440 or 1500 set, large packets will fragment. Best to drop it down to 1400: on my B535 it's at /html/content.html#mobileconnection or you can set it from the API tab in LTE H-Monitor.

(this is using the default APN of 3internet)
 
I'm humming along at 40Mbps currently, BUT its a far cry from 100Mbps+ I got 24/7 this time last year.
 
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Yeah, probably too early to shout 'hurrah' and see how it is during load and weekends.
 

11.85Mbps down and 1.64Mbps up currently, (also scoring an F for buffer float on other tests) with nothing else downloading in the house.

Not be doing much tonight on three then.

Rebooted router:

20.4Mbps down and 15Mbps up.


Slight improvement. Ping is still utterly pants.
 
Here in beautiful downtown Basingstoke (south) the Three HomeFi was doing OK, like the other people on here, until a couple of months ago. Average was 49 down 25 up. Pretty good. Rural area though. £22 p.m.

The DNS/hiccup/slowmo bug hit. Not as bad as was for other people but still occasionally noticable. Most of the time it's not enough of a problem to think about switching. Streaming services seem unaffected.

We're currently at 60 mps down over 4G cell and 5GHz wifi with the HomeFi running in bridge mode into a TP-Link Archer C50 router (£30). I use OpenDns in the TP-link. HomeFi B311 is on the internal antennas next to a PVC front door.

There's a Synology NAS on the ethernet which managed to dump 500 GB onto Gdrive over a couple of nights, so it's all pretty livable-with. The occasional browsing slow-downs irritate though, but not enough to send me back to BT et al.

Contract ends in June 2021, so I'll reappraise then.


Clipboard01.jpg
 
Speeds are pretty much maxed out there for Three's B3 alone (y)

Cellmapper suggests there isn't any B1 around the Basingstoke area so carrier aggregation (4G+) isn't available - even if you were considering swapping out the B311 for something better you wouldn't likely see any meaningful uplift in speed.
 
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^^^^

Well quite. I've been on 3G and then 4G broadband from Three for about the last ten years, so have seen a few bleak moments. But it works well, most of the time, for me.

There's always the 'hope' that buying more kit gets more performance but 40 down (often more) is fine. Grouches about the B311 were the lack of 5Ghz WiFi and only one ethernet port. Solved with the Archer C50 add on, although its four ethernet ports are 10/100 only.

About once a month the B311 hiccups, gets a reboot and returns to normal. Comms is a 'black art' they say. :)

I'm unsure as to what happens to the discounts on the Three contract when the two years is up. I'm hoping it doesn't roll over to the £70 before all the discounts were applied to drag it down to £22 p.m.

Anyway, thanks to all for the great feedback and info on the Three network and mobile data in general.
 
Here in beautiful downtown Basingstoke (south) the Three HomeFi was doing OK, like the other people on here, until a couple of months ago.
Greetz from the other side of Amazingstoke. It sounds like you're picking up service from one of the band-3-only masts in that area. Try using cellmapper.net to find one of the masts that will aggregate bands 3+20. However, beware: I'm using a band-3-only mast, but when I aim at my local bands 3+20 mast, I end up with less throughput—I think due to congestion.

cells.jpg


I don't know of anyone who's managed to aggregate bands 3+1 @GavinAshford. Did you mean 3+20?
 
Personally,
Greetz from the other side of Amazingstoke. It sounds like you're picking up service from one of the band-3-only masts in that area. Try using cellmapper.net to find one of the masts that will aggregate bands 3+20. However, beware: I'm using a band-3-only mast, but when I aim at my local bands 3+20 mast, I end up with less throughput—I think due to congestion.

View attachment 466

I don't know of anyone who's managed to aggregate bands 3+1 @GavinAshford. Did you mean 3+20?
I looked at the same map/masts and my comment was that as there wasn't any B1 in the area (other than a couple of masts to the north/north-east) it would be fruitless to think about replacing the B311 modem for one that can aggregate bands.
With Three, I pretty much ignore B20 as they don't own enough of it to make any significant difference, or worse, reduce speeds as you've found!

Also, hi to you both, I'm just a couple of junctions up the M3, near Camberley.
 
Apart from the well publicised 'stalling' issue the Three service has been excellent here for the last 15 months. There's always the temptation to upgrade the B311 router, tempered by the box full of old 3G kit in the cupboard lying unused.

The backup Plan B hardware is a 4G Mifi. It gets used in the car, but if the B311 dies, we can still get Der Internetz.

My elderly parents on the other hand, have had two BT outages in the last year, followed by moronic 'customer services' advice about replacing micro-filters unscrewing test sockets, and threats of a £120 engineer visit if they can't fix it themselves.

All by robot text message they can neither read nor understand. (HomeHub crashes.) Their last bill was £250 for the quarter.

If 4G works then it's great. It's just the hiccupy nature of anything to do with radio transmitters, backhauls, contention, and other people's infrastructure you can't take a screwdriver to to fix. :)
 
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I’ve just had an email off of Three for my grandparents home broadband saying the big network build is happening and speed increases of up to 130% are to be expected..
Gives me some regret I cancelled my £5 unlimited everything SIM.
 
Upload was still slow as it was relying on the B3, feel like my device would of been able to achieve more if I was able to also connect too B1 and B20 aswell but it didn't seem as if 4x4 MIMO was available and to be honest I've only come across this in London so far with EE.
4x4 is likely to have been available if B32 was present, however the level of MIMO that you are connected with at a given time is dependent upon the connection metrics (SINR/power etc) - it could easily drop to 2x2 or 1x1
 
Well I went on a hunt today and while I found some more band 32 sites and went into 5G zones connections and speed where still very poor, so I guess backhual is an issue too.

I believe backhaul is a major factor with slower speeds on 4g as well as 5g where Three's network is concerned.
 
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Apart from the well publicised 'stalling' issue the Three service has been excellent here for the last 15 months. There's always the temptation to upgrade the B311 router, tempered by the box full of old 3G kit in the cupboard lying unused.

I feel the same with my B310, I put a Poynting XPOL-2-5G aerial in the roof-space and I don't think I'm going to get anything more out of it as it has flatlined at 150Mbps, possibly the mast limit as well as it's rural, although Band 3 and 20 are available. Maybe wait until the 5G routers go through a few literations and then jump.

I have been on Three broadband for three years now with no issues, ADSL still 1.5Mbps and no Fibre.

lte_log.jpg
 
Having moved from BT fibre due to getting very unstable download speeds that varied between 1-8Mbps (when I had a 10Mbps guaranteed minimum) I was blown away when I plugged in my Huawei B525 last Saturday and was sitting with a pretty consistent 38-40Mbps download and 30+ upload with a ping < 40ms.

Tonight is the first evening I have seen it struggle, and I am not seeing download speeds get over 10Mbps and the ping is erratic but anywhere 130ms-200+ms... Router not moved, no change in routine at this end. Is network saturation really that bad with Three? And of course the support chat closes at 6pm on a Friday.

The 30 days money back may come into play

Current info... (about 500m from the mast, no buildings in the way)

RSRQ... -6.0dB
RSRP... -100dBm
RSSI... -77dBm
SINR... 9dB
 
Absolutely it is. 1 year in I'm 50Mbps down from what I started at. By the end of my 2 year contract I expect it will get worse, not better.

Wonderful... Will keep an eye on the frequency of this. Back above 30Mbps now and ping back down to below 35ms to see how things go.
 
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