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Three Oversubscribed Areas Alert! (And What Action Has Three Taken)

jmngonline

ULTIMATE Member
Please use this forum to list any specific areas that are oversubscribed on Three. Also if you know anything about Three planning to tackle or upgrade the area in response to the problem please mention them aswell.

Thanks

Oversubscribed Locations\/


Three's Head Office, Green Park, Reading

Church Lawton

High Wycombe


West Hull , HU3 Anlaby Rd

The Polygon, Southampton

South Tyneside

Entire South East of County Fermanagh

Tytherington, Macclesfield

Sunderland

Leichester square

Newcastle


Padstow (during summer holidays)

Stamford Lincolnshire

Alsager

Church Lawton

Kidsgrove

St Cross Road Winchester

Newquay

Swanage (during summer when town crowded)

Central Southampton

Discussion \/
 
Last edited:
Please use this forum to list any specific areas that are oversubscribed on Three. Also if you know anything about Three planning to tackle or upgrade the area in response to the problem please mention them aswell.

Thanks

Here's ones I know


St Cross Road Winchester
Newquay
Swanage (during summer when town crowded)
Ocean Village area Southampton

Questions

If someone tries to apply for 5G home broadband then tries a postcode for an oversubscribed area will Three still give the customer the 5G router or will they say they cannot offer the service because of bad speed in the area?
They have been doing that for a long time.

However, since they go by their own outdated data, its not suprising people use different post codes to get the deal (since they are living on the edges and margins of 5G and can pickup good signals.

Calling Three in such a scenario is pointless, since the script monkeys are even more ill informed and will use the timeless cliche of "engineering works" !
 
Please use this forum to list any specific areas that are oversubscribed on Three. Also if you know anything about Three planning to tackle or upgrade the area in response to the problem please mention them aswell.

Thanks

Here's ones I know


St Cross Road Winchester
Newquay
Swanage (during summer when town crowded)
Ocean Village area Southampton

Questions

If someone tries to apply for 5G home broadband then tries a postcode for an oversubscribed area will Three still give the customer the 5G router or will they say they cannot offer the service because of bad speed in the area?


Newcastle City Centre is heavily oversubscribed. Most of South Tyneside also apart from certain bits.
 
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Newcastle City Centre is heavily oversubscribed. Most of South Tyneside also apart from certain bits.
South Tyneside has been a joke to Three since day one. In the early days you'd constantly roam onto Orange's 2G even in fairly central parts of South Shields itself under their coverage agreement. Once that ended it was blackspots galore (as were many other coastal towns too in my experience). They finally increased their coverage as 4G expanded but lack any kind of capacity.

I Don't live in South Tyneside but I am not far away and where I am the Three network is a congested mess too - To the point that data can sometimes just stop altogether and there's seemingly not even enough capacity to reliably hold a VoLTE call. It's a joke!

Across Tyne and Wear the UK's most oversubscribed network O2 actually holds up really well everywhere except for parts of Newcastle City Centre. If you want a solid experience throughout central Newcastle it's basically a choice of EE or nothing from what I've seen.
 
Entire South East of County Fermanagh, eNB 12742 and the sites that it provides backhaul for (ie eNB 6719 and eNB 10872).

Three have known about the problem for years and nothing has been done about it. Other than if you don't like it, go elsewhere. They will also let you out of contract for it.

I have seen a Band 28 (EARFCN 9360, PCI 216) apparently coming from eNB 6719 in the past few weeks, but can't connect to it. Mast still reporting CA B3+B20. However the speed has doubled on B3+B20, so hopefully they are doing something!
 
Tytherington, Macclesfield served by 2 sites, one is B3,B20,B28 and the other is B3 only

1718727432613.webp
 
I live in South Tyneside, and can confirm it and Newcastle-upon-Tyne being absolutely dreadful for Three performance - I was on SMARTY/Three themselves last year, and while at home I got amazing performance due to being next to a PoW, moving out of its range, data speeds crawled to an almost complete stop.

And in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, data stopped working full-stop. I had to get a bit close to Central Station for any kind of data throughput to happen, even if very little happened. 99% of the time I had to connect to some public Wi-Fi, or hop on my bne eSIM.

Ended up leaving them for O2 when I got a discounted line in my dad's name, and while the performance ain't too amazing, it at least works for me and doesn't cut out completely.
 
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South Tyneside has been a joke to Three since day one. In the early days you'd constantly roam onto Orange's 2G even in fairly central parts of South Shields itself under their coverage agreement. Once that ended it was blackspots galore (as were many other coastal towns too in my experience). They finally increased their coverage as 4G expanded but lack any kind of capacity.

I Don't live in South Tyneside but I am not far away and where I am the Three network is a congested mess too - To the point that data can sometimes just stop altogether and there's seemingly not even enough capacity to reliably hold a VoLTE call. It's a joke!

Across Tyne and Wear the UK's most oversubscribed network O2 actually holds up really well everywhere except for parts of Newcastle City Centre. If you want a solid experience throughout central Newcastle it's basically a choice of EE or nothing from what I've seen.
Yeah I've only been using them since about 2015 on and off and they were a joke then. I'm using vodafone at the moment sheerly because EE don't wanna use B28 for 4g and their indoor coverage is shocking in the North East, vodafone also work well in the centre, plenty of 4CA sites with 1,7,8,20 on them:).

O2 are decent here and in a lot of the North East plenty of capacity deployed. Three have just upgraded a site near me which I now connect to which is great and faster than VF but their too inconsistent as a whole to warrant moving my number over. Bet you enjoy the 4G on the metro underground stations on EE haha.
 
I live in South Tyneside, and can confirm it and Newcastle-upon-Tyne being absolutely dreadful for Three performance - I was on SMARTY/Three themselves last year, and while at home I got amazing performance due to being next to a PoW, moving out of its range, data speeds crawled to an almost complete stop.

And in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, data stopped working full-stop. I had to get a bit close to Central Station for any kind of data throughput to happen, even if very little happened. 99% of the time I had to connect to some public Wi-Fi, or hop on my bne eSIM.

Ended up leaving them for O2 when I got a discounted line in my dad's name, and while the performance ain't too amazing, it at least works for me and doesn't cut out completely.
Newcastle and Sunderland city centres are awful for Three. South Shields is okay-ish in certain places now but the sites with single band 4G are crippled mostly, lots of blackspots aswell, I'm using vodafone, glad you're happy on o2 though.
 
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View attachment 15620

This was their 4G band 1 ca speed at Southampton General Hospital. Ill let you decide if this is considered to be oversubscribed speeds or just slow.
Those results don't seem to indicate oversubscription but instead indicate traffic management to ensure a low level of performance for important use cases.

10 MHz of B1 provides up to 50.4 Mbps so 5.41/50.4 = 10.7% is not unreasonable for a throttled connection in an important area where usability and function are more important than raw throughput. https://www.3glteinfo.com/lte-data-rate-throughput/

5.41 Mbps down versus 7.85 Mbps shows a mild level of downward congestion/contention whereas I previously saw on Three UK sub 1 Mbps down versus 10 Mbps to 30 Mbps up which was a much surer indication of congestion/contention and this was when Three UK was my main internet connection for work and the contention was seen in the middle of my working day.

When oversubscription, congestion, contention, and saturation are at play, download ping and upload ping usually show over 1000 ms and 2000 ms in my experience and 601 ms is borderline as to whether you are seeing traffic management or congestion.

Given the presence of a hospital, it's not unreasonable that the carrier will prioritize accessibility over raw throughput in that location.
 
It would probably be unlawful to back out of the proposed merger, without a good reason, so it's reasonable for Three UK to behave as if the merger were to go ahead, as has been promised to the public and financial markets, until such time as there is a blocker.
How can you promise something that is reliant on someone else approving it?

I cant see how anyone can rationally defend it. (assuming they not affiliated with either three or VF in some way).

What are they going to do if there is no approval for some more years, will they keep behaving like a spoilt child that isnt getting their own way?
 
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Those results don't seem to indicate oversubscription but instead indicate traffic management to ensure a low level of performance for important use cases.

10 MHz of B1 provides up to 50.4 Mbps so 5.41/50.4 = 10.7% is not unreasonable for a throttled connection in an important area where usability and function are more important than raw throughput. https://www.3glteinfo.com/lte-data-rate-throughput/

5.41 Mbps down versus 7.85 Mbps shows a mild level of downward congestion/contention whereas I previously saw on Three UK sub 1 Mbps down versus 10 Mbps to 30 Mbps up which was a much surer indication of congestion/contention and this was when Three UK was my main internet connection for work and the contention was seen in the middle of my working day.

When oversubscription, congestion, contention, and saturation are at play, download ping and upload ping usually show over 1000 ms and 2000 ms in my experience and 601 ms is borderline as to whether you are seeing traffic management or congestion.

Given the presence of a hospital, it's not unreasonable that the carrier will prioritize accessibility over raw throughput in that location.
It's better using https://tools.pedroc.co.uk/4g-speed/. That site outputs completely different numbers to what the tool above.

Shows 75/25 on a 64QAM/16 configuration (which I assume that the site you linked was using) at 10MHz, can't know true configuration unless someone uses NSG.

Theoretically, I think it would be more likely to be 98/37.5 anyways, I use the general rule of 10MHz = 98-100mbps on 4G and 10MHz = 105mbps on 5G
 
All of the ST7 area is heavily congested around the areas of Alsager, Church Lawton and Kidsgrove. Even with a full 4G signal no data flows or speeds never get over 0.50mbps

Its shockingly bad, which is annoying as I am about to move to this area and I am currently in a 24 month contract for Three 5G Broadband.

Hoping they let me out the contract considering the hub is loaned not owned.
 
All of the ST7 area is heavily congested around the areas of Alsager, Church Lawton and Kidsgrove. Even with a full 4G signal no data flows or speeds never get over 0.50mbps

Its shockingly bad, which is annoying as I am about to move to this area and I am currently in a 24 month contract for Three 5G Broadband.

Hoping they let me out the contract considering the hub is loaned not owned.

When I was in Kidsgrove recently I was picking up Vodafone 5G SA.
 
It's better using https://tools.pedroc.co.uk/4g-speed/. That site outputs completely different numbers to what the tool above.

Shows 75/25 on a 64QAM/16 configuration (which I assume that the site you linked was using) at 10MHz, can't know true configuration unless someone uses NSG.

Theoretically, I think it would be more likely to be 98/37.5 anyways, I use the general rule of 10MHz = 98-100mbps on 4G and 10MHz = 105mbps on 5G
I've just remembered that cellmapper also has a user-friendly calculator.


1719501700977.png


5.41/75 = 7.2% which I suspect is a higher percentage of 10 MHz max throughput than I see with 110 MHz bandwidth.

I think in practice it's not all that easy to estimate what max throughput I can expect. I know that for the below aggregated bands, I typically see 100 Mbps down and 6 Mbps up which is probably way below what the spectrum can support but my experience does not suggest to me a problem of Three UK oversubscription when I compare throughput results during peak and quiet times. The midhaul/backhaul could be better but I don't get the feeling of brokenness I got when 4G LTE download throughput was sub 1 Mbps before I moved for two years to using EE.

1719501835050.png
 
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