Three 4g router sudden slow speed issues

Associate
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Ive been using my 4g broadband plan for about a month or so now, and its been great until the last few days. I switched away from plusnet as I live in a village and had god awful broadband, unstable and around 24mbps at best,on "fibre". switched to Three and from day 1 i was getting on average 100mbps. same as on my phone with 3. I live on top of a hill fairly near the phone mast so Im lucky in that regard.

Recently my speeds have dropped and I now get 30 mbps at best with an average of about 3-10 mbps. Ive phoned them twice now, first time they told me it was just where I lived and that poor signal is because of where I placed the router, even though I made it clear I had an external antenna attached to the window , that I know from testing before and after gave me a clear speed increase. second time they told me it was my router the Huawei b525 having a software issue. and there was nothing they could do.

So as a last ditch effort to work out whats going on I thought I would post here to see if anyone had a similar experience or knows what to do
 
Man of Honour
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Can you get signal stats from the router such as RSRP (signal receive power), RSRQ (receiving quality) and SNR (signal to noise) would help to see whether the poor speeds are due to contention/usage or signal quality.

Unfortunately with 4G it is going to vary a lot based on weather, RF/EMI source interference and other users and many other factors.
 
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OP
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Sorry to sound like a complete noob but I dont know what is or where to look for it :confused: :D

as for the weather, in my part of the UK ive had very sporadic weather for the last two months ahaha, so I cant see how that would have been an issue.
 
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Ask to get through to one of there tech team members, your being given the "script" off a bit of A4 to get rid of you - 99% of the time useless.


sadly that was their "tech team" although the guy barely new what I was on about and really did sound like he was reading off of a script


Looked all over the web and could not find anything about the b525 having software issues that Huawei are in the process of fixing
 
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I'm not familiar with the control panel on the Huawei b525 but usually you'd log into a web-address like http://192.168.1.1 and it would be under the advanced options.


QEYbcHh




This is the router setting page. not much luck finding anything tbh

https://imgur.com/QEYbcHh
 
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Could also be a lack of backhaul capability, more folk signing up to the service or an increase in load from that tower - is there an tourist sort of things nearby?? caravan park or some other draw for crowds in the summer.

4g is never a good idea for broadband imho.
 
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Nah I live in a small village in hertfordshire, mast is in a less than I deal spot for the village tbh, but if you look on the coverage map im in an ideal location. Hardly anyone round here is on three, and most that are arent heavy data users, mostly old people tbh XD

around the village for at least 5 miles its just fields. Ive been using it for 2 months now with a solid 100mbps down and 30 upload.

before that I was on 24 down and 5 up on my landline, and it would always drop out.


Like I would accept backhaul if I was getting similar speeds both on my phone and the router. But im not, nowhere near, and its both the same network

I have a phone on three and holding my phone next to the antenna and doing a speedtest on my phone signal gives me about 86 mbps, switch it to wifi, and using the same network on the data sim in the 4g router I get about 20 if Im lucky now.

will also mention that since the speed dropping to this level my latency has also increased and the rate of drop outs has also increased. Something not right
 
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Caporegime
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Do Three do any sort of throttling/traffic management on their home 4G services? How much data have you pushed through it?
 
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Three's speed is inconsistent and varies wildly depending on where the device is.

I'm on their unlimited plan (£23/month) and the speed I get is all over the place.

When I place the device right next to the south facing window, I get approx 40 mb/s down, 20 mb/s up, give or take 5-10 mb/s, but anywhere else in the house, it drops to something like 8 mb/s down, 1 mb/s up, dropping down to 0.5 mb/s down and up, it can be unbearable. :( It doesn't matter where the SIM is in, mobile router, my iPad, whatever, the only thing that seems to matter is the location.

With unlimited plan, there shouldn't be any throttling or capping in place, I believe they got sued for that a while ago and removed the limitations.
 
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Do Three do any sort of throttling/traffic management on their home 4G services? How much data have you pushed through it?

Yeah Three got rid of " fair usage" and traffic management a while back, when they introduced their unlimted home broadband plans.

as for where the device is. well I use an external antenna attached to my window with suction cups that came with it. speed is wildly different all over my house, hence why I have always had it here. On my phone the speed is as it always has been, 86mbps and up. Its just my 4g router thats been absolutely hammered. I cant do any streaming now, and the files im downloading are taking so much longer, very frustrating as it being so much faster was the reason I got it in the first place
 
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Weird, just checked today and it all seems to have gone back to normal, and with lower latency. Now on 24ms of ping.

117mbps down and 32mbps upload

Thats what I was after lol. and what I normally get, seems I just had a 3 day blip
 
Soldato
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You'll probably find the speeds will be sporadic as rroff pointed out earlier due to a number of factors. Your phone can probably pick up a better signal than the router, and if there's a few users around you that suddenly start using a reasonable amount of data, your router is probably the first to start to slow down.
 
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Could also be a lack of backhaul capability, more folk signing up to the service or an increase in load from that tower - is there an tourist sort of things nearby?? caravan park or some other draw for crowds in the summer.

4g is never a good idea for broadband imho.

It is when despite living in a large town, you can only get 2 mb/s 'broadband' with no improvement in sight until FTTP allegedly comes our way in 2021.

However if I was getting 24 mb/s like the OP i'd never have gone for it. In my case my three connection varies between about 10 and 30 mb/s and drops connection altogether probably every other day requiring a router reset. Still a better prospect than our fixed connection was, 2mb/s in 2019 is completely unusable.
 
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So we just signed up with Three 4g broadband since BT are being a pain. We got told we could get fibre when we can't so they are putting us on DSL which is expected to get 5mbps. It's been 8 weeks and still no internet.

Anyway. Our Three 4g broadband thing came today, set it all up all the lights are good but my pc can't even load speed checker. I've went into the router settings and it's showing download as between 19- 192kbps.

Went on live chat and they said phone up the tech support because the account seems fine (thought I would need to active the SIM but I don't)

Don't really know what I'm looking for but

RSRQ - -14db
RSRP - -107dBm
RSSI - -73dBm
SINR - -5db

Anything in those number that could be slowing me down?
 
Soldato
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So we just signed up with Three 4g broadband since BT are being a pain. We got told we could get fibre when we can't so they are putting us on DSL which is expected to get 5mbps. It's been 8 weeks and still no internet.

Anyway. Our Three 4g broadband thing came today, set it all up all the lights are good but my pc can't even load speed checker. I've went into the router settings and it's showing download as between 19- 192kbps.

Went on live chat and they said phone up the tech support because the account seems fine (thought I would need to active the SIM but I don't)

Don't really know what I'm looking for but

RSRQ - -14db
RSRP - -107dBm
RSSI - -73dBm
SINR - -5db

Anything in those number that could be slowing me down?


Yeah it shows your mobile Router is receiving a weak 4G signal.

What made you think you have a good signal where you live?
 
Man of Honour
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So we just signed up with Three 4g broadband since BT are being a pain. We got told we could get fibre when we can't so they are putting us on DSL which is expected to get 5mbps. It's been 8 weeks and still no internet.

Anyway. Our Three 4g broadband thing came today, set it all up all the lights are good but my pc can't even load speed checker. I've went into the router settings and it's showing download as between 19- 192kbps.

Went on live chat and they said phone up the tech support because the account seems fine (thought I would need to active the SIM but I don't)

Don't really know what I'm looking for but

RSRQ - -14db
RSRP - -107dBm
RSSI - -73dBm
SINR - -5db

Anything in those number that could be slowing me down?

Those aren't great numbers but should still get you about 18Mbit down, 4Mbit up give or take depending on how stable the signal is and other user contention - if you aren't seeing those speeds it could be there is a lot of contention due to other users, etc. Three where I am is terrible though lots of dropouts and speeds way below what you'd expect from the signal even off peak.

If you can't even load sites possibly some kind of configuration error locally.
 
Associate
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Thought speeds would be fine as BT sent out a little 4g thing to keep us going but it doesn't have any ethernet slots. We're getting like 20-30 down on that. But that's just temporary. Once we get actual internet they're taking it back.

It's now getting 1mb down and 17mb up. Which is weird.
 
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