This might be the handy post mentioned
Throttling Tests & Resolution with APN Change
Hi All – I spoke again to technical team on 21/02/24, who were useless like usual, who passed me through to the complaints team again as they said they could not work out why my connection was maxing out at 120mbps and why it had changed and were still adamant they don’t limit or throttle connections! I’m being more convinced now that the technicians truly believe the connections aren’t being throttled, but there is something going on higher up above them doing this, that they have no control over!
Anyway, after I had finished with the complaints team, I did a little more digging around and went into the router settings to check the APN Access Point Name) which there are many posts about and has been mentioned on here. The APN was set to automatic and was ‘3internet’. On reading up it seems ‘3internet’ is the standard one used for broadband. I changed to manual rather than automatic APN and used ‘three.co.uk’ instead, and then did a speed test and 584mbps!! After all this, for me all that was needed changing was the APN, and I should have checked this earlier as other posts suggested.
I tried the following APN’s and all of them worked without a download limit apart from the ‘3internet’ one which is clearly being throttled-
3internet – 120mbps
three.co.uk – 543mbps
3broadband.ie – 567mbps
3ireland.ie – 532mbps
open.internet – 578mbps
So frustrating that no one from the Technical know this or could have suggested changing the APN and even more frustrating that everyone from Three are still adamant there are no speed limits and they don’t throttle – it’s obvious they do, and even more so from the further testing I did below!
Before I realised that it was just the APN that needed changing, I said to the complaints team the only thing left is to cancel my current contract and start a new contact with a brand-new sim card to see if that fixes the issue, as it has done for others, to which they agreed. This is the only plus point I have out of this whole charade as I was going to be paying full price for the next 8 months and I now have a new contract, 6 months half price, and I also ordered via TopCashBack and have already had the £102 cashback confirmed, will be payable in a few months!
So, I ordered a new contract, and a brand-new router and sim card were delivered the day after, so I started testing! My current or old router as such is the Zyxel NR5103e, and the new router they sent me was the updated version of this Zyxel NR5103eV2. I will call them V1 and V2 moving forward.
So first off, I tried a speed test with the new router (V2) and new sim card, and on checking the APN was automatically set as ‘3internet’. Speed test was pretty normal with a very high upload speed 472dowload/110upload. I then put my old sim card into the V2 and ran the same test and the results were just as with the V1 – 119download/61.9upload!! I replicated these tests using my old router (V1) and had similar results with the speeds being unlimited on my new card, and limited to 120 download on the old card when accessing via the ‘3internet’ APN.. If this isn’t clear evidence that Three are throttling connections on certain accounts I don’t know what is?? Three has clearly throttled my old account when using the APN ‘3internet’ but my new card hasn’t been throttled, YET, so I can get varied and what appears to be unlimited speeds. When I use any of the other APN’s on either sim card the results are all similar with no throttling.
As an additional test, I put the broadband sims in my mobile, and changed the APN from three.co.uk, which is the standard for mobile devices to ‘3internet’ and the results were identical to above. Old sim card throttled to 120mbps, new sim card no limit!
I am collated all of the information and speed tests I have and will reporting this to Ofcom next week as Three are still advertising their 5G with no speeds limits, which clearly, for many people, is not true!
NR5103e VS NR5103eV2 Testing
Whilst I had the opportunity, I went deeper into testing the two routers to see which one I wanted to keep for my new contract. The new router is much smaller which is a plus point, it is also worryingly much lighter, does that speak for the quality of the components?
I placed each router in the exact same space on my windowsill where I get the best signal. It didn’t take long to notice that the NR5103e (V1) had a better and much more stable signal than the newer NR5103eV2 (V2). I will refer to them as V1 & V2 moving from now on.
The V1 would be at a constant 87-89 RSRP, 15 SINR, 2/3 RSRQ and it would always be on a continual 5G connection, rarely dropping to 4G.
In comparison the newer V2 was so temperamental with the signal. It would generally stick at around 93RSRP but occasionally dip to 88 at random, then up to 96 and moving around all over. SINR 13, RSRQ was worse at 11. But what was really noticeable was the constant jumping between 5G, 4G+ and 4G. There was rarely a moment when I was looking at the signal where it was on 5G constantly and would change every 30 seconds or so and would dance about between them all, which can’t be great for a reliable connection surely?
The speed tests were actually ok for both. The download speed was noticeably quicker on the V1 which regularly would hit 200mbps higher than the V2, this could simply be down to the fact the signal was more reliable. But to put in perspective, even the lowest download on the V2 was still 300mpbs. The highest on V2 was 575, highest on V1 was 860mbps! One thing where the V2 did sometimes shine though was the upload speed. At times the upload speed would be 90-110mbps on the V2 where as the V1 could only manage 75-85mbps. The V1 was a constant upload speed though with no dips, whereas the V2 dropped as low as 60 sometimes. All I can think of here is the V2 is better at handling uploads compared to the V1, so when it has a strong, constant signal, it will achieve a higher upload speed. Either way 60 being the lowest recorded upload speed, it still incredibly quick and more than enough!
Overall, either router would probably work fine for most people, although this depends on your signal and how close you are to the mast. As I have mentioned in previous posts, I am very lucky, that although I don’t have clear line of sight to the mast and there are a couple of houses in the way, it’s almost irrelevant as I am approx. 50m away from it. For me, the extra 20mbps that I sometimes get on upload with the V2, is negligible in comparison to the constant reliable signal that the V1 gets, and the extra download speeds it regularly achieves over the V2 are more useful. There have been a number of posts backing up my findings on the V2 that the signal is all over the place and not reliable and drops out, and for that reason, I am sticking with the trusty V1 for my new 24-month contract.
I hope you find my post useful!
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fashric
Regular
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Friday - last edited Friday
My experience with changing the APN is exactly the same...
Tests done 2 minutes apart, just using different APN! Absolutely disgusting from Three, I too will be getting in contact with Ofcom and the ASA (with whom I have had very good experiences with in the past). Three cannot be allowed to simply get away with this dishonesty and false advertising. This all done using the same equipment, so the ONLY explanation is that they are indeed using speed throttling on certain customers/sims/numbers despite specifically stating no speed limits. Scumbags.
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_duncan_
Fledgling
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Sunday
I'm having the same issues reported here, as well as a few others that don't seem to be mentioned anywhere but feel very related, and (almost all) started at the end of January.
1. Speeds are being capped at 120Mbps down and 60Mbps up. Similar to other commenters, I'm about 50m from the local mast and used to get substantially better speeds. The router hasn't changed, moved, had settings changed, or anything other than where noted.
Here's the download speeds shown from a daily speedtest from my monitoring over the past 6 months:
And upload speeds:
You can see a substantial drop-off at the end of Jan.
2. I got a new router from Three around the end of November (switched from a Huawei one to a Zyxel one), and connection speeds did drop a bit then from consistently around 900Mbps to nearer 6-700Mbps. On the graph above, that's what the vertical blue line indicates. It's running the latest firmware but I wonder if there is maybe some issue there that should be investigated.
3. Pings are failing. I used to be able to ping things like google.com and bbc.co.uk, but now pings just time out.
4. There's an IPv6 address now. My internal network is still all IPv4 so I'm not fully using it, but I've tried switching the router to IPv4 only, IPv6 only, etc, and not seen speed improvements.
5. Inbound connections are failing. I'm guessing CGNAT is in place now as mentioned by a few other posters on the forum, which makes sense with IPv6 there but is causing some minor problems for me.
6. VPN connections seem to have even more restricted upload speeds. I'm not 100% sure what I'm seeing, but it seems my work's VPN is being capped at 30Mbps uploads, and connections to Windscribe appear to be capped at about 10Kbps(!) upload with IKEv2 protocols which makes it almost unusable. If I try it using wireguard or Windscribe's "Stealth" profile the speeds increase to nearer 60Mbps.
I've tried contacting customer support about it but not got anywhere other than a suggestion to get a new sim card, which I've not had a chance to try yet. I did also try the APN thing but it refused to route traffic unless it was set to 3internet with IPv6 enabled.
