Three UK - 4G Home Broadband - any users here?

[thetapeworm]

Well this turned into a much more epic topic than I could have ever imagined

I left Three last week, months of issues (that I moaned about here, sorry) and then on the day I moved to my new ISP Three 4G suddenly started working like it had in the first month.

For the week running up to this I'd been forced to use 3G as the 4G was utterly woeful.

Three were decent about it in the end, they released me from my contract early, refunded my last month's payment and didn't charge me an exit fee or the £35 they'd earlier asked for to cover the cost of the hardware.

[thetapeworm]

On the "unlimited" thing I received my final bill through from Three in the post today (presumably because they can't send me a text with it now). I hadn't paid any attention to the previous ones but I found the "outside of your allowance" bit interesting as I was on an "unlimited" package and had no knowledge of an allowance.

[thetapeworm]

DuckSauce said:

Any suggestions on what's gone wrong here?

The router is in the same place its always been, 3 to 4 bars and set to LTE

Used to get around 20 to 25 and now I'm struggling to get above 2. Noticed the last few days everything has been really slow

I suspect they've "carried out some great work to bring you 5G" and screwed up 4G as seems to be the case for so many Three UK customers over the past 6 months.

Towards the end of my period with them I found 3G to be far faster than 4G 99% of the time.

[thetapeworm]

Psycho Warren said:

anybody with recent experience of the three4g lately?

got the hub about 9 months ago as i was fed up of poor service on virgin, regular outages, poor speed despite being fibreoptic and thier increasingly rip off prices.

The last straw was them upping it to over £40 a month. three offered an unlimited tariff on the 4g hub for £15 a month. bargain. on paper slower than virgin but as a single person who only does general internet, youtube and netflix etc then i expected it would be fine.

all has been great until last few weeks.

these are the peak time speeds i am getting:



i know its not a problem with the hub as my three phone gets same kind of speeds.

my hub is line of sight with the tower which is about 3/4 mile away. the problem is only peak hours.

basically as i understand it, either the tower is strugggling due to a fault meaning peak demand 8s too much or there is now congestion due to too many new users in my area.

tried customer services and tech support both through chat and phone and they deny therr is any problems either technical or congestion.

to me those kind of speeds are unacceptable as the net is almost unusable.

do you think i have reasonable case to get out of the contract and go elsewhere? i dont see i have any choice at present.

anybody have a similar expereince? will i get anywhere complaining to three or is it suck it up until out of contract?

That all sounds very family only my poor service came around sooner than yours has, I documented it earlier in this topic but I realise it's now grown beyond anything I could have imagined from my initial question. If you're bored have a look back at my rantings 9Dec 2019 / Jan 2020 ish)

Essentially the issue seemed to stem from the 5G upgrade they were doing on the masts where I was and it was affecting the 4G, I could drop to 3G and get better performance some of the time but it was still incredibly sketchy.

I could see the mast from my house, router in optimal place, all other 4G devices on other networks working just fine, replacement router had no effect, new SIM had no effect (these were all sent by Three support to "fix" things) and in the end I just annoyed them so much on a daily basis (via their support channels and twitter) that they released me from my contract early and told me to keep the hardware (which I sold at CEX for £50).

Three support wouldn't confirm what the underlying issue was, status checkers confirmed there was an "issue" most of the time and coverage stuff said I was in an "excellent" area.

It wasn't easy to escape but persistence in logging and pestering paid off eventually.

http://www.three.co.uk/support/how-to-complain

I had lots of web chats logged already and asked to raise a formal complaint about the service, that's what kicked off the improved levels of support and ultimately allowed me to leave early.

It was a shame as it worked great for the first month or so and then as soon as the cooling off period ended it went to crap. Definitely a localised problem as confirmed by all the posts here where people were getting great service still.

Good luck.

Edited by thetapeworm on Friday 26th February 14:16

[thetapeworm]

Starlink is open to orders if you're brave...

https://www.starlink.com

[thetapeworm]

I'm both amazed this one is still active (I think it's the only thing I've ever posted that's received more than a handful of replies!) and that the same issues that forced me to leave Three still seem to exist today, very disappointing to read.