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Originally Posted by Superblade7

As mentioned above had no issues with EE or Three but since joining O2 I've lost count of the number of dropped calls and instances of the data signal dropping down to Edge or GPRS.

And you'll hear just as many people saying the exact same thing about EE.

---------- Post added at 13:28 ---------- Previous post was at 13:09 ----------

Originally Posted by Stuart

In fairness, he is posting from his own experience. It may well be true that his connection got worse at the time O2 launched 4G.

It's possible, though most unlikely. When O2 launches 4G they also massively upgrade the 3G on the same mast. The same applies to Vodafone, but not EE or 3.

It's also worth pointing out that at least one investigation (conducted on behalf of the BBC's Watchdog programme) concluded that several mobile networks had re-allocated a lot of their 3G bandwidth to the 4G network, so 3G users were noticing slower speeds.

That is untrue. Absolutely zero networks reallocated 3G bandwidth to the 4G network. 3G and 4G operate on separate bands that do not overlap and cannot be shared or reallocated.

The backend network linking the sites has a limited bandwidth. Previously, the 3G users on that site would have had nearly 100% of the bandwidth available to them, as GPRS and voice signals use almost no bandwidth. Now, 4G has come along and can use many times more bandwidth than 3G.

That's kinda clutching at straws. If there's too many people on a mast then your performance will be slow nomatter what technology they are using. "Signal" uses no bandwidth, traffic does. The only thing 4G does to the backend network is improve it.

4G does not use more backend bandwidth than 3G, actually it uses less. You are dividing the same amount of bandwidth between the same number of people. If those people weren't on 4G, they'd be on 3G and your 3G connection would be even slower.

Even if the providers aren't specifically reserving bandwidth for 4G (which they may be), 3G phones in busier cells are going to be competing with 4G phones for the limited bandwidth on the cell's data link.

4G is never introduced to a cell without the cell's data link being improved first. Even if it was, it would not make the difference you're suggesting.

Think about it a bit more, perhaps in "consumer" terms that might be more familiar to you:

You have ten users sharing the Wifi on your broadband connection. When ten users are downloading at the same time via 2.4Ghz, your connection is slow. When ten users are shared across 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz, how is it going to be any slower?

Adding 4G is usually combined with the masts' backhaul being improved by far more than 4G can take on it's own, more than doubling the capacity available to 3G even after 4G is all used up.

I've personally noticed my own connection (via EE) getting slower since they rolled out 4G, and that is one possible cause.

This is exactly the sort of misguided thinking I'm talking about. You'd rather jump to blaming 4G, than consider the far more likely fact that 3G users simply use more data (and there are more of them). 3G data usage roughly doubles every year or so, and that has nothing to do with 4G. Smartphone usage has gone up, smartphone ownership has gone up. Less than 15% of people are on 4G. 85% of the usage increase is on 3G.

Put simply, they cut the number of sites, but increased the number of customers. So, less bandwidth on each site to each customer.

They cut the number of sites, but massively improved the sites that remain. Thousands of the sites that were removed had 2Mbps or less. The remaining sites were upgraded to 100Mbps or 1000Mbps. In short, they may have removed 33% of sites, but the other 66% were given 5000% more capacity than they removed. So more backend bandwidth on each site to each customer. Backend capacity is largely irrelevant these days, being far more than required. The real problem is spectrum.

But that's just EE. None of the other networks have been removing masts at the same scale, so even if true, the same reasoning does not hold for 75% of networks.

This brings me back to a comment EE's CEO made quite early on - which is completely true, yet the vast majority of people misinterpreted: 4G does not use more data than 3G.

More people with more smartphones doing more things use more data. If it weren't for 4G, those same people would be on 3G and 3G would be even slower. 4G speeds have in fact almost halved over the past year. I suppose you don't have the convenience of 5G to blame for that huh?