Quote:
Originally Posted by nialli
As a customer, I am experiencing download speeds of 3Mb or less (according to Speedtest and SpeedSmart). A year ago I had 80Mb+ consistently. Same location (my home office), same phone, same carrier. Something has changed and the only thing I can see is that Virgin is now using the Vodafone network rather than EE.
My wife’s on Three. I put her SIM in my phone and I get 80Mb+. Return the Virgin SIM and it’s back to less than 3Mb again. O2 in the area is even worse. I live in south east London, five miles from the City.
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Well, it isn’t all the same. Virgin is a virtual network. It relies on a physical cell tower provided by one of the big four - previously you were using a local EE tower and now you’re using one provided by Vodafone.
The towers are almost certainly not in the same location, they may not have the same signal strength (the bars on your phone screen are only a very rough guide), and they may not have the same capacity. You could use a website like cellmapper.net to determine which EE tower you were most likely to have been using in the past and compare it to the likely Vodafone candidates in your local area. If you were able to put your SIM in a full-on 4G modem then you would have access to a stats page that would actually give you the cell ID.
My guess is that there is a combination of less optimal cell tower location in relation to your house, and heavier utilisation of the local Vodafone tower meaning there’s less bandwidth available for you. The latter problem is an annual one for me here, as I live in a fairly remote spot that gets very full of tents and caravans in August. For most of the year I can get almost 150/50 from my EE 4G modem, but on a summer evening this can drop to 10/10 or worse.