Vodafone (Lebara) upload speed worse after "Maintenance"

I have a Zyxel LTE7490-M904 4G+ cellular modem mounted outside my house facing my local Vodafone Cell Tower. This has been working fine for 7 months with a very decent 170Mbps download and 55Mbps upload speed (tested and logged every day).

A few days ago, Vodafone performed "maintenance" on the tower (possibly 5g positioning, but that's purely speculation on my part). The UL/DL speeds during maintenance were truly awful, but remained usable for the duration of the maintenance. The maintenance overran for an extra day.

Now the maintenance is complete, the speeds I'm seeing have changed. The Average UL speed has dropped from 55Mbps to 29Mbps. On the plus side The DL speed had improved from ~170Mbps to ~190Mbps.

My question is: As Vodafone 5G rolls out, should we expect the 4G service to get worse?
Also, do any cellular providers tell you the maximum speeds they provide from their towers 4G/5G?

I'm interested to hear opinions on this.

In reply to a post by emearg:

My question is: As Vodafone 5G rolls out, should we expect the 4G service to get worse?

Potentially if they take away frequency spectrum capacity from 4G and use it for 5G, or deploy Dynamic Spectrum Sharing on a frequency band.

e.g. if Vodafone had 15MHz of Band 1 (2100 MHz) and deploy DSS, then the mast will move capacity between both protocols. If there are lots of people with 5G NR capable devices then more capacity will be given to 5G, but if more people have 4G capable devices then 4G LTE has the capacity.

Also, do any cellular providers tell you the maximum speeds they provide from their towers 4G/5G?

No, radio systems are fundamentally shared, so this is impossible. You can calculate a theoretrical capacity over an LTE or NR connection using various online tools, once you know what is available on your cell site sector and what the capabilities are of your equipment.

The tool Cellmapper is worth looking at, if you have an Android phone you can contribute accurate up to date data. If you have iPhone you can only use the website.

For example here is the M4 at Reading with EE selected as the host network

You can click on the mast reference 28261 and this is the LTE e Node B number (written eNB) and the site is transmitting on frequency bands 1, 3, 7 and 20. Clicking shows on the left details about each transmission, and at the frequency (e.g. Band 1 = 2100 MHz) and the capacity (e.g. 20 MHz) or less or more.

You can look up on a spectrum reference site (authority is Ofcom) such as this one as to what spectrum assets each company has:
https://mastdatabase.co.uk/gb/spectrum/

In my local mast I have two transmissions on Band 3 each 20 MHz wide, and two transmissions on Band 7, one 20 MHz and one 15 MHz, so a total of 75 MHz of LTE capacity.

You can then use a theoretical throughput calculator:
https://www.cellmapper.net/4G-speed

If your user equipment is modern enough to support 4G carrier aggregation and the device supports all the aggregations the network is using, you could end up with 75 MHz of capacity at the modem.

Then you have to guess how many other people are using that mast sector. Each mast often has antenna pointing in three separate directions, each direction is a sector. These are numbered, and you will see this on Cell mapper.

This is complicated...

Edited by jchamier (Fri 16-May-25 19:04:25)

Thank you for such a comprehensive reply. It is really useful

I am actually a paying subscriber to cellmapper.net and regularly submit data and the occasional mast photo. I've found it very useful. Until I looked at Cellmapper last year, I actually had made a wrong assumption about which mast provided coverage for my house. It was very handy for deciding where to place my External Cellular Modem. .

When I saw my upload speed drop I sort of knew in my heart of hearts that there was little I could do about it as there are no speed guarantees. Now I understand the reasons. Thanks.

In the longer term I'm probably going to have to invest in a 5G cellular modem. I'm going to have to wait until the prices come down a fair bit. I'm sure they will just as the 4G+ LTE modems eventually did. I'll need to take a close look at what frequencies my mast will allocate to 5G. They have been testing 5G on it but it's not officially a 5G mast yet.

https://mastdatabase.co.uk/gb/spectrum/ is new to me, thanks for the tip.

--
Graeme.

Edited by emearg (Tue 20-May-25 16:11:53)