Agree EE 3G in and around London is [censored] poor. Drop outs, slow speeds and just patches of no signal.

It may be better on 4g but given the cost I never found out. Switched to three and am having a much better ride at present.

I'm reading forums and apparently EE4G uses a different APN and other things. I must say when I had T-mobile I was often seeing E and I think I barely ever see that now on actual EE. There's an implication that data is better on EE on the EE forums, even on 3G due to various technicalities.

Food for thought is that T-mobile contracts will automatically connect to T-mobile masts before falling back onto orange sites. The T-mobile ones are often weaker signal as the masts are often shorter. This is why so many orange sites have been kept and will be upgraded to 4GEE and T-mobile standard 3G... So right now Orange customers may get better experiences as they'll be defaulting to Orange sites and only falling back onto T-mobile. That said Orange masts often have slower speeds (albeit probably more reliable signal strength etc). No idea what actual EE chooses as a preference.

There seems some issues whereby customers on T-mobile often default to a T-mobile GPRS or Edge signal when there's a full strength Orange 3G signal in range too.

In time the Orange network wont even be there, just T-mobile. So orange sites will blast out T-mobile style signals. At this stage there wont be these issues as it'll all be one network.

Definitely some documentation of issues. That said on EE I don't see issues but I do have a 4G contract. I can genuinely say from as high as Barnet North London all the way into Central London and even as far out as Richmond I get 4G signal and it's usually almost full.

I think perhaps OP wants to go into the store and enquire regarding the APN settings.

I moved to Manchester a couple of months ago and live with another person on EE (Orange originally) and he suffers from terrible issues in the central manchester area. (Withington, Fallowfield etc) the city centre is good but where we live it is terrible. Nobody here has a EE (T-Mobile Originally) contract so I can't compare as to whether they have better signal around here.

The way they sell all their contracts on all their networks especially when in store is that you use the EE network and it's no different so if it is the case that the APN settings and the way you communicate with cell towers is different then there is clearly a problem here.

In reply to a post by maxima120:

O2 worked very well everythere

Not here

In reply to a post by brandscill:

I think perhaps OP wants to go into the store and enquire regarding the APN settings

All T-Mobile, Orange and EE customers now use the APN called everywhere

I thought that be the case but this was mentioned before me.

In reply to a post by ukhardy07:

I'm reading forums and apparently EE4G uses a different APN and other things.

In reply to a post by brandscill:

I thought that be the case but this was mentioned before me.

My mate's T-mobile and my EE both use "everywhere" as the APN. but YMMV.

Apparently EE pushed out a carrier update making the APN 'everywhere'. Not every device has this carrier update, although virtually all do, so I doubt it's this... Some will still view going onto the other network as roaming if they are on old carrier settings. It's a very difficult process really to have seamless switching between two carriers, as an example switching from a T-mobile mast to an Orange mast mid call will result in the call dropping although the signal may still show as high. Ultimately until the network is solely T-Mobile / EE standards there's going to be discrepancies between signals in areas covered by both Orange and T-Mobile as clearly not everybody will just use the one mast.

I even think that with the everywhere APN, I still think it defaults to the home network as a priority (not entirely sure anymore though). If you scan for networks manually in an iPhone you will see EE mentioned twice... The top one is always the home carrier followed by the other one. Looking at my phone right now I'm defaulting to a 2 bar signal, whereas choosing the lower carrier gives me 4 bars in the same spot. So for whatever reason my phones choosing the worse signal, an iPhone 5... Both are showing as 3G. Now both work fine so I'm not worrying about it just an observation.

Interesting observation.

OP what are your APN settings?

In reply to a post by ukhardy07:

I can genuinely say from as high as Barnet North London all the way into Central London and even as far out as Richmond I get 4G signal and it's usually almost full.

thanks, this was helpful