Smarty slow/stalling page loading

I'm under the impression that Smarty have some kind of proxy setup on their network from some of the posts on here. Well, I'm thinking that this thing is pretty damn slow recently.

Recently in the past 2-3 weeks, I've found some pages are very slow to load. Looking in the network tab, the loading seems to stall on mundane things on the page. Javascript scripts, logos and other things from CDNs. The loading of these will just hang for 20-40 seconds randomly holding the whole page up. Example on ThinkBroadband... the background image takes 20 seconds to load.

Needless to say, this is sort of annoying. The problem, of course, disappears when via a VPN. Actual throughput is fine.

Is anyone else experiencing this on Smarty or perhaps 3?

Interesting.
I use a 4G router with a Smarty unlimited sim, using it for things like Windows downloads and updates which otherwise might saturate my normal connection.
Over the past week or more I've had a few times where I got "not connected to the internet" messages.
Haven't wasted any time trying to problem solve this, but interesting what you say. "Might" be connected.

I`ve been experiencing similar things with my 3 unlimited data sim over the last 3-4 days so it might be a more widespread problem with network capacity.

I'm in Ireland and just moved to 4G broadband with Smarty and download speeds are x10 faster than my fibre connection. However, I am experiencing the same issue with some pages taking 10-20 seconds to open. Streaming etc is perfectly fine. Also there is a marked improvement when I go through NordVPN. Definitely a widespread problem.

I`m in Northern Ireland and have also noticed an improvement when using a VPN, any idea why this would be?

Could be DNS is failing i.e. slow or not responding, or some exit routes from a network are heavily congested but VPN tunnels out through one of the good ones by chance.

I'm in Ireland and just moved to 4G broadband with Smarty and download speeds are x10 faster than my fibre connection. However, I am experiencing the same issue with some pages taking 10-20 seconds to open. Streaming etc is perfectly fine. Also there is a marked improvement when I go through NordVPN. Definitely a widespread problem.

Cheers, ardmhacha. Sounds like exactly the same.

A lot of the more popular websites like YouTube all work perfectly fine. Problems seem to start when you come across less popular sites.

In reply to a post by clyde123:

Interesting.
I use a 4G router with a Smarty unlimited sim, using it for things like Windows downloads and updates which otherwise might saturate my normal connection.
Over the past week or more I've had a few times where I got "not connected to the internet" messages.
Haven't wasted any time trying to problem solve this, but interesting what you say. "Might" be connected.

I haven't noticed this personally. It always seems to be connected. It's just browsing the web that I notice. Could be related though.

Uploaded a video of the issue to make it clearer. Should stream on most browsers.

Seems really bad tonight.

Changing DNS servers away from Three's own doesn't help.
Large downloads and popular websites such Facebook and BBC are fine.
To make minor websites work OK, only way I've found is to use my corporate VPN.

I agree it looks like their proxy is the holdup.