In reply to a post by thebigdolphin1:

Like in fog, rain or other poor conditions?

Cellular comms being "across" the land to the nearest cell-site, and using under 4 GHz spectrum is unlikely to be impacted by fog/rain in the way that Satellite comms (over 20 GHz) and much further distance is frequently interrupted.

Three is licensed to use 700 MHz, 800 MHz, 1800 MHz, 2100 MHz, 2600 MHz, and a large band in the 3600 to 3800 Mhz range. Which technology they transmit is their choice. EE is very similar, but has a lot more capacity in the 1800 range. O2 and Vodafone additionally have some 900 MHz.

Ah right, just wanted to make sure I'm not gonna be left without internet during our typical British weather haha. Seems my nearest Three tower uses the 1800 MHz band and only 600M away, hopefully it should all work out fine.

In reply to a post by thebigdolphin1:

Ah right, just wanted to make sure I'm not gonna be left without internet during our typical British weather haha. Seems my nearest Three tower uses the 1800 MHz band and only 600M away, hopefully it should all work out fine.

If you have an android phone with cellmapper you can get accurate data, however 1800 MHz (Band 3) is the traditional base layer for Three's 4G deployment, only 15MHz and that is all I have in this town. Some areas also gain 5MHz of 800 MHz (Band 20) which helps if there is a large rural area to cover for voice calls, pretty useless for data. Three sometimes reduce the capacity of their 3G transmissions and enable for 4G using 2100 MHz (Band 1). The other frequencies are generally for 5G, but there are reports that Three are using some 700 MHz spectrum for 4G as well. (Band 28). This is early days for 700 which was only licensed a couple of months ago.

In reply to a post by thebigdolphin1:

Have you ever found the connection to be slow or unstable? Like in fog, rain or other poor conditions?

I don't. I made sure to test 3Mobile coverage in my area with a SIM before I committed. I get 4-5 bars so no issues ever with bad conditions. Tower is about 300m away and a panel is pointing right at me.

If you're in a marginal signal area, then you might run into trouble perhaps.

Enjoy the referral. It's basically free - no sure how they make money on it, I guess they hope people stay. I did in the end so it worked.

Edited by deleted (Wed 21-Jul-21 13:19:41)

Three also have 1400mhz for downstream at 1900 cell sites (although not sure how many sites they have in total to be able to put that figure into context).

Well, results are finally in. 55 down, 20 up, 4 times faster than what I was getting with TalkTalk. Ping isn't great but its certainly usable, although annoyingly some websites and apps lose connection every few minutes - I assume this is CGNAT related, as I'm using a Smarty SIM temporarily, but it'll hopefully go away when I switch to Three.

I would definitely suggest native Three, not their bargain basement. But have you seen this current offer?

4G router plus a 32" TV?

Yeah I've seen that, but I'm only going to be using it for 12 months or so (at least, I hope). Plus I have a router/modem already, so I'd only go with their standard SIM (which turns out only being £12/mo with their cashback offers).

Speaking of the router though, as luck would have it it's just given up on me, failing to detect the SIM 😭 Hopefully its just a dodgy contact, or I can swap it for another... why can't things ever work right the first time.

In reply to a post by thebigdolphin1:

Well, results are finally in. 55 down, 20 up, 4 times faster than what I was getting with TalkTalk. Ping isn't great but its certainly usable, although annoyingly some websites and apps lose connection every few minutes - I assume this is CGNAT related, as I'm using a Smarty SIM temporarily, but it'll hopefully go away when I switch to Three.

The same as what I get.

On Smarty the IP can change constantly. If this causes problems and you use a PC/Mac mostly then I found a quick and free solution was to simply install Cloudflare WARP on my PC. It'll setup a VPN tunnel to say their London DC and you get a constant IP as a result.

https://1.1.1.1/

Edited by deleted (Thu 12-Aug-21 09:35:28)

Yeah I've found that to be the case, but it only seems to affect certain Twitch streams and SFTP sessions and I've been using a VPN with those. Somewhat annoying, but I'm not gonna complain when I've got about 10 months of free Smarty unlimited! 😂

Hopefully I don't get kicked off for excessive use either... Only been using it as my broadband for around 10 days, already used over 500GB.