Ah cheers mate! Seems the IP allocation on everyone else's Three SIMs aren't as bad as they are for me (I get one almost every second), but I managed to sort the timeout issues I was having. I have noticed a few problems with AWS CloudFront services temporarily becoming unavailable though, they'll occasionally become unreachable for some strange reason - I'll be keeping an eye on that.

The referrals were pretty much all friends and family who were getting a better deal, only needed to convert 4 for the whole 10 months (including the joining promo using the ref you gave me).

Try forcing your modem to 3G for a while to see if it's an issue with 4G.

I pretty much have WARP connected on my PC all the time and my latency is about 50ms and packet los 0.11% - so it's excllent.

Agh just had a look at my local planning applications database and noticed Three/EE applied to upgrade my current mast with one of their 5G monopoles earlier this year... a good 80% of houses from the neighbouring estate objected, so it was denied. I wouldn't have expected them to have even considered upgrading my area at such an early stage. Still, they've put an appeal in so fingers crossed.

In reply to a post by thebigdolphin1:

Agh just had a look at my local planning applications database and noticed Three/EE applied to upgrade my current mast with one of their 5G monopoles earlier this year...

If that was to add a monopole next to the existing, then I can see why people objected. Why not just upgrade the existing mast.

Hope something sensible happens and you get Three 5G - I'm not holding out hope here, expect EE will install 5G by this time next year, but Three are so random!

Truthfully I'm probably not gonna bother with 5G - the routers are insanely expensive at the minute. But the plans showed they were gonna add multiple 4G bands with the new mast, so a better speed than the current 40Mb/s would be great.

Yeah not sure why they planned on keep the existing one. I assume that offers 2G/3G and the new models don't? To add to that there's also an old-style single band 3G mast on the same road, so there'd be a total of 3 within a short distance. I can sorta sympathise with the local residents a little, though the new mast site was out of the way in a grass bank at the side of the road and there aren't any houses directly facing them.

Not sure if its the same everywhere else but Three and EE seem to be running a joint rollout here, the monopoles in my city seem to be shared by both providers (under the entity 'MBNL').

In reply to a post by thebigdolphin1:

Not sure if its the same everywhere else but Three and EE seem to be running a joint rollout here, the monopoles in my city seem to be shared by both providers (under the entity 'MBNL').

MBNL came about in the early 2000s when it was T-Mobile and Three, as a way for Three to get access to T-mobile's masts & poles. Today EE and Three share a lot of equipment for 3G, but they run their own 2G (EE only) 4G and 5G, but should be sharing the metal masts, and have two sets of transmitter hardware (boxes on the ground).

MBNL as a company will be paid by EE & Three separately to maintain their equipment on the shared pole. In some cases the mast is owned by a third party (e.g. Cellnex whom bought a lot from Arqiva)

Kinda makes me wonder why all mobile operators didn't just join together and operate from the same set of masts. Surely that'd work out much cheaper and be more efficient for them? Only thing I can think of is trying to maintain competitive coverage over each other, but these days they pretty much all cover the same 98% of the UK.

They are now encouraged to share masts by the Government, and you have O2 & Vodafone working together using CTIL / Cornerstone, and EE & Three working together with MBNL. However each operator also has their own unique (unilateral) masts and monopoles, Things are better than when we had 5 separate networks, and I remember motorways with 5 monopoles in a row!

You won’t get all the networks using the same locations as since the 1990s the Government has licensed them individually and they compete on coverage as well as price.

If there was a single infrastructure operator (similar to Openreach in fixed line) then there would be no incentive to innovate in coverage, and more likely the UK coverage would be worse.

Using the term "reallocating IPs" for this is not quite right.

When we talk about allocating IPs, we're generally talking about having exclusive use of that IP address for some period of time. So for example if you're using the right APN on Three you can have a IP allocated that will be "yours" for some time.

But when not using an APN like that, we're dealing with carrier grade NAT. You won't be the only person "allocated" the IP address that you see you traffic going via. There will be other people's data also exiting the carrier's network using that IP.

Except in niche cases, having an IP address that changes quickly is not generally a problem nowadays. There used to be lots of services that would be tripped up by subsequent TCP connections coming from a different IP address, but this doesn't tend to happen now.

I used to use a load balanced setup, where there was a 50% chance of each TCP connection using a different IP. The only service that I used that this caused a problem with was Santander's online banking and thankfully even that issue got fixed when the upgraded their systems a couple of years ago.

I have been using Three for my home broadband for the past 2 years with an unlimited sim inside an unlocked Huawei B525s-23a and Poynting 4G-XPOL-A0001 antenna.

Forced the B525 to bands 3&20. APN set to 3internet.

I get an normal IP and no CGNAT. Play warzone without too many issues, ping is normally between 60-80ms.

Download speeds are 80-110Mb/upload is always 30Mb.

Only issues I have had is when the local mast went down for a couple weeks.

I did try an Huawei B818 but no improvement in speed. Cant complain as I'm only paying £15pm