£15pm seems to be the lowest retention offer so far. I was offered it after rejecting £18.

As I fancied a "free" TV to give away I went for a new contract with the (latest from Three) ZTE router, at £23pm. Compared to the default £22.72 I was on. The TV is yet to arrive, as it only comes after the first regular payment.

Huh, so I decided to try out the EE network to see if it'd be any better. Interestingly, EE was actually quite a bit slower than Three (35Mb/s vs 55Mb/s), though had a much quicker latency (when pinging bbc.co.uk at least), with Three at 62ms and EE only 28ms.

According to cellmapper, EE offer LTE-A from the mast, though weirdly there's only a single band transmitted from the tower — I thought the idea of LTEA was to aggregate multiple different bands together, so I'm not sure why that would be enabled or how it'd work? The cell also apparently has a bandwidth of 20MHz whereas Three only serves 15MHz, both using band 3 (I would've assumed carriers would use separate bands?).

Really not what I expected though, I wonder what that's all about. The SIM wasn't actually EE but a cheap (free, even!) reseller using their network — I can only assume they have some sort of prioritisation or rate limiting in place causing these unexpected results.

In reply to a post by thebigdolphin1:

According to cellmapper, EE offer LTE-A from the mast, though weirdly there's only a single band transmitted from the tower — I thought the idea of LTEA was to aggregate multiple different bands together, so I'm not sure why that would be enabled or how it'd work? The cell also apparently has a bandwidth of 20MHz whereas Three only serves 15MHz, both using band 3 (I would've assumed carriers would use separate bands?).

What tool did you use to determine what you were receiving? Could be a limitation of that tool/phone/modem.

It is very likely that EE is transmitting two signals on the same band, they have sufficient spectrum to do this. LTE limits a single signal to a maximum of 20 MHz wide.

My local mast transmits for EE two 20MHz wide signal on band 3 (1800 mhz), they are listed by the EARFCN reference number, so I have 1617 and 1815.

However for Three my local mast only transmits one 15Mhz wide signal on band 3 (1800) which has the EARFCN 1392

Cellmapper will show this if you scroll down once you click on the cell number (eNB).

---
EARFCN stands for E-UTRA Absolute Radio Frequency Channel Number.In LTE, the carrier frequency in the uplink and downlink is designated by EARFCN, which ranges between 0-65535.

* EARFCN uniquely identify the LTE band and carrier frequency.
* For example Band-1 and Band-4 can have same Rx frequency 2110-2170 MHz, but their EARFCN are different.
* EARFCN is independent of channel bandwidth.

Edited by jchamier (Wed 25-Aug-21 13:35:04)

Just used my phone and speedtest (I also tested Three speeds from my phone's SIM, so the modem is the same for both tests).

I didn't realise carrier aggregation would be possible for the same band - I should probably look into 4G and radio communication a bit more, it's quite interesting and I'm clearly lacking knowledge!

Are you talking about the individual 'cells' listed on cellmapper? Yeah the mast emits 3 cells of band 3 @ 20MHz, though it appears they're directional and pointed 120 degrees from each other, so in reality you'd only be able to receive one at a time.

In reply to a post by thebigdolphin1:

Are you talking about the individual 'cells' listed on cellmapper? Yeah the mast emits 3 cells of band 3 @ 20MHz, though it appears they're directional and pointed 120 degrees from each other, so in reality you'd only be able to receive one at a time.

Not what I was referring to, as yes these three cells (often referred to as sectors) are how the physical mast transmits in the three directions. However each radio transmitting (per network) can transmit a lot of different things. Many networks don't have sufficient spectrum (licensed by ofcom) to use any more than 1 transmission per band, but EE in the UK does.

If you scroll down this page you will see each of the freqency bands, and the amount each operator has in the various colours. When you get to Band 3 you can see that EE has two blocks, and Three has one block and Vodafone and O2 have tiny blocks each.
https://pedroc.co.uk/content/uk-commercial-mobile-sp...

In reply to a post by thebigdolphin1:

Yeah the mast emits 3 cells of band 3 @ 20MHz, though it appears they're directional and pointed 120 degrees from each other, so in reality you'd only be able to receive one at a time.

That eNB is 11083 and you can see the data set is ancient and incomplete. You need someone with an Android phone running cellmapper to go near that mast and drive around it in a circle to pick up all the transmissions.

It looks as if the three sectors have 1617 the main EE 20Mhz and then in 2019 a second transmission was detected on 1667 but only on one of the sectors, which is unexpected especially in a residential area.

Hence why I think more updated data is needed for that mast.

I assume Three's mast data will be up to date, I mapped it with cellmapper just the other month (though it's possible my phone's modem is lacking in features, it's a cheap device). Now I've got an EE SIM I'll try doing the same when I next go out there.

What makes you think the data is incomplete or outdated? It seems the other 2 EE sectors have been 'seen' in the last few months, so I would've thought they'd be up to date from the listed date?

It is quite possible that EE are restricting the speeds of the 3rd party SIM provider - they certainly used to run 2 different speeds even for their own customers (you had to pay more for the higher speeds).

Wow, seems they do! Who'd have thought a mobile provider would still be doing that in 2021? That does make sense though, it's a completely free SIM (which is actually a reseller of a reseller of EE). I suppose that's a good way to prevent their networks from being overly congested, whereas Three just offer the maximum speeds possible for a super low price.

In reply to a post by thebigdolphin1:

Wow, seems they do!

Not unusual for resellers or MVNOs. EE's own PAYG used to be speed limited to 30 Mbit/sec, but I see this has been lifted in early 2020.