While everyone coos at the promise of 5G, UK network Three asks if it can tempt you with 4G+ Hutchison's UK network Three has upgraded 2,700 urban sites to support faster 4G data. The introduction of carrier aggregation technology on the network has enabled it to boost downloads by an average of 33 per cent, said Three UK. Users in cities, traditionally the most congested areas, will see the benefit, which manifests …
"Hutchison's UK network Three has upgraded 2,700 urban sites to support faster 4G data."
Funny, I have recently disabled 4g on my THREE phone, to achieve a more stable connection. I'm sick and tired of it flapping between 3g, H+ and 4g.
As I type this, my phone sitting on my desk has a miserable 1 bar of 3g signal, and often reverts to 'no service' - right in the middle of central London. It seems that this place is swamped with Vodafone and EE coverage but naff-all of THREE for some reason.
If their upgrade doesn't improve anything, might be time to jump ship to GiffGaff.
I have to say I've not got any complaints about Three. I generally find their signal and data rates to be spot on. There are a couple of places around where I live that no operator seems to get a signal in.
of course, with Three I also get the added benefit of using my phone abroad as though I'm at home. I travel quite a lot so that's important to me
"Then I think you misunderstand the point of 5G.
It's not just about theoretical data rates to an individual phone. It's about scaling data rates in aggregate in congested areas where there simply isn't enough 4G spectrum to go around."
I think you misunderstand the point of 5G.
It's not about data rates at all. It's about a marketing buzzword that's been thrown around so much that now the poor engineers are having to desperately scramble to come up with a real idea it can be attached to. No-one has any clue what the standard might actually end up looking like or what purpose will be retroactively attached to it, but as long as we can throw around terms like IoT and blockchain, at least we can all have a good game of buzzword bingo.
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My previous Huawei phone had a configurable option for carrier aggregration, with a big warning not to turn it on unless you knew what you were doing. My current Xiaomi phone doesn't have that option but does light up VoLTE quite frequently. The rest of the time it flickers between 3G, H+, E, R, and a couple others I forgot.
I agree with @Rathernicelydone that none of it matters if the carrier's connection to the internet is maxed out, which does seem to happen.
I frequently experience unbearably slow 4G speeds with Three, despite having a decent signal strength, and a device which can support all of Three’s 4G spectrum frequencies, and carrier aggregation.
My work-around is to switch 4G off, forcing the device back to 3G. Hey-presto, problem solved.
Where I am right now, on Three:
4G : 3 Mb down, 50ms latency
3G : 22 Mb down. 25ms latency
This is the complete opposite to what I experienced previously with EE on the same device. That said, EE were charging me 3x more per month :-/
Let's hope this new strategy fixes the problem nationally.
Your probably on 4g800 (if you can make a call and keep 4g connected your on the slow 4g800 witch priority VoLTE not data resulting in slow speeds (other 4g bands on 3 are not enabled for VoLTE calling resulting in dropping to 3g to allow call to work )
Be nice if CA is available here or not
You need to put phone into flight mode and back out and see if it puts you on 4g2100 or 4g1800 if available in your area
On iPhone you won't know if your on VoLTE 4g800 or most android phones, unless it's China ones (cubot, ulefone, Huawei or Samsung show VoLTE)
One thing that is annoying on three and ee they don't allow active data session session 4g up (so if your connection drops to 3g it will stay on 3g until your data goes idle for about 3-10 seconds) unsure if vodafone is. Same
O2 (and o2 NVMO s) on the other hand will happy switch up and down 3g and 4g when better signal is available even if data is active (twitch youtube, streaming audio etc)
There is no such thing as 4G+, The original UK LTE networks ≠ 4G. Only LTE-A = 4G
Later revisions of HSDPA were officially 3.75G, bog standard LTE was more like 3.85G - according to official 3GPP standards it never was 'real' 4G.
We missed the boat on real 3G network deployments in the UK and then jumped on LTE too early so got shafted the other way round because the kit & backhaul wasn't ready.
t's just a bloddy good job a lot of the LTE kit deployed could be upgraded to LTE-A instead of being thrown away, but it would still have been more economical for the networks (and better for consumers) to upgrade 3G to the max 3GPP release and skip of standard LTE altogether.
We should have gone straight to LTE-A/4G networks when the software for the radio hardware was actually ready (and the back-haul networks upgraded) which was about three years ago.
So in actuality we ended up being late to the 4G party in the same way as we were late to the 3G party. Those marketers are great at covering up crap like this.
Interesting. Though, it's good to know that at least one of them got it (almost) right.
I guess this is why Three seem to have been particularly vocal about "Spectrum Fairness" when it comes to 4G.
I wonder how it could've been if Ofcom had allowed the O2/Three merger when it was proposed a year or so ago. I guess we'll never know now :(
The only 'truthful' answer I've ever been able to come up with why the BT/EE merger was allowed and the O2/Three merger was rejected was the lining of pockets.
It certainly wasn't down to European 'competitive landscape' reasons, EE/BT + Vodafone + O2/Three with equal spectrum would have been great for competition because the playing field would have been level.
That is unless that is Ofcom were convinced they would collude to jack up prices in step with each other... which might be a second 'truthful' answer, but as you say we'll never know.
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