EE drops packets but retains UK network champ's title

EE’s dominance as the best-performing UK mobile network has one or two surprising short comings in the No.1’s performance. Real-world data suggests Vodafone has the best network for 4G packet loss and EE the worst. We rarely see measurements for packet loss, jitter or latency on mobile networks and these come from Tutela, a …

[Anonymous Coward]

One reason could be the use of microwave links for backhaul, which is cheaper, rather than fibre, which is faster but more expensive.

Oh I didn't know light travels faster than light. (unless more bandwidth = faster?)

Microwave is also susceptible to weather conditions.

They're perfectly capable of dealing with layer two packet loss and the only 'issue' you'd get would be ice/snow on the protectors, which doesn't happen very often in the UK.

[Malcolm 1]

Light in air travels faster than light in a glass fibre.

[Steve Todd]

In so much as the fact that you can send more data per unit time, then yes, fibre is faster. Any given bit does not sped less time in transit (in fact the speed of light is slower in glass), but you can encode much more in the shorter wavelength and across multiple frequencies.

[Locky]

A simple rule of thumb

Comms companies. They are all as bad as each other.

[Tubz]

I can believe it, 4G on EE is horrible in my area even with a S8 ?

[Frenchie Lad]

And Three

Should be dropping 3 for something faster?

[Adam 52]

Re: And Three

Something peculiar is going on with 3. Ever since they had their big outage at the beginning of September it's been really unreliable for me (and my acquaintances). It's almost as if they've lost lots of small chunks of their network (perhaps a mast sharing arrangement ended or something). And this is central London, not the middle of nowhere.

[NonSSL-Login]

Time frame and next tests

Yesterday I did a speedtest on my 3 sim (still on the unlimited one plan!) and found it was giving 106Mb/s down and 33 up http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/a/3439503471

What was the time period the tests were done over? The last few months Three have done a lot of upgrades in a load of areas, so they might fare a bit better in the next lot of tests when it comes to speed at least. Latency is still not superb although thank $diety I don't have it as bad as the results Tutela came up with.

Now we just need latency, jitter and packet loss comparisons published for fixed line home broadband connections. Yeah, i'm looking at you VM!

[AmenFromMars]

EE exploiting their "free" spectrum and o2 & 3 lack of the same maybe?

[Roj Blake]

You think EE has awful customer service now...

...wait until their billing and support is rolled into BT.