It is acceptable because as we've said multiple times, a mobile network doesn't guarantee service of any kind. It can't!

Shame it's being used as more of an excuse by them rather than getting off their backsides and sorting it out. Before i left them over a year ago i was told by their CS that it was due for an upgrade within 3 months, clearly wasn't true. 3 months seems to be their standard "shut the customer up" line.

I don't deem it as acceptable considering the amount of time they have known about it. The area where the congested cell site is has been literally covered by BT Fibre so really is a poor excuse.

I believe the congested cell is this old orange one, i would guess at insufficient backhaul. It only seems to have one very run down looking microwave link, it's definitely outputting Three 2100 3G.

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@53.27...7i13312!8i6656

It can take over two years to fix a problem that is known about, so maybe there's already a plan in place?

The availability of "fibre optic" internet access is irrelevant to this. 3/MBNL would have a leased line or high capacity microwave link installed regardless of what you can get at home.

According to their social media peeps there is nothing planned for any of the cell sites covering the area. That said, they also said that Llandudno wasn't meant to get 4G and randomly one day i started seeing both 1800 and 800 coverage there.

I hope that they are wrong and something is being done about it.


Well as i said before i believe i know which of the sites is congested, an old orange one which i think has insufficient backhaul. There are a couple of old orange sites, one covering the congested area and another which covers a large section of the valley i live in. According to the CS the one covering the valley is due to be brought into MBNL in the next 3 months as currently it only outputs EE 2G.

However there is supposedly nothing planned for the old (and probably congested) orange 2G/3G cell covering the congested area. What baffles me is that the other cell covering the area manages to deliver speeds of around 10 - 15 Mbps pretty consistently, shouldn't the congested cell be offloading to the other, non-congested sites?

Haha, yeah okay then.

Are you the guy that outed himself as a Vodafone employee in another thread?

Fair enough. Cell breathing and why you still get a bit with 4G. Nice topic for a Sunday!

Firstly the basics. The expansion and contraction of a cell’s coverage area that is cell breathing is due to the interference caused by all users in a cell and adjacent cells occupying the same spectrum at the same time. So with 3G, as a cell becomes busier a phone has to raise its power so it can still be heard above the increasing noise. However, there’s a limit to how far it can go and when this power limit is reached and the cell gets noiser it can no longer be heard. Obviously phones towards the edge of the cell have the biggest problem as they will already be operating at higher power and since they can’t go higher they are effectively now beyond the boundary of the cell which has now reduced

The usual analogy given is two people speaking to each other in a room. They can be at opposite ends and still understand each other. However if more people enter the room and start talking the noise level means they have to raise their voices to hear each other. Once it gets busy to the point that they can’t speak loudly enough anymore they lose contact and have to move closer to each other. And it’s the same with phones.

Now 4G has a trick to avoid this. That single carrier which is divided into sub carriers (or resource blocks) are arranged in an orthogonal manner i.e. each block is independent of the other and so one doesn’t have any impact on the other. And so within a cell, no matter how many resource blocks are allocated, even if it’s the full amount, there is no interference from other users and so no cell breathing.

That’s where the textbook descriptions normally stop but it’s not quite that simple because whilst the resource blocks are independent in a cell they have to be reused on other cells and since cells have to overlap users in one cell can cause interference to users in an adjacent cell and so there are still cell breathing effects albeit much reduced because the intra-cell interference that results from users wiithin the same cell is usually larger than the inter-cell interference from adjacent cells.

So 3G has intra and inter-cell interference whilst 4G only has inter.

Also, just to say irrespective of cell breathing, static cell boundaries don't exist for any technology are there are plenty of other factors that impact them e.g. trees with or without leaves in different seasons (and whether the leaves are wet or dry). However don't expect any network to blame a reduction in coverage on leaves on the trees as the ridicule they would receive would finally consign the train's 'leaves on the line' excuse to history!

Thanks very much - I didn't realise that with 3g the cell had intra-cell interference, my understanding of breathing had been that the cell would, upon heavy load, reduce its own transmit power and thus its coverage footprint, I must have had it in laymans terms somewhere along the (leafy) line and got it wrong.

Cheers for taking the time to write that

https://www.dropbox.com/s/n533yx9kgp...30-22.png?dl=0


4G in Hull took ages to arrive but if it stays at these speeds I'll be very happy

Genuine question that applies to all networks - do you think that's an acceptable timescale for anything other than a major, wide-ranging technical problem?

If it's a region-wide problem that requires very significant capex investment, fair enough. If it's a problem with an individual mast I don't think a two year resolution is in any way acceptable.

Which mast was that?
My Mast map needs another update as they've been squirreling away so much.

Springfield way. I was in morrisons car park

The challenge here is a cell site build or upgrade has many dependences.
Landlord access?
Backhaul?
Power?
Change in regulations?
Mast work?
MHA / Antennas / Cabling?
Man Power?
Planning?
RF Planning?
Dependences on sub tending to other cells (parent or child)?
Spectrum re-farming?

I would agree that a 2 year delay for a site to be upgraded is poor but often the reason why is outside of the MNO's control to a degree.

In Hull's case it required a massive project because it was a very unique situation.

The other thing to consider if that they don't look at individual sites in that way. There's 18,000 of them, it's a much more wider capacity and rollout plan. They will look and target the most congested sites, but there isn't always the budget to or focus on every individual site.

When you subscribe to a mobile service, it is with the expectation that the speeds and coverage varies from place to place due to lots of complex factors. There are often a lot of projects and upgrade work happening in some areas and then later they may schedule and work on upgrades for your mast or add a new 4G site.

There is no promise of set speeds or even a 100% coverage promise in every area / street. There isn't a mobile network in the world which doesn't drop calls in some areas or have variable speeds in different areas.

If you absolutely must have > 0.5Mb/s when travelling though some areas then I'd recommend getting a PAYG sim card and giving a network a real good testing before signing up to a 2 year contract, as it'll be impossible to get out of that contract mid term arguing that an area you travel through (not home) only has 0.5Mb/s and you experience dropped calls.

Even if they turned that old Orange mast off, leaving you with no signal in that are you still couldn't get out of your contract and the ombudsman still wouldn't rule in your favour if it's just an area you travel through and you have no signal for a short while. If you were a customer in the area that spends all day there then yes you would likely be allowed out of your contract, but not just for travelling through. As mentioned on many networks you drop down to 2G on a lot of routes, not 0.5Mb/s.

That's not a reasonable time frame as that is longer than what they sell contracts for to a customer. They can do things much quicker if they want.

Interesting reading this as you have some users complaining about sites that actually give out a 3g connection, yet in many parts of the UK people are still waiting for EE/Three to bring 3g!

My bug bare is the fact that Three are now updating 3g masts for 4g, despite there being loads of 2g EE masts sitting left untouched only a few miles away from proposed upgrade sites. I guess its just how the mobile world works.

Vodafone are doing a similar thing. Apparently where they have done 4G it's very good but those are mainly places which had 3G before while huge areas still sit on 2G coverage.

In the case of those 2G EE masts, wouldn't they have to be put into MBNL before 3 could get on them? Not sure how that all works.

There's no doubt that you of all people know what you're talking about, so I accept all of that. All I'd add is that the general customers perception is that it's unacceptable, and therefore I think a degree of expectation management / transparency would go a long way in altering this perception. Perhaps if people knew what the anticipated timescales were for particular problems to be resolved and/or the issues causing the delays, they would be more willing to accept the disruption.

I'm speaking from my own perspective here and it relates (in an off-topic way!) to EE rather than Three, but if I'd been updated in any way over the last 14 months (and counting) as to why my service is so poor, and when it might be resolved, a lot more goodwill towards the company would probably remain.

To some extent that is true, however because they seem to take o2 and VF masts, they tend to create a really dense level of coverage in the areas they upgrade. This is deffo the case here anyway and they are still going. It does hope from 4g to 3g+ quite a lot these days.

Isn't Three's coverage checked supposed to indicate if there is congestion in an area? I've seen it a couple of times when checking coverage for relatives. Not popping up in my congested area though.

Wonder if they don't bother updating the checker with congestion data as it would make them look bad? They've known about it for so long here it's turning into a piss-take. I'd guess that they are waiting for 4G so that backhaul can be upgraded.

To be fair to Three, they have at least had this message on the coverage checker for my area for some time:

https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resi...nt=photo%2cJPG

Interestingly, it did have a date on it some time ago (January 2015, although the problems started in October 2014) but they have removed it now - probably because the timescales look so bad,

Here was the message before the date was removed:

https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resi...int=file%2cJPG

It's a shared mast with EE, but EE denied there was a problem for a long time and certainly have never publicly acknowledged it. I wonder if EE are the other company that Three refer to in their message, or whether it's a backhaul/power/infrastructure partner....

Well don't they share the backhaul something like 70:30? If three is maxing out its 30% and EE is fine, they probably have no need to spend money upgrading the site.

Couldn't Three just install more microwave links or increase it's fibre capacity. AFAIK fibre can go well above the speed which most masts are supplied with. I would guess that the old orange 2g/3g cell which i think is the congested cell is probably using some ancient voodoo magic for it's backhaul, i would guess that it gets no more than about 100 Mbps. 30 Mbps for Three and 70 Mbps for EE. Can't see it lasting much longer with such pathetic backhaul.

Sorry, not sure if you're responding to my message (which isn't the same mast Benny Boy is talking about).

In my case, the mast is unusable for both three and EE due to congestion.

Has anyone heard any more about ThreeinTouch allowing access to 800Mhz?