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Three 4G Discussion Thread (Part 2)


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Old 02-02-2016, 22:06
paulbeattie87
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That's because cunningly 800 isn't usable by most people 98% of the time since you need to lose 2100 completely to get it. In this way they can say it's rolled out but don't have to worry about it being used.
I think Three thought EE would go into some kind of panic when Three launched 800.
Instead they probably had a bloody good laugh and it's possible that's why EE is taking so long to get VoLTE/800 out.... they are still rolling around on the floor p***ing themselves laughing.
I'm aware of what they done with the reduction in priority. I've had it twice, both times the signal was so weak it was dropped within seconds. I just feel it's disingenuous so say you've got expanded coverage in places where you can't really use it unless a long list of conditions is met. Generally I find their 4G in places it currently is isn't changing and isn't expanding which I don't imagine is helping the coverage.

Indoor coverage wouldn't be so bad if Three had WiFi calling (InTouch doesn't count as it's rubbish) or 2G. That's much less of an issue for EE specifically as it has both.
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Old 02-02-2016, 22:07
jonmorris
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When I was in Leeds a few months ago, 3's 3G and 4G were terrible whereas Vodafone and EE were great
Three has got the extra spectrum where I live and in Welwyn Garden City is currently beating everyone. I think the position of the site is helping somewhat.

At home, it's varied. EE can do 140-150 and Three around 60, but the issue is that when the signal drops, EE remains around 30-40 and Three goes down to 4-5! A big difference.

Vodafone does appear to be more consistent. Not necessarily always the fastest, but less of the really low speeds that are now a part of life in many places - especially central London.

Mind you, in Piccadilly Circus recently Three was way out ahead!

I don't think Three's network is bad where it has been upgraded. I'm upset about the way they're treating over a million customers, not the network itself. Although VoLTE is a mess right now.

Roll on inTouch over 4G as soon as possible!
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Old 02-02-2016, 22:24
japaul
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Is Vodafone fast in your area because they have LTE-A because Three is a lot faster in more parts of Leeds for me. This could be because Three don't have 2 X 15 MHz in your area.
The only LTE-A available is on EE and it is very slow with speeds of 60Mbps download and usually rubbish upload. There is only one place where I got 144Mbps. It feels like EE are throttling 2.6GHz.
All of Three 1800 is 2 x 15 isn't it? They were actually pretty quick at getting it in place throughout the country when it became available for them to use in October (not that it was a particularly hard job to do).

EE does appear to have an upper limit of ~150Mb/s so you won't see more than that. However my suspicion is that it's not as straightforward as a simple speed cap so it may not always appear to be 150.
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Old 02-02-2016, 22:58
PrinceGaz
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I doubt most users care whether they get 80Mbps or 8Mbps unless they are in the small minority who insist on running speed tests at every opportunity. 8Mbps is more than enough for everything you would want to do on a mobile so I really don't see what the fuss is about.

1Mbps is enough for almost all mobile usage outside of video streaming, and if you want to do video streaming on your mobile, you should decide on your mobile provider's contract with that being the main deciding factor.

I reckon a better way for Three to go forwards with 4G800 would be to throttle it on all handsets to say 2Mbps generally, and 512kbps or however much it could handle at that time of day based on the load, instead of restricting the handsets which are allowed to connect. If you want faster data, you pay for it as there is only a limited amount those masts can provide.

I'm sure most people would prefer EDGE type speeds from 4G800 which will be adequate to view most websites (which at the end of the day is all people need, along with sending messages on WhatsApp, and checking in on Facebook and the like), rather than the nothing at all they get when their phone has no signal.
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Old 02-02-2016, 23:13
DevonBloke
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I'm aware of what they done with the reduction in priority. I've had it twice, both times the signal was so weak it was dropped within seconds. I just feel it's disingenuous so say you've got expanded coverage in places where you can't really use it unless a long list of conditions is met. Generally I find their 4G in places it currently is isn't changing and isn't expanding which I don't imagine is helping the coverage.

Indoor coverage wouldn't be so bad if Three had WiFi calling (InTouch doesn't count as it's rubbish) or 2G. That's much less of an issue for EE specifically as it has both.
And that's why it's more ludicrous than a Tesla Model S firmware upgraded to Ludicrous Mode that Three didn't do WiFi calling first.
It's like... er...... DUH!!!!
This is insane mode (pre-update) but mental just the same........
0-60Mph 3 seconds. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQl9OjPFDdc
Off topic but fun!
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Old 02-02-2016, 23:25
Pedro_C
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Three has got the extra spectrum where I live and in Welwyn Garden City is currently beating everyone. I think the position of the site is helping somewhat.

At home, it's varied. EE can do 140-150 and Three around 60, but the issue is that when the signal drops, EE remains around 30-40 and Three goes down to 4-5! A big difference.

Vodafone does appear to be more consistent. Not necessarily always the fastest, but less of the really low speeds that are now a part of life in many places - especially central London.

Mind you, in Piccadilly Circus recently Three was way out ahead!

I don't think Three's network is bad where it has been upgraded. I'm upset about the way they're treating over a million customers, not the network itself. Although VoLTE is a mess right now.

Roll on inTouch over 4G as soon as possible!
Three's 4G in Beverley (East Yorkshire) was great when I went on the mast Hunt on Saturday, 65mbps where Vodafone seemed to sitting on UMTS/basic HSDPA. So most definitely yes.

My parents use InTouch on a Vodafone Smart Ultra 6 with a 3PAYG SIM to do all the outgoing calls from home and they find it to be very reliable, so certainly if it would be permitted to use LTE for its data connection, it will be nice.

I looked through a load more planning applications for central London and all the masts I saw were being equipped for 3 and EE 800MHz as well as EE 2600Mhz, so they're both aiming for urban 800.

Also, while going between Beverley and Filey, 3's 800 did spring into action on my S5 where my EE device had no signal, so this 800 is definitely going to be good!

I locked my phone to Voda 2G for a day and largely did not have any issues at all. OK: I'm in an area where the EDGE is always operating at near the technical maximum and websites did take a bit of time to load, but, honestly, it was not bad. Also, videos, which many dare not try to load on their devices for fear of data running out, worked fine with a bit of buffering on the small YouTube video player mode (144p-240p)
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Old 02-02-2016, 23:40
-ajm-
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I'm curious. Does not having 4G coverage use any significant amount of power (I.e searching for it) when in a non 4G area than switching to 3G only? Or does it know when not to search I haven't really noticed any difference but am just curious.

I knew this was always the case with having no service at all.
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Old 02-02-2016, 23:57
japaul
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It (mostly) won't search for 4G unless told to do so by the system information it receives from the sites it does connect to so these only tell it to look for 4G if the network thinks there's a good chance it will find it. Occasionally phones might do an initial search from scratch but not often and this depends on the phone.
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Old 03-02-2016, 03:03
Redcoat
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Yeah it's good isn't it when a HK based company which has invested heavily in the UK for 14 years, mostly at their own loss wants to continue to specialise just in mobile and to buy up a company from a parent who wants to exit, but it's blocked.

So what will happen is it'll force them to exit and then your real private equity asset strippers will come in and milk it for all it's worth or it'll go to a telecoms company like Virgin Media who'll just sell it as yet another thing and their project roadmap will have to be split between their fibre network, their business customers, their ISP, their phone service, their gov contracts and oh year, the mobile business too. Where's the new fibre rollout they promised to new areas? Nowhere, hasn't happened.

BT has been criticised for ignoring areas, the pair of them have been acting against the interests of consumers eg: BT rolling out areas where Virgin had fibre already first, yet BT is allowed to swallow up EE and add to their already huge dominance.

Three has invested in growing that UK business for little return, they have innovated and pushed in areas like mobile broadband, unlimited data, and elsewhere, for the smallest operator they push 42% of the UK's mobile data, which is the largest amount of any of the networks.

They didn't have the budget that the combined O2 / VF had for 4G, or EE because of the smaller customer base, that's one of the issues, it is hard to compete in the UK being the smallest provider with 9M customers. That's exactly why they want this merger / sale, because if this doesn't happen then in today's market with limited smartphone growth and margins squeezed it just isn't worth being in the market as a standalone 9M telecoms business, no wonder they didn't put the money YOU wanted them to put into 4G.

This year they'll make a pretax £300M profit, they invested £500M in 4G, if they had invested the £1BN that O2 & Vodafone did, then they would have made a loss of £200M. All this will be put before the people making the decision about the merger and hopefully they will see sense if they want to secure the future and set a fair competition platform for all.

How it can be OK for a massive group like BT to consume a huge mobile operator, but not for the UK's smallest network to be absorbed goodness knows. When you look at it from Three and O2's point of view they do have a valid case, you need scale.

There are many reasons why prices have increased recently, a lot of it is to do with the ending of charges for 0800, termination rates, data usage rocketing, expensive 4G spectrum purchase and rollout and the new spectrum fees from Ofcom, not to mention the arbitration fees that they have to pay now and many other things.

The money needs to be there to invest in the network, £15 doesn't buy a lot of hardware these days, that was the 2012 pricing, yes it's gone up, but still competitive, the people complaining can't actually get those prices or allowances from others in most cases.

Has there been an uproar since the merger in Ireland? No
Have the prices increased significantly? No

What they have done is some big new sponsorship, some new investment and a 1M Euro anti-homessness campaign. Three's chairman is actually one of the worlds biggest philanthropists who has given millions away, including to the UK to fund hospital equipment etc and who believes in a culture of doing good.
If you replace "Three UK" with "O2" you nearly have a wavejockglw tribute post on your hands!
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Old 03-02-2016, 19:02
Thine Wonk
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If you replace "Three UK" with "O2" you nearly have a wavejockglw tribute post on your hands!
If you say so, there are a couple of members that seem to "have it in" for Three at the moment though, and are basically starting threads and creating multiple reasons why Three suddenly murdered their first born.

Actually nothing new has happened except the continued moving people off the One Plan which has been happening for 18 months. It has hit the news again because of a big batch, but 1 or 2 posters are having kittens and now suddenly it's "Three this", "Three that", the same user posting roughly the same thing in all the threads and even starting new ones.
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Old 03-02-2016, 19:06
d123
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If you replace "Three UK" with "O2" you nearly have a wavejockglw tribute post on your hands!
Wavetwonk?

.
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Old 03-02-2016, 19:19
Thine Wonk
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Mobile Today has just published the potential options for concessions for the sale of O2 "what should Three and O2 be forced to do"

It is giving the options that I have been posting and discussing in recent weeks.

http://www.mobiletoday.co.uk/blog/mo...ced-to-do.aspx
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Old 03-02-2016, 19:26
alan.w
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Anyone know anything about this looks to good to be true but only 200mb
http://devicereg.three.hostedservice.net
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Old 03-02-2016, 19:30
Booster1573
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Anyone know anything about this looks to good to be true but only 200mb
http://devicereg.three.hostedservice.net
Seems to be exactly what T-Mobile US are doing

Edit: http://www.three.co.uk/Privacy_Cooki...=1400623499496

Edit 2: http://www.three.co.uk/datareward
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Old 03-02-2016, 19:31
d123
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Mobile Today has just published the potential options for concessions for the sale of O2 "what should Three and O2 be forced to do"

It is giving the options that I have been posting and discussing in recent weeks.

http://www.mobiletoday.co.uk/blog/mo...ced-to-do.aspx
So a guy who hasn't worked in the industry and has been editing a magazine for around 2 years is suddenly the only opinion worth anything? In your world his opinion is worth more than OFCOM or the CMA?

Whatever happens won't be influenced by some 2 bit journo with almost no experience.

You really are turning into Wavetwonk...
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Old 03-02-2016, 19:39
Thine Wonk
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So a guy who hasn't worked in the industry and has been editing a magazine for around 2 years is suddenly the only opinion worth anything? In your world his opinion is worth more than OFCOM or the CMA?

Whatever happens won't be influenced by some 2 bit journo with almost no experience.

You really are turning into Wavetwonk...
What the HECK are you on about, who said it's the only opinion that should be considered? I posted an article, what is your problem? This needs to stop.

Reported this to DS, anybody deliberately baiting or name calling will hopefully take a forum break. I come here to discuss things, not to be called names or bullied for posting my opinion.

Mobile today is a big well known website, the article is valid as it discusses the options that will be considered over the next few weeks, including outright refusal. I'm not sure why you're behaving like this, and a couple of other members too. I can only see it as deliberate baiting because you disagree with my point of view.

I haven't called you names, so I would ask that you don't otherwise I'll continue to report the posts.
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Old 03-02-2016, 20:05
d123
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What the HECK are you on about, who said it's the only opinion that should be considered? I posted an article, what is your problem? This needs to stop.
Have you read the CV of the expert you want to show to be backing your opinion?

Youth worker, BBC runner, financial reporter, reporter for a magazine dedicated to hydraulic cranes ???, social media "editor" and finally 5 minutes at Mobile Magazine.

What do you think he knows that makes him more relevant than people who've been in the industry for years, or OFCOM or the CMA?

Jon Morris has about 25+ years experience on him.

Why not ask the driver of the 29 bus for his opinion on the matter when you next pass a bus stop?
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Old 03-02-2016, 20:07
Gigabit
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Name calling? Lolwut.
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Old 03-02-2016, 20:08
Thine Wonk
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D123 where have I said I'm "backing" him?

I didn't even express an opinion about the article, I just said it lays out similar options to what I have posted on the forum recently. Calling me the name of a forum member who was banned numerous times for deliberately trolling, posting the same links repeatedly and other things like that is a bit unfair. I posted a bloody mobile today article, that's all!!!.

You have your own opinion that the sale won't go through, fine, we'll see, that was listed as one of the options in the article you seem to be so so wound up by. Mobile today is probably 'the' industry news website for UK mobile. We'll all find out the outcome in a few weeks, it could go either way, but that article is interested as it's likely 1 of those 3 options will be the outcome.
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Old 03-02-2016, 21:07
jonmorris
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I'd like to think Mobile News is probably the leading trade title. Not that I'm biased having written for it for around 8 years..!

Not the best looking website (www.mobilenewscwp.co.uk), but the print copy is far better IMO. Last time I saw Mobile it was about 8 pages thick!

The editor of Mobile News has also been there for many years (and I'll be meeting tomorrow at an Honor event, as it happens).
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Old 03-02-2016, 21:13
Stereo Steve
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I wouldn't get too stressed Mr Wonk. D123 and Lucan had a good go at me last year for suggesting that 800 and VOIP were in some way linked for EE. Accused me of all sorts. I see neither yet and I suspect they will emerge either at the same time or very close together, as I predicted way back then. Some people are visionaries. Some people are Martin Dawes. I reckon 3O2 will go through as well, in some form. It will have to be heavily pruned but I bet it happens. I also think that will be a good thing for UK mobile users.
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Old 03-02-2016, 21:18
Thine Wonk
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Very good Jon, I have looked there too. As you know a lot of the articles seem to do the rounds with only slight re-wording on some sites. I presume they sell the copy to multiple sites. I'm not suggesting that site and Mobile Today do, but I see it a lot with the other non mobile newspapers.

I'm happy for people to disagree, I don't don't like being called Wavejock for posting an industry article setting out the likely options that the CMA will go with. I had similar thoughts that those were the likely outcomes as I posted about it recently, but to be honest most of it is glaringly obvious when you look at what has happened with previous CMA decisions, it has always been MVNO, Specrum sale etc, and 'no' is still on the cards too.
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Old 03-02-2016, 21:30
Thine Wonk
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To add, I've never thought that they will say no outright. I am of the opinion that it isn't sustainable to have a minor player now with the market the way it is and that the whole reason why they need it to go through is the continued stability of the U.K. Market with sizeable players to stand up against the likes of BT and give them some competition. They have struggled enough over the years to know that it'll be even harder for a small network to survive in an even bigger and more dominant market. Three and O2 want to focus purely on mobile and to do that you need scale.

I think that the CMA will consider this and that a solution will be found that will likely result in a series of compromises like Tesco shares sold, gifgaff separated and gone, and the creation of new MVNOs under some new wholesale agreements. It could actually be very positive, because at the moment, as it stands you've got one company that wants out of the UK anyway, and another that will struggle to compete in the medium to long term in the market that they'll have to fight their corner in, however combined they could really give EE and Vodafone a run for their money.

All should be revealed in the coming weeks either way.
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Old 03-02-2016, 22:03
jonmorris
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Interesting that Three will freeze prices according to the FT tomorrow. Is that before or after bumping everyone up to paying more per month?!

Is that like when British Gas increases energy prices just before winter, then offers a lock-in to protect the rate against further increases..?
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Old 03-02-2016, 22:16
Thine Wonk
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It would be for 5 years according to multiple articles, the end of the One Plan was only a percentage of customers, there were several options, not just the £30 and actually people forget that no other network really offers a similar deal for even those increased prices. If those prices were fixed for 5 years speaking personally I'd be happy.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/n...ger-plans.html
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