Earlier this month I talked about thinking of moving back to giffgaff. I've no major reason to have doubts much on the calls & texts services any more than usual, so I just looked at their data service to test, so I took out a spare sim I had for them, got a top up, registered it and bought a gigabag and stuck the sim into a Nexus 7 4G tablet.
Compared to EE, no problems with 4G signal strength anywhere around my house. So now on to data speed tests. Two tests on 4G taken on a Tuesday evening...
* Down - 1.24Mb :: Up - 16.81Mb :: Ping - 66ms
* Down - 1.19Mb :: Up - 19.36Mb :: Ping - 72ms
So the ping times are decent, upload speeds are very good to excellent, but the download speeds are shocking for what is very possible. Just to double check I forced the tablet into 3G mode and did one more test, with 4/4 bars of signal strength...
* Down - 0.95Mb :: Up - 2.96Mb :: Ping - 89ms
...looking at this unless you needed the significant difference in upload speed, there is no real premium in have 4G over 3G for data on giffgaff on this arbitrary test. Not that the 3G download result is brilliant itself.
Just to check that it wasn't just cell overload, I did a 3G speed test on my phone with Lycamobile. It came out as ::
Down - 2.10Mb :: Up - 2.35Mb :: Ping - 101ms, and ::
Down - 3.30Mb :: Up - 0.46Mb :: Ping - 79ms. Although varying, both are a lot more usable than giffgaff even on 4G! Another Lyca test taken at 3am the next morning had
Down - 7.84Mb :: Up - 1.31Mb :: Ping 108ms. By this time, giffgaff on 4G had improved a bit...
* Down - 6.92Mb :: Up - 20.00Mb :: Ping - 67ms
...but still not better for download speeds than Lycamobile on 3G!
Later that day I did a late afternoon test that coincided with rush hour times. For giffgaff there wasn't much improvement on either 4G or 3G...
* Down - 1.06Mb :: Up - 7.11Mb :: Ping - 51ms (4G)
* Down - 0.60Mb :: Up - 0.64Mb :: Ping - 90ms (3G)
...Lycamobile on 3G to be fair was straining itself :: Down - 0.92Mb :: Up - 0.14Mb :: Ping - 123ms. I then did a 3G speed test with a T-Mobile sim card in the same phone as the Lycamobile sim (It's a dual sim phone). Even with a weaker signal (I made sure I was in the best place in my house to do this test), the results were :: Down - 5.28Mb :: Up - 0.50Mb :: Ping - 95ms. A significant difference, though it would be unfair to not point out that the local EE mast will almost certainly have far fewer users on it at that time.
So come up to last Friday in the early evening and I did another giffgaff 4G sim test (I've left the sim in the Nexus in the meantime), and to see if the results would be different compared to the tests done the week before. The answer is no.
* Down - 1.00Mb :: Up - 18.51Mb :: Ping - 77ms
So overall, these results suggest that for me, giffgaff's data speeds are even slower than when I left them last year.

And on that front, I don't see myself moving back to them any time soon. While they no longer have a 4G premium for their goodybags, their 4G data download speeds are frankly pathetic. Lycamobile OTOH is a heck of a lot more usable though even they have a data freeze at times. I just wish EE & 3 had much better indoor penetration here, as their data speeds locally are much better on average - but not that I didn't know that already. In the meantime I have an EE 4G 100GB data sim in an Osprey 2 mini that I recently got, left the giffgaff 4G sim in the tablet (I might just let the gigabag continue until the credit runs out and I don't have the Osprey with me) and put the T-Mobile sim and Lycamobile sim in the Moto G2 dual sim, the former for data and the latter for calls & texts.
My hunt continues...