Took my Pixel XL to Manchester. Got 3CA working fully. Hitting about 132mbps in Victoria Station and the surrounding area (incredibly busy at this time of year and a real achievement from EE in my mind) . https://twitter.com/lightspeed2398/s...63091543216129 got some nice screenshots on Twitter.

Vodafone even with B20+B1 CA were atrocious in the city yesterday, I mean appalling, under 5mbps most of the time. Dread to think what o2 were like.

That's quite an impressive difference - Is it reasonable to think that EE are "finished" in this area, but Vodafone still have more to do? (maybe adding B7 too) - so they aren't done catching up?

In fairness, allowing for the significant difference between the two networks, I wouldn't describe "...under 5mbps most of the time" as appalling as with that speed around 99.9% of customers will not really notice any bottlenecks on their mobiles.

EE aren't finished, data demands in central Manchester will only go up, lots of B3 only masts still that will be upgraded.

CTIL in Manc are finished as well getting the base B20 on and VF have B1 on almost every city centre site as well. B7 on a few as well. I'd say expansion of B7 + some densification is the order of the day.

Was a noticeable slow down compared to EE and in some places the network was so bad that it wouldn't even attach to LTE. Kept getting kicked off to 3G which wasn't much better.

The point is though that the network doesn't have enough capacity and density, they need to get it resolved and there have been few signals that way. The data demands in big cities are only going up and if they can't handle them now what will that network be like in 6 months etc. There's a reason EE had 55MHz deployed and a denser network.

5Mbps should be enough to stream HD video, so it's certainly not terrible. Not great for people sending/receiving large files, such as using Drive/Dropbox/OneDrive or screen sharing, but certainly the average Joe will find it just fine - as long as the latency is low, so web pages and social media updates nice and quick.

Vodafone is doing a lot of 3CA work but in London, congestion means that in some locations you're still looking at speeds between 40-80, not 150-200 as you might elsewhere. And some locations are sub-5Mbps, just as is the case on EE and Three.

I've been meaning to do another network test video, but I've been to many locations that I did the original testing from early on after 4G launched and speeds have in many places gone down, considerably, not up.

These upgrades in many ways just take us back to where we were!

I don't know what EE are doing in my local area, but my local mast for 4G has been down for about a week or so.

Now my local mast is down for 3G too, so my local mast is only outputting EDGE now.

Thankfully I'm within the service area of another mast that is reasonably close by, but that has now become congested with 4G speeds below 10Mbit/s and 3G speeds below 5Mbit/s (one 3G test was less than 1Mbit/s both ways).

Whatever EE are doing, needs to be resolved. Maybe it's upgrading the mast to fibre? Maybe it's the addition of 800MHz? Maybe its something completely different!

When connected to carrier agrigation does the signal strenth show the strongest signal or the weakest band?

The primary band which can really be any of them.

That's not good news. Unless you're in a critical area I wouldn't expect that to be fixed until after the Christmas break now...

Hmm... Funny you should say that because 3G was working up until a couple of days ago.
4G has been down for the last week or so though.
Thankfully I live within reasonable line of sight of another 3G/4G mast but there are some people in the village I live in, that aren't so lucky and will have EDGE or nothing (unless they use a VO2 SIM).

LG G4 in those screenshots, although I've used NSG on a variety of phones.

Yikes, didn't think Vodafone would preform quite as badly. I wonder if backhaul has anything to do with it, or it is purely a lack of B7/site density. I also dread to think how Vodafone users were coping on just B1 or B20, considering many won't have handsets that can do B1+20. I guess those users would have seen sub 5Mbps.

Like Lightspeed says, the issue isn't so much 5Mbps now, but what that will mean in the future. I certainly remember Three performing at 5Mbps thinking this won't last long, and not long after it was performing at less than 2Mbps in some locations with fairly high latency.
Another issue is 5Mbps outdoors will not equal 5Mbps indoors. Yes I know there will be WiFi and such, but it's still a concern that needs to be fixed either with small cells, more B7 or high density.

Unless they've changed the way they work recently that's incorrect, you're confusing network changes with network maintenance. The engineers work right through, even Christmas Day will have on call staff in case of breakdowns.

If a site needs working on it will be worked on, it's more likely the issue there is a difficult repair or difficulties with access etc rather than the workforce has downed tools and gone home for the holidays.

Ah, fair enough. I thought they'd ignore localised problems on masts outside areas of high population over the Christmas period. Maybe they're not as sh*t nationally as they seem to be around here...

They have engineers, contractors and people back at HQ all available over the festive period. Most issues can be fixed remotely.

They only just stopped rolling out physical upgrades, still currently tinkering despite it being nearly Christmas.

Tinker bells (hey) tinker bells (hey) tinker all the way (hey hey)
Oh what fun it is to mess with settings on Christmas Day

3G is now fixed and working again on my local mast Speed is also back to normal (15 down, 2.5 up).

4G is still coming from a distant mast as it is not working on my local mast.

Still, better than what I had just a couple of days ago (EDGE or nothing for the majority of people in my village, with a weak LTE or HSPA signal from a distant mast for some).

Sony Xperia XA (EE sourced) now has VoLTE and Wifi Calling.

Wasn't aware of VoLTE but a mate in the office at work just re-contracted with EE despite our office being a no go for any 3/EE signal. He took an XA so I've hooked up my portable WiFi hotspot with a work Voda SIM and he was able to use WiFi calling ...... Can't hide from the missus now tho!

As I've got a good WiFi hotspot hooked up in the office, I've decided to port my O2 number across as testing on a mate's XA works well on WiFi calling (4G/800 on low power or not working out so well, I don't know)

However, it would appear that EE think it's Christmas holidays already. I inputted my port details yesterday and received confirmation. As nothing had happened today by 1100 (IIRC things start to happen at around 1000) I called them up to check and was flabbergasted to be told "because of Christmas holidays it won't be done until the 29th"!!!!

Not sure about EE but AFAIK it is a normal working day today. Not a great start.

Yes it is a normal working day. Do not understand why? Also saw yesterday EE engineers working on a mast so surely thay have not finished for Christmas yet

By the way yesterday got a good deal with EE- 4GEE Max Sim only plan 12GB for 15.99 Not bad. Can not complain now

Nice but I prefer my 40GB

For the same price?