EE's degraded service and coverage - time to leave after 15 years?

ZhugeEX

pioneer31 wrote: »

I'm willing to bet any three of those will outperform EE

You might not get a better signal with Three but it's worth trying them out.

O2 and Vodafone are most likely to provide a better signal in the area you're in. But you need to test it out first.

Should you find none of the networks work in your area or you still only get a weak signal then the following applications/tools will be able to assist in getting a signal.

EE- Booster box / Wi-Fi Calling (To launch 2015)
Three- Booster box / Wi-Fi calling (Three inTouch)
Vodafone - Sure Signal booster box
O2- Wi-Fi Calling (O2 TU GO)

ZhugeEX

pioneer31 wrote: »

If they only remove masts which provide duplicate coverage then they shouldn't be creating any blackspots?

"Much better"....

Real life experience is what counts, not stats and PR. A lot of people are finding the EE signal poor compared to their previous Orange/T Mobile. I'm one of them. I don't want to change providers but when I travel down large parts of the M5 without a signal, then arrive at my sister's house and find the signal is not what it was, as well as it being rubbish at my own home address then I decide that it is crap.

There are millions of reasons why a black spot may be created. For example the orange site may have been higher up or the T-Mobile site may have been pointed at a slightly different angle, maybe they had to move the site due to unmanageable terms set byt the landlord etc... I honestly don't have time to list the millions of reasons.

Of course real life experience is key. But even in real life experience, EE is a much better network across the entire UK compared to Vodafone and O2. It's ever so slightly better than Three. Of course when you look at it on an area by area basis then Vodafone might be better on one street where as Three may be better on the other side of town etc... But overall, EE is still the best by far.

What you need to understand Is I'm talking generally here. I'm not talking about you or anyone else on this forum. As I've said in the past, and you can read through all my posts in this thread, is that my posts are written to inform users of what is going on with the EE network optimisation as a whole.

I'm not defending EE, just stating what's going on but a lot of people like to draw wrong conclusions from my post.

I also don't understand why you don't want to change providers? If Orange wasn't working for you then just switch. It doesn't make sense to stay with a provider that doesn't work for you.

diamonds

d123 wrote: »

But it knows a LOT more than you do...

You don't even understand how voice and text over 4G will work (unless you have read the link since your posts about calls over 4G?).



Yes, we are.

How rude...


3G data effects voice quality given limited bandwidth to carry data from the base station connected to the Telcos servers, 4G will suffer the same, 3/EE customers already experience such on MBNL provided backhaul.


Exactly why 3 going into 2G would have made it a market leader for calling and texting, 3 has 2G and 3G networks worldwide, for example, HK and AU (via its Vodafone AU merger before it closed its shared Telstra/3 3G network and transferred all 3 customers to Vodafone)




3G & 4G effect call quality as well as data quality for other customers on the same network, in my experience with 3 and EE both networks suffered the same effects with the shared MBNL backhaul.


Voice over LTE is not foolproof that quality will be better than 2G for calling and texting as per what the government wanted by the way of useable coverage for calling and texting.

diamonds

ZhugeEX wrote: »

A lot of people including yourself seem to be missing the point.

Even with the "network optimisation", EE has more masts than Three, O2 and Vodafone. That's how many masts EE had after the merger and hence why they were decommissioning so many after the merger because they provided duplicate coverage.

The side effect of that is very clear though as it has left black spots or areas with weaker signal than before. A 2G refresh along with 4G launch + increased capacity at sites is going some way to fix the above side effects but there are obviously some areas that will still be affected. Also there are a number of old orange sites which are still being integrated fully into the EE network to provide increased coverage on 2G as well as 3G/4G.

At the end of the day, EE still has the best network in the UK as backed up by root metrics and P3, even Ofcom themselves. When looking at the overall UK It's clear to see that EE is still a leader, shortly followed by Three. When looking at specific areas the results will be more varied. It's best to choose the operator that works best in the area you spend most of your time in. Should it mean that you need to switch networks then do it. If you get great signal everywhere on one network but terrible signal at home then EE, Three, O2 and Vodafone all have home signal boxes or Wi-Fi calling as a solution.

There seems to be a huge placebo effect here where someone loses signal for day and blames it on something completely unrelated. I remember when people on here purposefully thought that all UK networks were slowing down 3G speeds so people would upgrade to 4G. No correlation at all.

Having a Orange sim and a EE 4G sim, I can assure you many places national are worse off for a signal.


At home I have to manually lock to the old T-Mobile on both as Orange is unusable, at my old mans less than 2 miles away its the opposite but data is hit or miss with a full signal 3G.




That is with interchanging Sims between a 3G Blackberry, a 4G Xperia and 4G Nokia.


Add a 2G Nokia on Virgin which jumps up and down and between all EE 2G signals (including the above handsets on 2G) leaving me with no signal I can assure you EE network is a horrific mess via the merger. No constituent country of the UK is unaffected.


During the merger of both even Kineto Wireless were outstounded EE pulled the plans for the WiFi calling app they did for EE at a time more and more EE blackspots were cropping up via base station closures, and it is still not launched, it was expected August.




MBNL is failing to provide backhaul capacity, because closing 10000 sites bottlenecked EE and 3 customers, so physically it worked but not on a capacity and signal front from customers point of view.

ZhugeEX

diamonds wrote: »

Exactly why 3 going into 2G would have made it a market leader for calling and texting, 3 has 2G and 3G networks worldwide, for example, HK and AU (via its Vodafone AU merger before it closed its shared Telstra/3 3G network and transferred all 3 customers to Vodafone)

3G & 4G effect call quality as well as data quality for other customers on the same network, in my experience with 3 and EE both networks suffered the same effects with the shared MBNL backhaul.


Voice over LTE is not foolproof that quality will be better than 2G for calling and texting as per what the government wanted by the way of useable coverage for calling and texting.

Still don't see a valid reason for Three to invest in 2G. It's like buying a Nokia 3210 to play snake when you can buy a Galaxy S5 to play snake. You can do so much more with the GS5 + snake will be in colour and no doubt better. Sorry for the bad example but it's similar with 2G - 4G.

VoLTE is indeed the future and like I said before, call reliability is very very high due to the QoS component. 3G voice and 4G voice are totally different, the most obvious difference being that 3G is circuit switched.

VoLTE will not only allow for higher quality calls, it'll reduce call set up time, reduce battery usage and enable simultaneous voice and data services without a drop in quality. VoLTE is very spectrally efficient compared to 2G/3G.

When deploying VoLTE, networks will be actively reducing the bandwidth for voice and maximising capacity. This is done through the QoS component that I mentioned earlier as well as TTI bundling, header compression feature activation and parameter and paging optimisation. This can be improved on in the future as well, as can voice quality over 4G thanks to super wideband codecs.

And I'm sure you'll say that coverage on 4G isn't every where yet but that's why all UK networks will be launching VoLTE alongside SRVCC which will allow for calls to hand off on the 4G network to 2G/3G should 4G coverage drop. EE and Three have over 98% 3G coverage and O2/Voda have over 98% 2G coverage meaning that VoLTE with SRVCC handover is an excellent mid way solution as the 4G roll out is still ongoing.

Nokia and AT&T both confirmed recently that whilst other applications such as Skype and 3G voice calls failed under heavy load, VoLTE quality was pretty much unaffected with only the slightest drop in quality noted. Call set up time was also noticeably faster in these tests.

AT&T also said that battery life was on par with 3G voice which is amazing when you think about it and that optimisations in the future, both from terminal manufacturers and networks, could result in even better battery life.

All in all, once VoLTE is deployed it'll work out a lot more cost effective than traditional 2G/3G networks.

I'm still not sure why you think networks in the UK should be investing in 2G and not 4G. If you want I can supply you with some white papers regarding 4G and VoLTE for you to read through?

pioneer31

I've just performed a manual search from my signal-less Orange phone. I've now hopped onto T-Mobile (1-2 bars).

So my phone isn't automatically switching

There is a hill near me with all the networks on (according to sitefinder) (though the site does say it hasn't been updated since 2012)

ZhugeEX

diamonds wrote: »

Having a Orange sim and a EE 4G sim, I can assure you many places national are worse off for a signal.

I don't disagree with that. There has been a number of cases where signal has decreased or gone in a number of areas.

But overall in the UK, EE are still the best. Especially outside towns and cities where you'll struggle to get 3G on O2 or Vodafone.

diamonds wrote: »

During the merger of both even Kineto Wireless were outstounded EE pulled the plans for the WiFi calling app they did for EE at a time more and more EE blackspots were cropping up via base station closures, and it is still not launched, it was expected August.

MBNL is failing to provide backhaul capacity, because closing 10000 sites bottlenecked EE and 3 customers, so physically it worked but not on a capacity and signal front from customers point of view.

Wi-Fi calling isn't an app anymore. It'll be integrated into the firmware which should provide a better experience than Three's inTouch or O2's TUGO. Similar to T-Mobile in the USA.

BT & Virgin provide the backhaul. MBNL are currently upgrading all their sites to GigE and turn on 4G when this is done. It leads to a better experience overall.

ZhugeEX

pioneer31 wrote: »

I've just performed a manual search from my signal-less Orange phone. I've now hopped onto T-Mobile (1-2 bars).

So my phone isn't automatically switching

There is a hill near me with all the networks on (according to sitefinder) (though the site does say it hasn't been updated since 2012)

Sounds like it's your phone sticking to an orange signal then.

Can you manually lock to T-Mobile?

pioneer31

ZhugeEX wrote: »

Sounds like it's your phone sticking to an orange signal then.

Can you manually lock to T-Mobile?

There wouldn't be any point. It will only drop out when I drift towards an Orange mast.

It is making calls on T-Mob though

ZhugeEX

pioneer31 wrote: »

There wouldn't be any point. It will only drop out when I drift towards an Orange mast.

It is making calls on T-Mob though

True. Are you on contract or pay as you go?

Might be worth buying a cheap £5 2G phone and swapping your SIM for a new one and see if that roams effectively?