SMARTY/Three blocking tethering?

coffeehound

Wonder if anyone knows what's going on here, please ..  

I use tethering from iPhone to Macbook a lot.  Current service provider is SMARTY on an unlimited data plan.  Mobile data service has been notably erratic in recent days.  Then today the option to set up a mobile hotspot dissapeared from the settings menu with a message saying 'contact Three to set up a personal hotspot' or somesuch under mobile data.

Are SMARTY doing this to throttle data use?

daveyjp

My smarty mobile had an outage this afternoon for a couple of hours.

Archie_Duke

Also suffered a Smarty outage from about 1500 for a couple hours or so. Oddly even my WiFi calling/VOWifi (Android 10) refused to connect when I tried to make calls during this time

outtatune

Three have been zero across pretty much the entire country today.

coffeehound

Thanks, so it's definitely a network-wide issue

SiliconChip

It seems to be different issues for different people. I have kept data access both on my SMARTY SIM and my Three home broadband router, but I've had no phone signal for most of the last 10 hours. Three aren't saying anything that I can find, but it has been reported in the media.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-67595457

To add, I've just seen this on the SMARTY website.

Information.
A number of customers may be experiencing intermittent issues with our network. Data services have now been restored and our engineers are working to fully fix calls. We apologise for any inconvenience this has caused today

Mutton_Geoff

Three had loads of problems, my PAYG autorenew didn't go through, then after I'd paid via online chat for the next month, data worked but not voice.

This is the 3rd time I had issues with Three so ordered an O2 sim via Moneysupermarket, and texted Three for a PAC number. Within 24 hours, all up and running with O2 now and being a Virgin Media customer got double data. 80Gb, unlimited calls, £8 a month.

Goodbye Three.

MSE SIMO links to O2 offers didn't work and was more expensive than MS offers.

Mutton_Geoff

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-67595457

coffeehound

^ interesting that smarty customers seem to have been particularly hit as though they are on a lower service level agreement with Three or something.  Oh well, good to know it's not my phone going belly-up . .

EnPointe

coffeehound said:

^ interesting that smarty customers seem to have been particularly hit as though they are on a lower service level agreement with Three or something.  Oh well, good to know it's not my phone going belly-up . .

there's a reason the MVNOs are cheaper than  going direct to the  underlying  service provider 

coffeehound

Worse than ever now.  Very flaky data service for the past fortnight and no device tethering available for the past two days