Oh my goodness. I can’t believe how simple this would be if ’3′ would even take one second to inspect their services properly.
Above is a map of where I am on the left of the yellow line, and where the three transmitter site is on the right side.
April 2012 I purchased a three data contract, and was so happy the way it was working at the above address (KT160EE), I decided also at the beginning of November to also change to 3 for my mobile phone data/calls.
Shortly after around the 9th November, all data at the above location became impossibly slow. I left it about a week or so as I was away, hoping that on my return all would be resolved. It wasn’t.
I called three to report a fault and was told they would look into it. A week later and nothing. I did eventually get a call back from ‘level 2′ tech (I think) asking more questions they agreed something was wrong, and they would get back to me.
More time passed and I got a call last Thursday, this time telling me engineers had been to the site (really?) had made some changes and wanted me to test to see if it was any different. I obliged and did a speed test on my pc (which failed to even load the address I was given) and then tried on my phone which got a similar level of results as I keep getting recently.
I then decided that this path of progress was too slow, and took to twitter. I sent a message to @ThreeUKSupport and also @ThreeUK they said they would look into it…
This is where it gets a bit frustrating. Let me make VERY VERY clear the following points:
- I get 3/5 to 4/5 ‘bars’ of signal strength on my data dongle. Its not ‘excellent’ and its certainly not ‘poor’.
- The data service WAS working perfectly. In fact it was much better than Vodafone, it worked so well, I even decided to get a new phone and ’3′ voice contract.
- I am 0.8 miles line of sight from the transmitter site (with a few trees in the way) there are no new buildings and no new constructions causing me any issues.
- I drove to the bottom of the cell site and ran some data tests there. They give exactly the same kind of response as I get from the problem location. I even put a video on youtube!!!
So with this in mind. These have been the responses I have had from@ThreeUKSupport each sentence is a different response, I have been following this up daily.
Could be a limitation of service and no actual faults.
No faults in area but area can only receive a very limited indoor signal so it’s likely it’ll vary within the property.
Hi, no faults in area but can see area’s only capable of receiving a limited indoor signal so will vary from room to room.
No faults at our end in area. Looking at the area and the signal it receives it’s to be expected to be honest as there’s only a very limited indoor coverage available.
100% no issues with mast. The area only receives a very limited indoor signal – this isn’t a fault. The area’s only capable of receiving that.
No faults or any works, just a limitation in what services are available within that area.
I’ve begun to wonder if @ThreeUKSupport is any more than a public face to prevent a PR disaster on twitter, and they have no more power of skills in checking for faults than what we do via there website. One thing for sure they don’t appear to be technically minded, or are used to talking to non technical folk. I’m not a mobile network expert, but did work for Sony/Ericsson at MWC 2012. To me at least it appears the ADSL lines that feed data to this cell site are suffering network issues, but as its such a low population density in this area, perhaps they don’t care about it…
THREE UK PLEASE PLEASE WILL YOU LOOK INTO THIS.
