Recently we have been having lots of Internet connection issues.
We have available to use: Virginmedia cable
3 3G Vodafone 3G EE 4GWe find that when VM cable goes off, so too does Vodafone. Sometimes 3 also goes off at the same time. But mostly, 3 comes back and is quite reliable.
In the past few seconds, our VM signal has returned - and so too has Vodaphone service!
Quite how can these all be interlinked?
By sharing some bit of common infrastructure at some point - say the same backhaul link from an exchange also serving the local cell radio tower.
I now a chap a few miles down the road who has lousy throughput on his BT broadband. I found he also has an excellent Three signal - but lousy throughput!
I'd always vaguely wondered how the masts were wired into the networks and this was a practical demo. JR's comments put the tin hat on it!
Mains supply. Often the Virgin main boxes and the mobile phone masts can be quite near one another, and presumably nobody uses battery back ups these days. Brian
It's very common with EE to get excellent signal strengths but random internet throughput ranging from very good to zero. Seems to be dependent on the cell tower - maybe some have problematic or overloaded network links?
There is site somewhere (buried on Ofcom's?) where you can see where the sites are, which carriers and, I think, which flavour of G.
Depends... There are quite anumber of networks out there carrying commercial traffic. Virgin Media is one, MML Telecom do a significant amount of Vodafone backhaul.
That may not help, the above companies might be renting dark fibre from BT or buying capacity from BT. They do have their own infrastructure but I suspect that is mostly wireless as digging trenches to drop a bit of glass in is rather expensive.
It may to a limited extent but once you get a bit deeper into the core network huge areas all go through one place. Our (BT) ESR used to be in Edinburgh, that threw a wobbly one night and most of the north of england, a fair bit of Scotland and Northern Ireland were without internet. Even a much smaller incident recently took out a bit of Newcastle, all along the Tyne valley and down the South Tyne, not sure about the North Tyne.
Since then our ESR has moved to Sheffield, we are 20 miles south of Hadrians Wall...
Having said that these major nodes are staffed 24/7 and they do jump to fix 'em. Along with most network faults. Don't tar BT Openreach with same brush as BT Retail.
I believe that BT do have backup batteries in their cabinets.
Both the EE and Vodafone transmitters and the nearest VM cabinet are within yards of us. But in 90 degree different directions.
Not seeing any issues reported for VM and Three.
I was fairly sure that the VM cable (OK, fibre) goes straight from here to near Reading.
Not good if they are all so co-dependent on same things... :-(
Same here - often I have to rotate my antenna 90deg to another cell and get nearly full performance until the 'main' cell I use has recovered. Sometimes it's weather, sometimes contention, sometimes just - shrug.
If I had the choice and here I do I'd prefer VM thanks . In any case fibre here is around 30 meg with VDSL, 100 or more with VM...
I suspect the latter. I frequently get good strength but lousy data rates from EE. About to jump ship when my current contract runs out. Definitely gone downhill since they started "rationalising" their network after the T-mobile/Orange merger.
Tim
I already jumped ship to them from Three because Three's data network has gone to shit.
That doesn't leave anyone else where I live!!
Yes EE everything everywhere but in reality NN nothing nowhere;(..
There all like banks now, none any better then the others...
VM use coax to deliver the broadband in most places. Its capable of giving higher connection speeds but it costs more to do so. ADSL and VDSL are quite cheap. Installing headend equipment for cable isn't and you need to section up the access network as you add more customers to avoid contention in the shared bit. This is why VM offer high speeds but you soon get managed down if you try to download lots. A couple of people using bit torrents can bring a section to a crawl without management.
Three's network seems to work much better than EE in my neck of the woods so for better or worse, that's where I'm headed...
Tim
Why?..
Dennis .. it just works, and works very well, and despite downloading lots haven't had any speed issues to speak of apart from when the other end is slow;!..
What I do find a PITA is when working most anywhere else once you have those speeds on tap anything else is bloody annoying;!...
The headend equipment is more expensive. It used to be even more expensive which is why VM used to have several thousand customers off each headend unit. Now they have far less sharing each segment.
You probably don't have any heavy users or VM have managed them down despite the claims they don't.
They do but I'm not sure if they are big enough to maintain the service for 18 hours. The shortest time a power cut has to be before the DNO has to cough up compensation to those affected.
I think they are there just to bridge switching transients or auto-recloser breaks. Might give 15 minutes or so. I hope to catch the VDSL and fibre install guys in the act and have a chat but as none of the new cabinets are on my normal routes around the area or visible from home I'll probably miss 'em.
In my experience (dating back to Cable London) they have been and are still open about traffic management. See eg
I'd like to know that too.
As far as I am concerned, resilience has got to improve. After all, we are moving towards situations in which internet is the only way of achieving certain things - possibly including making appointments with doctors and, if some news stories are to believed, claiming some benefits.
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