Three Band 1

[chrisshan]

Anyone notice issues with Three's band 1 in the past month give or take?  Wereby ive a few sites setup in mutiple locations around South of Ireland where db would have been -90 would now be well over -100's and forcing to switch to band 3? TIA... Are there new bands i should be on the hunt for now instead?

[Seán]

Three appears to have intensified its energy saving measures around the middle of May.  On the 7th of May most of the Three sites I pick up around South West Donegal and across Donegal Bay that were operating band 1 have switched off most of their band 1 sectors again.  They only re-enable them on the rare occasion such as temporarily over a bank holiday weekend.

With the band 1 sectors that are still active, I have also noticed a drop off in the signal levels.  My workplace which currently uses Three 4G with a MikroTik LHG had a significant drop in band 1 since mid May.  With the signal down in the -110's RSRP, the connection occasionally drops out, very annoying during a video call, something which never happened before May other than during a site outage.  Band 20 and 3 are practically unusable due to high congestion in the afternoon.  My manager plans ordering Starlink next month. 

Three band 1 RSRP at work - 30th January vs 24th June:

       

At home, with the Three site I connect to across Donegal bay as indicated by the red arrows below, two band 1 sectors (PCI's 30 and 470) came online for a few hours on Saturday evening, the first time in 3 weeks.  From comparing a screenshot of the readings from a screenshot back in March, the band 1 readings and some band 3 readings are all down by about 5dB despite no adjustment to my antennas over this period:

       

Besides losing band 1, the weaker band 3 sector (PCI 30) means it now clashes with a band 3 sector a neighbour mast across the bay (PCI 115) which remains stable around -108dBm as indicated by the blue arrows above.   They occasionally ramp up the power, e.g. PCI 30 is currently -102dBm as I write this post and the band 1 cells PCI 30 and 470 are offline.  The two purple arrows are Cell IDs on another sector of the mast I'm connected to and were about the same strength as back in March. 

After 7 years of being with Three for my home broadband, I finally decided to change provider, most likely Vodafone, I am also testing Eir.  I plan cancelling my Three broadband bill pay SIM in July.  I am fed up with seeing my Three connection intermittently drop to a snails pace in the evenings due to their badly implemented energy saving measures.

[chrisshan]

Three appears to have intensified its energy saving measures around the middle of May.  On the 7th of May most of the Three sites I pick up around South West Donegal and across Donegal Bay that were operating band 1 have switched off most of their band 1 sectors again.  They only re-enable them on the rare occasion such as temporarily over a bank holiday weekend.

With the band 1 sectors that are still active, I have also noticed a drop off in the signal levels.  My workplace which currently uses Three 4G with a MikroTik LHG had a significant drop in band 1 since mid May.  With the signal down in the -110's RSRP, the connection occasionally drops out, very annoying during a video call, something which never happened before May other than during a site outage.  Band 20 and 3 are practically unusable due to high congestion in the afternoon.  My manager plans ordering Starlink next month. 

Three band 1 RSRP at work - 30th January vs 24th June:



At home, with the Three site I connect to across Donegal bay as indicated by the red arrows below, two band 1 sectors (PCI's 30 and 470) came online for a few hours on Saturday evening, the first time in 3 weeks.  From comparing a screenshot of the readings from a screenshot back in March, the band 1 readings and some band 3 readings are all down by about 5dB despite no adjustment to my antennas over this period:



Besides losing band 1, the weaker band 3 sector (PCI 30) means it now clashes with a band 3 sector a neighbour mast across the bay (PCI 115) which remains stable around -108dBm as indicated by the blue arrows above.   They occasionally ramp up the power, e.g. PCI 30 is currently -102dBm as I write this post and the band 1 cells PCI 30 and 470 are offline.  The two purple arrows are Cell IDs on another sector of the mast I'm connected to and were about the same strength as back in March. 

After 7 years of being with Three for my home broadband, I finally decided to change provider, most likely Vodafone, I am also testing Eir.  I plan cancelling my Three broadband bill pay SIM in July.  I am fed up with seeing my Three connection intermittently drop to a snails pace in the evenings due to their badly implemented energy saving measures.

I notice that since switch off if band 1 in the last few weeks, my lte6 is supporting CA 3+3 and getting same results as a band 1 on it's own. Unfortunately some sites are only lte4 for me and now need to upgrade them for ca. If 3+3 is same as band 1 then so be it. Might look at 48 options to get same at reduced cost?

[Sock Puppet]

My Huawei B525 used to be set to band 1 (2100mhz), it lost signal completely a while ago, and now 2100mhz on Three seems to be being used for 5G instead, which my router doesn't support. The router is using band 3 (1800mhz) right now, but it's much slower, which is due to congestion. I used to get up to 100mbps fairly consistently on band 1, now during the evenings on band 3 that drops down to as low as 10mbps.

Debating what to do, whether to upgrade my router to a 5G one, and if so would that work. If so whether I should I get my own router and put in my old sim card, or upgrade the hardware through Three, or should I just cancel the service and switch to Eir.

It looks like if I do switch my broadband bills will be higher, as at the minute I am paying €30 a month, but Three and Eir both want €40 for their 5G plans (Eir have 4G plans slightly cheaper, but I don't see the point).

[Oppiuy]

My Huawei B525 used to be set to band 1 (2100mhz), it lost signal completely a while ago, and now 2100mhz on Three seems to be being used for 5G instead, which my router doesn't support. The router is using band 3 (1800mhz) right now, but it's much slower, which is due to congestion. I used to get up to 100mbps fairly consistently on band 1, now during the evenings on band 3 that drops down to as low as 10mbps.

Debating what to do, whether to upgrade my router to a 5G one, and if so would that work. If so whether I should I get my own router and put in my old sim card, or upgrade the hardware through Three, or should I just cancel the service and switch to Eir.

It looks like if I do switch my broadband bills will be higher, as at the minute I am paying €30 a month, but Three and Eir both want €40 for their 5G plans (Eir have 4G plans slightly cheaper, but I don't see the point).

I have the exact same story as you. Have noticed in the last couple of weeks a real slow down in evening speeds. Just checked the router and details and band 1 has gone. We pull from a mast in Glin Limerick but we are the other side of the Shannon in Clare. About 12-13 km from the mast. I don't think 5G can reach that far, even with the antenna I have. It's the pontying xpol 2 5G

[Seán]

Over the past few weekends I have experimented with various band combinations and antennas to try getting some sort of improvement and I really get the impression that Three is deliberately crippling its 4G service to try getting its broadband customers (and its sister network 48's €7.99 / €10.99 customers) to move over to 5G plans.  Personally I would if I was within the range limit to establish a 5G connection. 

If you are within 10km, my suggestion would be to try getting a used unlocked 5G router (e.g. from CeX) and use either a prepay Three or 48 SIM, both which provide 5G access and the SIM works in the router.  If you have an outside antenna, try to get the Zyxel NR5103E or NR5103Ev2 which has external antenna ports that work on both 4G and 5G.  Just be sure to setup an automatic 28 day top-up so you don't accidentally get cut-off if you forget to renew the plan.  48 appears to operate directly on Three's IP connectivity as the external IP address shows up as owned by Three and roughly the same latency.  The two drawbacks I'm aware of are that you cannot get a public IP address (for port forwarding) and mobile operator will not provide technical support if there is a network issue. 

Even if you still want to say with 4G on Three, I suggest calling them to cancel anyway as they will likely offer a reduced rate for a few months to stay.  They reduced mine to €20 / month until December, as I certainly would have cancelled.  I may still cancel in the coming months as even the improvement I got with 4x4 MIMO is still well short of the speeds I was getting up until May. 

These are my observations so far since band 1 went 5G only:

During the few times the second band 3 carrier was active (EARFCN 1275), I could not get it to aggregate EARFCN 1275 with band 28.  Due to my distance from the mast, I can only connect on band 20 or 28 as the primary carrier, in which case it aggregates the congested band 3 carrier EARFCN 1700.  Band 20 is a lot more congested than band 28 due to more users with older routers / phones that lack band 28 support, so while band 20 + 3 + 3 CA provides more throughput, this only lasts until EARFCN 1275 goes offline and the connection is down to a snail's pace until I switch the primary band back to band 28. 

I had little luck achieving band 28 + 3 + 3 CA even with the MikroTik Chateau 5G which has a modem capable of this CA.  The problem here is that the modem connects with upload CA on EARFCN 1700.  With upload CA, it does not appear to support band 3 + 3 CA with either band 20 or 28.  As a result, the Chateau 5G actually performs worse than the Chateau LTE12 when the second carrier is online.  I asked on Quectel forum if I could disable upload CA such as with an AT command, but they said there is no AT command to disable upload CA. 

In the past I noticed that when the MikroTik Chateau 5G aggregates both bands 20 and 28 with the higher bands, it does not use upload CA.  It appears that Three has since disabled band 20 + 28 CA, at least with the mast I'm on.  Even if I just enable bands 20 and 28, it will only connect on one, whereas I still get band 20 + 28 CA with Eir and Vodafone.  This also prevents trying to achieve 20 + 28 + 3 + 3 CA, although I'm not sure whether the modem supports this combo either.  I certainly did get 4CA with bands 20 + 28 + 3 + 1 CA in the past, although I used to disable band 20 as I got much faster upload speeds on band 28.

As the MikroTik Chateau LTE12 supports 4x4 MIMO on a high band when connecting with just 2 carriers, I installed two U.fl to SMA pigtails and used a modded MikroTik LHG with coaxial leads to connect the two additional ports.  At the time of testing on Saturday I was getting roughly 40Mbps down on speed tests with just the main two antenna connections attached to a pair of Poynting LPDA-92 antennas.  When I attached the LHG leads, it brought the download speed up to 60 to 80Mbps.  As I cannot view the aggregated band MIMO status due to connecting on band 28 as the primary, I tried attaching / detaching the leads multiple times just be sure it was not just a test to test variation and it appears that I get 50% to double speed improvement with the 4x4 MIMO.  Attaching the LHG leads in place of the LPDA-92 still delivered about 40Mbps down at the time.  With the MikroTik Chateau 5G, the LHG boosted the upload speed by about 10Mbps due to the upload CA, i.e. from about 30Mbps to 40Mbps. 

At this time of testing, I 'm getting the following with Three (band 28 + 3 CA and current 4x4 MIMO antenna setup) and Vodafone (band 28 + 20 CA 2x2 MIMO):