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Comment by martinald | Hacker News Reader

The problem with Three is they don't have enough spectrum especially in densely populated areas, they definitely have invested a lot in backhaul capacity. 99% of cellular data problems are nothing to do with backhaul or peering, it's spectrum usage.

Some good news: they are aggressively rolling out SDL (supplementary downlink) which will really improve things. They also announced today their 5G network (which has by far the most spectrum of all UK carriers) has went live. I would expect insanely good speeds on that network.

But yeah, turns out selling unlimited data/tethering/roaming/text/minutes for as low as £11/month isn't a good business strategy.

Generally though: EE is good everywhere. Vodafone is good in North London, O2 better in South London. Three generally awful everywhere.

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Three’s 5G has actually been running since last summer : I should know, I was in one of the pilot areas in London and signed up for their home broadband offering on day one.

No complaints, 100-300Mbps on average. They seem to have done great at the 5G spectrum auctions, they’re the only UK carrier with 100+ Mhz.

I’m also using them for mobile 4G and yes that’s often awful, as others are reporting. I should probably switch to giffgaff (safer to use different providers anyway in case Three has a catastrophic outage), but Three’s "Feel at home" free roaming in many countries beyond the EU (including the US) is super handy and has no equivalent that I know of.

> "Three’s 5G has actually been running since last summer : I should know, I was in one of the pilot areas in London and signed up for their home broadband offering on day one."

But this is not really the Three network. It's a separate network with a different network ID and cannot be accessed with ordinary Three devices/SIM cards.

It's based on the network formerly known as "Relish", which was bought by Three in 2017. The areas covered by Three Broadband's 5G are basically exactly the same areas which were always covered by Relish. They just upgraded the equipment to use 5G radio.

Relish held a lot of spectrum in the 3.5 Ghz (n78) band. Three, by arrangement with OfCom, added Relish's holding to their own 3.5 Ghz spectrum won at auction to give them the contiguous 100 Mhz.

There is an additional 200 Mhz of 5G spectrum being auctioned this year, which should bring the other operator's 5G holdings up to comparable levels with Three's:

https://www.techradar.com/uk/news/ofcom-to-hold-next-5g-spec...

> But this is not really the Three network. It's a separate network with a different network ID and cannot be accessed with ordinary Three devices/SIM cards.

I'm not in the UK and ask purely out of curiosity, but what SIM/configuration do you use then?

They provide a 5G home router (Huawei 5G CPE Pro), with a SIM card specific to the Three Broadband (formerly Relish) network.

I've found 5G speeds on Vodafone to be quite variable. I have a weak 5G (Vodafone) signal at my flat, and at times I've seen it as high as 130 Mbit, but at other times it drops to 1-2 Mbit or vanishes completely. Where as on 4G I get a consistent 20-30 Mbit all day long.

I suppose this will improve when they build out the network more, but even in locations with strong 5G signal the speed seems to vary a lot.

Seems like 3's 5G network has still not actually launched, but they're now promising it "by the end of February".

Is 3's SDL in addition to their carrier aggregation ("4G+") rollout? Because I already have that and it doesn't seem to have helped much!

Keep in mind that current 5G deployments in the UK (and I think the world) bond 4G and 5G together. This often causes problems if the 4G is heavily congested. Vodafone's London 5G deployment is still pretty spotty, it will get a lot better. Plus it uses a very high frequency band (3.5GHz). When the 700MHz band gets added in a couple of years it will be a lot more consistent.

Yes, SDL is on LTE1500, LTE Band 32. It is another carrier to aggregate with the other ones. Both 3 and Vodafone have some spectrum in that band, IIRC 3 has a lot more. It will really help with overloaded cells in the short term.

My router (Huawei E6878-870) apparently supports LTE band 32, but I've never seen it used on either Three or Vodafone. At my flat, Three seems to use band 3 (1800 Mhz) always.

Vodafone floats between bands 7 (20 Mhz channel!), 20, and 1, but gets good speeds on any of them.

Three always slow at peak times, sometimes unusably slow, despite having by far the strongest signal.

This sounds a lot like Freedom mobile/Wind here in Canada. Although it was the opposite, the cities had the good coverage but if you drove an hour out of town it was either offline or really slow.

The networked sucked at first but they are slowly improving things and offered far better customer service and contracts than the existing 2-3 monopolies.

But sadly if you really want the cutting edge of speed and spectrum you need to use one of the monopolies.

That's interesting. In Australia, if you happen to use Telstra 4G (the only provider that is reliable for most of the country) I've found that speed in remote towns can be a lot faster than in any of the capital cities. It's surprising as the remote towns can either on satellite link or at the end of 1000km of fibre.

> The problem with Three is they don't have enough spectrum especially in densely populated areas

Isn’t this argument basically debunked? Places like South Korea and Japan have no issues whatsoever with extremely fast wireless internet at a fraction of the price.

I’d guess it’s a reference to the specific allocation of spectrum that Three has relative to its competitors.

Here's a really interesting site showing how the UK's 3G/4G/5G spectrum is allocated.

https://pedroc.co.uk/content/uk-commercial-mobile-spectrum

It's pretty clear that Three's spectrum is woefully lacking compared to the others, except on 5G and the LTE SDL band 32 (both not widely deployed yet).

Especially problematic when you consider that Three are the ones who have been selling super cheap unlimited data packages for the last couple of years!

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