Three's 3G data network is down UK wide | Hacker News Reader

Three's 3G data network is down UK wide

theregister.co.uk

9 pointsdan123411 comments

It went down for me around 10pm BST last night. I assumed I had hit a data limit or something. This morning I checked their website, their twitter feeds, google news and found nothing.

So i phoned them at exactly 8am this morning. I was on hold for 47 minutes. Turns out its not just me.

Extraordinarily disgraceful communication with customers about this. They should be completely ashamed that they had a 12 hour outage they refused to publicly acknowledge. I can forgive the outage but the outrage of their poor communication is sad

That's partly the reason I posted it here - I couldn't find any info start with and was beginning to think it was my phone until I found someone else on Three.

I thought the same. I have unlimited data so I knew I hadn't hit any limit but thought maybe something was up with my phone. Rebooted several times. Reset network settings. etc. and nothing. I went to call them this morning but when I checked with a few colleagues also on Three and they had no data either I figured it was an outage. Annoyingly they didn't put anything on their site until after I saw this post.

I'm tired of the Three coverage and "uptime". Fine, now they're down, shit happens, I can deal with it.

What pisses me off is their permanent shitty signal - enter a supermarket - no signal, enter a data centre (at work, where I spend most of the day) - no signal, go in a building with thicker walls (e.g. Barbican) - no signal.

In all these places Virgin Mobile has no problems.

I find Three has superb coverage throughout London. Elsewhere it's not so good.

Newcastle city centre is fine (around 19-20Mb most days) but I'm lucky to get 4Mb once I'm a couple of miles out.

(half remembered, take with a grain salt)

Building penetration of a signal gets worse as frequency increases - so Three UK (2100 MHz) suffers more than Vodafone UK (900+2100 MHz) inside large/heavy buildings. Three has LTE (4G) coverage planned at 800+1800 MHz so eventually this should improve.

What's amusing (for me) is the first I heard about this was via their Twitter account - I was on the internet at the time using their data network, having just turned my phone on!

Three seems fairly reliable, with a decent signal strength in my area, compared to O2/giffgaff (which my friends like to use).

Their support on Twitter is fairly quick to respond, but I suppose that's more indicative of the way support over social media is nowadays.

I'm always surprised that intelligent people are shocked that the consumer cellular network they pay £5 a month for doesn't have 100% uptime

I guess what shocks me is that a system this large has any Single Points of Failure. I would expect distributed-system failures (netsplits et al), but not whole-system downtime.

I noticed I had no data at around 23:30 last night and still no data at around 8:30 this morning. I was pretty surprised to see the outage last that long.

Things appear to be working again now (12:30) albeit slower than usual.

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