Anyone On Smarty?

[barry1010]

I changed from EE to Smarty a while back and have the 4G to be a lot slower.

Has anyone else had this problem?

[Buenchico]

It might simply be that you're not as close to a mast operated by Three (which owns and powers Smarty) as you are to one operated by EE and therefore you get a weaker signal.

[barry1010]

Buen, this is in my home. When I was on 3 and before that, EE, I was getting very fast download and upload speeds. Now it's too slow to tether (Smarty does allow tethering) and is a pain to use when my broadband is down at home.

[Buenchico]

Numerous websites seem to suggest that EE has the fastest 4G network in the UK, followed by Three. However that difference might just be because EE has more masts, meaning that users are more likely to be very close to an EE mast than a Three one.

This site ran tests to check whether the speeds on Smarty are as fast as those on Three and found that there was no difference:
https://www.simsherpa.com/networks/compare/smarty-vs-three

Note this quote from that website though:
"Three are typically the second fastest 4G network, with speeds around 30.7 Mbps.

Those are the sorts of speeds you’d get on mid range broadband. However, in reality you can find yourself going as slow as 9 Mbps in rural areas or as high as 70 Mbps in more built-up areas"

As a reference point for you, I live in a small town that has notoriously poor mobile phone signals. (We used to have a mobile phone shop in the town which, somewhat embarrassingly for them, couldn't get a signal from any network). I've just checked the 4G speed I'm getting from the nearest Vodafone mast (which is used by my network operator, Asda Mobile) here in my bedroom several times. It's consistently around 1.5 Mbps. (The local press often report on communities here in Suffolk who struggle to get more than 0.3 Mbps, so there are certainly a lot of variations around the country).

[Buenchico]

I've got no problem tethering my laptop to my phone (using that 1.5 Mbps download speed) if, for some reason, I can't access my home broadband - although, of course, I can't stream video at that speed.

However my broadband is hardly ever down anyway. (I pay for a 'business' service, where my provider will get Openreach onto the case within only an hour or two if there's a problem). Apart from the time, earlier this year, when Openreach managed to disconnect my phone line altogether for a few days, I'll normally go several years between instances of my broadband going down and it'll then get fixed within a few hours at the very most.

[barry1010]

Thanks, Buen. I very rarely lose my Internet connection and today's outage was planned maintenance that I was notified in advance.
It turned out to take only 20 minutes.

I'm just confused as to why my 4G signal is much slower just because I've changed to a provider who piggybacks off a network I previously had very good speeds with