Extremely poor 4G speeds

[Azrall]

Hi All,

Looking for a last ditch effort in an attempt for a resolution with my One plus 5.

For about 3 months now, I've been struggling with VERY poor 4G speeds, (less than 200kpbs!) in the Swindon area.  It's better at home, but not by much, (3-4mbps)  It's barely useable at this speed and I cannot stream videos/music etc and isn't very good for work.

I popped into my local branch to be told that the issue is that "there are too many people on the network" I can't believe for one second that all of Swindon's population use o2.  Ironically, when I performed a speed check in the o2 store. I peaked at 30mbps. As soon as I stepped back outside, it plummeted back down to 200kpbs!  A sim swap was performed to no avail.  I've factory reset my phone to no avail. I'm at the end of my tether with this and I'm close to requesting my contract is cancelled because of the poor coverage i'm getting.

Is anyone having a simialr issue?  Any help will be greatfully appreciated!!

Thanks,

Allan

[MI5]

It's not so much the whole of Swindon on o2 but the number of people using the available o2 bandwidth, which is smaller than the other networks due to their 4g allocation.
If you switch to 3g and get faster speeds, this proves it's congestion slowing you down.

[Azrall]

Thanks for the reply.

I have switched to 3G and I have a slight improvement. It's still not great though. Looks like i'll be switching networks then.

thanks for your help.

[jezza1234]

Thi is not an uncommon issue see below text from a reply I made to a similar post a while ago(sorry copied and pasted as feeling lazy today 

There are a combination of reasons that O2 users will not get good 4G coverage in city/town centres and built up areas at certain times of the day(facebook hours!).

The first and main reason is not lack of coverage or faults with masts it is about 4G capacity.

O2 predominately uses 800Mhz(ish) 4G which provides a good coverage footprint (the lower the frequency the further it will travel) but has a smaller capacity bandwidth(fewer users at a single time). Therefore at busy times of the day, when people are on lunches etc and the first thing they do is come out of the office and jump on to social media or check emails etc(go on we all do it ) This puts an incresed load on 4G which at those frequencies is an issue and therefore 4G speeds will slow right down.

Other networks, EE and voda, use a higher frequency which has a smaller coverage footprint but greater capacity(more users at a time) across alomost all of thier 4G estate

Interestingly O2 has recently obtained a chunk of spectrum at the higher frequncies which one would assume they will eventually use to alieviate this issue.

As to what you can do about it the best thing would be to register for the cloud or use O2 Wifi points of which there are many in town/city centres this should get you on line and also save you using your data allowance.

Unfortuantley there is no quick fix to this issue in city centres its just down to O2 4G frequencies and the  amount of people trying to access it at the same time at particular times of the day

Proffesionally I have a great deal of experience re frequencies, radio communications and LTE technology, and feel your pain 

[Skyhawk1010]

As mentioned it’s almost certain there’s a capacity issue with an unholy mix of small bandwidth, not-so -capacity-efficient 800mHz (which happens to be Vodafone’s main choice but they’re also using 2600mHz Band 7 as well as reframing 2100mHz and having more 800mHz masts to begin with !) few transmitters and high demand.

O2 are working on this, not least by refarming  existing spectrum such as 2100mHz and (less likely as they had very little to start with !) 1800mHz maybe with some older 2G 900mHz coming onto 4G as well. 

The biggest remedy is in fact building and activating 2300mHz transmitters which, if done in depth, will probably solve the issue overnight, Trouble here is that London and historic O2 friendly towns like Slough are having first refusal on this so it’s unlikely to happen anytime soon in Swindon I’m sorry to say. 

So it will probably get better but not exactly overnight .