I live *slightly* rurally. I have a TP archer mr500 router and an external 4g antenna installed by a professional aerial service who’s been working in the area for decades and so would know where to place/orient it. I was with smarty until recently. It worked (overall) fine for a few months, but in the past couple of weeks I’ve been getting your usual combination of 'connected with no internet’, super slow internet, etc. I followed all the tips online (reboot, enable 4g only, google/cloudfare dns, and other ones I can't even remember).
Yesterday I put my phone giffgaff sim into the router, and bam! Speeds I never encountered before. Best the old sim could do was around 10Mbps, with giffgaff I got near 20Mbps.
For reference, with the smarty sim I had RSRP: -114dBm RSRQ: -14dB SNR: 0.0dB (and 50% signal strength), with Giffgaff RSRP: -101dBm RSRQ: -8dB SNR: 9db (and 75% signal strength).
However…today the connection is slow again (as per Google's names for speeds. I did repeated testing on Google, rebooted, even applied some of the 'old' fixes), but nothing brings it up. What’s weird is that it starts fast (though not as fast as yesterday), and then it goes down and down…unlimited with giffgaff is 15£ per month more expensive than smarty………….
My question is whether it could be be worth it to try O2 instead of Giffgaff? I read that O2 can be less 'privileged' than O2 when it comes to ''bandwidth' allocation etc. and the same goes for contract over PAYG.
At the same time, it would not be ideal to switch to contract with O2 to end up with the same speeds, so I was wondering if there’s any way I could *try* the speed on a contract sim (and then cancel, is there a grace period or something?)
