Yay, just found something else to gripe about, though unlike my usual 'glass-half-empty' summations, this one appears to have landed sunny-side-up.
I'm with Three (Broadband) coming on 12 years now. It's been a bumpy road regarding the quality of service provided for a lot of that time. First off, to my knowledge, Three is still the cheapest provider of Broadband in Ireland. But click on any one of the Google-spawned links that offer to test your Internet speed, only to then funnel you to a hand-picked assortment of ISP's that actually pay their bills, and you can't help but notice that Three.ie is never even mentioned, let alone included. Not once in the last 12 years I've been with Three have I seen a single Ireland-based ISP comparison include Three. The reason, up until very recently anyway, was imo, that Three was by far the cheapest of the lot, so rather than try to compete on price, the other lot simply chose to ignore them, in the hope that they might simply go away.
Well they didn't, and though they are still a small player here, relative to the main Telecom services provider, Eir, who has around 70% of the broadband market, there seems to be a shift of sorts happening among ISP's here at the moment. Personally, I'd put it down to Musk's Starlink shenanigans.
For the first time ever it would appear that Ireland-based ISP's are viewing one another as competition and are offering much more competitive broadband packages. Eir for instance, is now providing a free Huawei B818 modem/router with their current mobile broadband offering, while only charging €30 per month. This €29.99 per month with a 750GB cap exactly matches what Three has been offering for almost 2 years. Three is after countering this by cutting their price to €15 per month, though only up until the new year. I don't know when this was first offered, but had I seen it before now, being 'out of contract', I would have jumped at it, still might. Thing is, competition is finally having an effect on telecom services in Ireland. I remember back in the 'noughties', Eircom still selling twin-line ISDN connections (128kb/s combined) as their answer to 'true' broadband offerings from other companies that had begun to surface. Thing was, these cretins were not only offering something that was laughably inferior technologically, they were actually charging the suckers that fell for this, for two phone lines, not one!!! I was living in Dublin at the time and had proper broadband from a company named UTVIP. What has always stuck in my craw was that I still had to pay Eircom line rental, on top of the broadband charges. But I digress, back on topic...
Three broadband reception has always been spotty where I live. In the almost seven years that I've been here, the service had gone from being just about acceptable to downright abysmal. For the last few months, anytime before 1-2am in the morning I would regularly have download speeds in the range of 20-50kB/s - the lower range is only 3 times the dial-up speeds I was experiencing in the 90's. To put this further into perspective, at its worst, watching uninterrupted, Youtube videos at the lowest possible resolution (144p) was impossible. My newfound knowledge of the ISP industry in Ireland came from research into finding a Three.ie replacement, as things had gotten that bad. Eir, the main contender, really was never an option, as their reputation among anyone even remotely interested in online privacy, is mud - check out this Wiki-article, the "Controversy" paragraphs at the bottom, in particular.
Well, denied an honourable way of abandoning the good ship Three, I first decided to see how my immediate surroundings fared broadband-wise. Using a tablet combined with my old battery-powered Huawei modem, I was amazed to discover that just 3km from here, I could Download at over 30Mb/s, and upload at 10-15Mb/s. So yesterday, I spent a couple of hours seeing was their any way I could improve the broadband reception here, going so far as strapping the same battery-powered Huawei to a make-shift pole - a couple of planks nailed together - to see if elevation was the answer. It wasn't. It was then I made an amazing discovery!!!
Desolate, with optimism at an all-time low, I decided I'd try a change of in-house location for my Huawei B525 modem. Signal strength had never been an issue with it. Worst case, I was always receiving at least 2 4G bars on it, though usually it was 3 or 4 bars. Moving it from the window of one room at the side of the house, to one on the front, didn't improve signal-strength, there was a falling-off if anything.
** BUT THE CHANGE IN DOWNLOAD SPEEDS WAS IMMENSE **
I couldn't believe it, still can't, given that there seems to be little or no difference in the signal-received strength. the browser-based B525 diagnostics, which independently provide signal strength, is much the same as before, namely it's a 4G/4G+ signal I'm receiving. After a day of 'playing' with various web-based Speedtests, I see speeds of between 20-60Mbps download, and once I saw it even hit 70Mbps!!! Upload speeds are another thing entirely. When it's operating 'correctly', there seems to be a definite speed-cap in place at around 3Mbps. Right now though, just after 8pm (which would qualify as 'peak-period' time) my Download speed was 53Mbps and Upload speed, an underwhelming 0.67Mbps.
Nevertheless, I'm finally getting 'value for money' broadband-wise - and it only took 12 years! Yay!
Edit:
A week or two later, there's still great speeds being had. Generally, it's around 40-45Mbps, though occasionally it can drop down to the low teens, or jump as high as 70+Mbps. My talk of a 3Mbps upload-cap was just more idle speculation as I've seen wildly varying figures since then, but onto the point of this edit.
I'm still mystified as to why my transfer speeds have shot up, despite the received signal strength being marginally lower. So to that end, I've been experimenting. I moved the B525 to another window on the same side of the house, around 10-15 metres from the first and like from the other location, practically with a clear view to the horizon. Then using my tablet while in the same room, I speed-tested my connection from the new location. I expected little or no difference between locations, instead the change was profound - I went from upload speeds of 40Mbps to around 1-3Mbps. Ironically, upload speeds increased to 4-5Mbps. Moving the B525 back to the other room, it reverted back to the 40+Mbps download speeds again. Intriguingly, I found that my adjusting exactly where I sat it on the window ledge - we're talking mere centimetres here - I could dramatically improve my upload-speed. I went from the 0.5-0.7Mbps speeds noted above to a much more consistent 4-5Mbps. I've just done a speed-test right now and it returned a Download-speed of 48.6Mbps, with Upload-speeds coming in at 4.6Mbps. Consider again that mere weeks ago I was looking to ditch my current ISP due to not being able to stream 144p Youtube videos without them stalling repeatedly - all down to the abysmal download-speeds I was getting (<250Kbps during peak periods, or 4 times dial-up speeds!).
But I am still no nearer to understanding why such small differences in router placement makes such enormous differences in transfer speeds, particularly since there is little or no difference in the received signal strength that I'm seeing. Had someone suggested stuff like this to me a month ago, I'd have told them that they were talking nonsense.
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