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Three The One Plan - Not as good as it seems?


Richard10002

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For 18 months I used a 3 Mobile Broadband Sim in a MiFi dongle. Was able to watch Sky Go and Virgin Anywhere with gay abandon, and little/no buffering. Speeds varied from around 8Mb to 13Mb, and it was quite amazing..... But limited to 15Gb per month for £16.

 

Having heard and read about The One Plan on Three, with truly unlimited data, and tethering allowed, I got it with a Samsung Galaxy S3 in January.

 

At first it seemed as fast as the Mifi at all times of day, so I cancelled the Mifi contract Sept 20th. I can't remember when it happened, but I recently noticed significant buffering when watching footy on Virgin Anywhere in the evening. I started checking the speed, and found I was only getting about 1Mb to 2Mb when I was having the problem. I wondered if it was distance from the aerial/mast, but that hasn't changed in the past 8 months.

 

Anyway, a bit of googling around revealed Traffic Sense!!! This is Three's way of managing bandwidth, without affecting the "amount" you can download - they slow the speed of tetherers and peer to peer downloaders, and similar, between 3pm and midnight.

 

So it looks like 3 have a fair use policy by another name for those who have bought into The One Plan.

 

Has anyone else experienced this? And has the experience changed from time to time?

 

The cynic in me thinks they may have waited till I ditched my Mifi contract, then hit me with Traffic Sense... Or I might be in a location that has got busier... But it all seems a bit strange that it was all very fast until just a few weeks ago??

 

For the time being, I'm reserving judgement on The One Plan, as it doesn't seem all it is cracked up to be!!

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For 18 months I used a 3 Mobile Broadband Sim in a MiFi dongle. Was able to watch Sky Go and Virgin Anywhere with gay abandon, and little/no buffering. Speeds varied from around 8Mb to 13Mb, and it was quite amazing..... But limited to 15Gb per month for £16.

Having heard and read about The One Plan on Three, with truly unlimited data, and tethering allowed, I got it with a Samsung Galaxy S3 in January.

At first it seemed as fast as the Mifi at all times of day, so I cancelled the Mifi contract Sept 20th. I can't remember when it happened, but I recently noticed significant buffering when watching footy on Virgin Anywhere in the evening. I started checking the speed, and found I was only getting about 1Mb to 2Mb when I was having the problem. I wondered if it was distance from the aerial/mast, but that hasn't changed in the past 8 months.

Anyway, a bit of googling around revealed Traffic Sense!!! This is Three's way of managing bandwidth, without affecting the "amount" you can download - they slow the speed of tetherers and peer to peer downloaders, and similar, between 3pm and midnight.

So it looks like 3 have a fair use policy by another name for those who have bought into The One Plan.

Has anyone else experienced this? And has the experience changed from time to time?

The cynic in me thinks they may have waited till I ditched my Mifi contract, then hit me with Traffic Sense... Or I might be in a location that has got busier... But it all seems a bit strange that it was all very fast until just a few weeks ago??

For the time being, I'm reserving judgement on The One Plan, as it doesn't seem all it is cracked up to be!!

I have done identical to yourself, other than I bought the sony z thing. I gave the mifi up a month ago, and my phone slowed down within the week. When I rang them over the weekend, they advised I would be better off with mifi. Conned!
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Well I've said it before we find three unusable for work, we pay a lot more for EE 4g - not cheap but blindingly fast, about twice as fast as my father in laws home broadband. It's £26 for 8gig a month but we can top up £30 for 10gb, I need stuff to work, if it's cheap and rubbish, then it's no good to me. I note that 3 are really pushing the all you can eat one plan, I just wonder how much bandwidth contention there is?

 

We cannot use 3 if we need to back up a website database, the connection is throttled so much by the time you're half way through the download the database has changed. I put our 3 sim in the new 4g EE wifi dongle (its Alcatel) the other week to see how it was - a much better connection than the old mifi hardware (obviously not 4g yet), but still way too slow for a back up.

 

Wonder if it is only 3 that does this throttling thing? Vodafone don't do it either, can't comment on 02 as that's the only service provider I've not got a sim for.

Edited by Lady Muck
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The way I see it it's about needs & expectations. I don't need a fast bandwidth or even an internet connection - I feel horribly lost if I can't connect to the internet, but that's want rather than need. Without the need cost has always been the major motivator. When we first moved aboard we had a dongle from Vodafone that gave us 1gb per month for £10. Since then we've stepped up through various deals, always feeling thwarted by the fact that without camping in a Wetherspoons pub or McDonalds we could only download one or two programs per month from the iPlayer, links to Youtube had to be resisted, and often, towards the end of the month, all avatars had to switched off on the forum.

 

Now for £25 per month I no longer worry about usage. Yep, slow sometimes. Yep, throttled often (even at 3am) but I can live with that because it serves my wants. At the end of the day as long as I can check the forum, catch up on Facebook and check my e-mails I'm good. Anything on top of that is a bonus.

 

It also helps that I'm a night owl - I do my iPlayer catch up post midnight - some people find that rather odd but then some people are more intolerant than others.

 

I have noticed the throttling/slowness has been more frequent in recent months - I wonder if 3 are a victim of their own success. After all there's only so much bandwidth out there for us all to share.

 

Edited for speeling

Edited by Ange
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<SNIP>

 

For the time being, I'm reserving judgement on The One Plan, as it doesn't seem all it is cracked up to be!!

 

Not with any specific reference to your problems but I am finding the overall service from Three these days poor. I don't have the One Plan but I seem to be finding of late that even just using their mobile service is a challenge in areas where I'm sure I have had good coverage previously. I've tried another SIM in my phone so I know it's not my phone that is at fault.

 

My contract with them has another year to run and I will be giving serious consideration to switching.

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I imagine Three have stopped investing in 3G coverage and bandwidth expansion in preparation for 4G.

 

Sounds plausible.

 

Another forum member kindly used a contact they had with three to try and find out why the coverage on our home mooring was now so poor and it turned out there was a problem with the local mast this was a few weeks ago now - last time we were on the mooring at the weekend it seemed no better so they are either not bothering with it or are just very slow getting around to fixing it.

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I imagine Three have stopped investing in 3G coverage and bandwidth expansion in preparation for 4G.

They are currently going through a programme of changing 3G transmitters for 4G transmitters in Sheffield. Planning rules state that they can not have two transmittors on the same site so they have to take the older one down before they can erect the new one.

 

Result for us at the moment is very hit and miss signal strengths.

 

On the plus side they upgraded me to 4G for no extra cost. On the downside my Iphone 4S isnt 4G compatible and I have another six months to run on the contract...

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Suffice to say, Three are very aware of the type of connection (Mi-fi unit with data SIM, tethered smartphone, dongle, etc) and are very much on top of running their network, using various traffic management technologies. Of course, its pretty much covered in their terms and conditions so not much of a leg to stand on for the average consumer.

 

We all love a "something for nothing" scheme but its not going to happen with mobile phone/data networks.

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We all love a "something for nothing" scheme but its not going to happen with mobile phone/data networks.

As I was paying O2 £21 for 100 minutes and half a gig of data and I am now paying 3 £15 for 2000 minutes (plus 5000 3 to 3 mins) and unlimited data with better coverage for both phone and internet and free 4G when it comes online I think I am getting something for nothing even if they throttle back to 02's level of internet service.

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I'm on 3's 321 PAYG at the mo and we also have a contract data sim with them (Mifi/router) all very good. I changed my phone sim from Giffgaff because 3 are a but cheaper for my level of phone use and the phone data speeds where we live at the mo are faster than Giffgaff's O2, but if, as I suspect, 3's level of 3g service gradually reduces in favour of 4g then I may have to revert to Giffgaff who have a better overall spread of coverage with 2g and 3g (and soon, 4g) 3 will automatically upgrade our data sim to 4g but that can be accommodated with a 4g Mifi/router.

 

I expect it will be a case of switching between providers in the future as they keep leapfrogging each other, one advantage of PAYG I suppose. Roll on the day when all are combined into one network.

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I, too, am on the 3 One Plan. For £15 I like it, even with their traffic management in place. The management does seem to be related to particular cells; it can be really noticeable in certain places but doesn't occur elsewhere. But it's good enough that I'm probably going to drop the data-sim when the contract expires - even though I've got a 25% discount on that one...

 

In order to overcome streaming issues related to this I use a couple of things to download stuff rather than watch it as a straight stream.

 

Get_iplayer downloads stuff from the BBC. [it's not just for linux - look down the page for windows instructions).

(http://www.infradead.org/get_iplayer/html/get_iplayer.html)

 

DownloadHelper is a Firefox plugin that does the same for many embedded videos such as youtube.

(http://www.downloadhelper.net/).

 

--

Dave

Edited by DaveP
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As I was paying O2 £21 for 100 minutes and half a gig of data and I am now paying 3 £15 for 2000 minutes (plus 5000 3 to 3 mins) and unlimited data with better coverage for both phone and internet and free 4G when it comes online I think I am getting something for nothing even if they throttle back to 02's level of internet service.

 

Which geographical location are you getting this kind of coverage? We've travelled a fair bit (NW and Midlands), and found variations but overall ok on data.

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They are currently going through a programme of changing 3G transmitters for 4G transmitters in Sheffield. Planning rules state that they can not have two transmittors on the same site so they have to take the older one down before they can erect the new one.

 

Result for us at the moment is very hit and miss signal strengths.

 

On the plus side they upgraded me to 4G for no extra cost. On the downside my Iphone 4S isnt 4G compatible and I have another six months to run on the contract...

I have to say, though 4g is very very good indeed. Much more stable connection and blisteringly quick. Quite a leap in technology. I'm a big fan.

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Or I might be in a location that has got busier... But it all seems a bit strange that it was all very fast until just a few weeks ago??

For the time being, I'm reserving judgement on The One Plan, as it doesn't seem all it is cracked up to be!!

Whereabouts are you? I certainly noticed that 40,000 students arriving in Nottingham at the end of September made a big difference to my home broadband ....
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I too have a 3 USB Dongle (15Gb data per month) and am having problems with the connection which I haven't had in the past.

In April this year I worked in an office in Cardiff and used the dongle all day very day, when I went there a couple of weeks ago I couldn't get any signal at all! So something has changed.

We have just come back from the boat at Droitwich Marina and the signal kept dropping out - again - something that hasn't happened before.

What's going on?

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I have to say, though 4g is very very good indeed. Much more stable connection and blisteringly quick. Quite a leap in technology. I'm a big fan.

I was a big fan of 3g once but as it became more popular it slowed down, I suppose the same will happen with 4g. Which is better, good 3g or bad 4g?

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I took up the 3 Mifi a couple of year ago now. It has proven to be very reliable. I had a problem at Keadby a few days ago, but other than that it has been able to connect everywhere else we've been. Trent/Soar/GU/Thames/Oxford.

Having said all of that, the one place it started to fail last winter was our mooring in Leeds. After asking 3 what was going on I was told that mast upgrades were happening, and that things would be back at the end of the month (March).

March came and went, no change. 3 said maybe it was another mast, they were upgrading several. By the time we finally left for the summer in June there was still no improvement. Throughout this period whenever we were off the mooring 3 was fine.

We're on our way back to Leeds at the moment, I just hope it's been sorted.

Bob

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Although I am on the move all the time and signal strength varies I have definitely noticed a deterioration in the last couple of months. I also have a 3 dongle which I can put outside when the signal is not so good but it seems to make little difference to speed.

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