4G Speed varies wildly and can be unusable - Anyone else had this issue?

[LRDefender]

I'm using a 4G pay monthly mobile sim in a D Link DWR 953 router - Every single day I have outages where the speed drops to less than 1mbps, been in store and they did a sim swap which made no difference. There is no maintenance or network issues in my area

My EE sim doesn't do this and the masts are in the same place so it's not a signal issue. It does it my phone or in the router so it does seem to be a Vodafone issue.

I understand that the network will get slower the more poeple that are using it but I've seen speeds of 1.43mbps at midnight, you can't tell me the network is busy on a weekday at that time of night.

These outages last a few minutes usually and then recover, it may then stay at 20-50mbps for anything from a few minutes to an hour and then happen again.

I read another post where someone said to set the router to 4G mode only but if I do this the sim never connects to the network, if I leave the router on auto it then connects to 4G although I have no idea why!

So has anyone experienced the same with a mobile data sim and any fixes, suggestions or solutions to the issue?

[Annie_N]

Occasionally 4G hasn't been correctly set up on an account; it might be worth contacting CS or Live Chat, and asking them to check this, or to remove and then reinstate 4G.

My only other thought is that, whatever the network checker says, there might be a problem in your immediate area. Are you able to try the router in some different location?

[LRDefender]

Thanks for that I phoned technical support and they basically said I need to prove this issue happens with other devices if it does then they will send an engineer to check the mast. If it doesn't then it's my router at fault.

I doubt the issue is with the mast itself or there would be other complaints in my area but I also don't think it's the router because the same issue doesn't happen on EE.

Not really sure where to go from here, I just managed to get the router to connect to only the 4G network with a signal of 93% and 4G connection speed is 0.46mbps!!!!! 2 minutes later it's 33.2mbps to say this is frustrating is beyond words.

[Annie_N]

@LRDefender I'm not sure that technical support would necessarily pick it up if it's a problem on your account - hence my suggestion of getting the "generalist" side to try re-setting up 4G on your account.

It doesn't sound to me much like a problem with the router, since a different network's SIM works fine, but the only way I can think to check that is to try using it somewhere quite different - not easy, if you need to use it for a longish spell before the problem recurs.

[LRDefender]

Ok thanks again, I literally pasted this link and asked them to reset the 4G as you suggested.

The response I have had was that they will escalate my case to the concerns team and they will send me a response by email in 48-72 hours.

No mention of resetting the 4G on the sim they just said to do a sim swap which would do the same thing and the store has already done which made no difference.

[Annie_N]

@LRDefender I'm a bit out of my depth on some of the technical side, but my understanding is that the problem I'm thinking of affects the account rather than the SIM. The main thing is that they're escalating it to the concerns team, so I hope that they'll get to the root of the problem.