red lights, no signal but great speeds,

[feno3000]

so i got the gigacube on tuesday. speed were 240mb downloads, green lights all round. i noticed the firmware was out of date so updated it. Now i have red lights for 4g and 5g even in the upstairs window facing the field where the mast is located(over some other houses, but in line). the router status page reads no bar signal, the lights are red, but download speed is 300mb plus upstairs, if placed downstairs is more around 200mb +. So better line of sight upstairs but still red lights. 

What i dont understand is if the signal is so poor how are the speeds being recorded so well? 

noise on the rsrp on day one was -98 after the firmware update is -100 upwards. mostly 110+. 

according to ookla - speedtest, my mast is 800m away, with some houses in the path.

moving to other windows has zero effect now, i can only see the firmware has had a negative impact on performance.

[Gemma]

@feno3000 - thanks for the detailed post and the tests you've done. I'd like us to investigate your signal from our side and look at your local mast. To help us to do this, please can you follow the steps from our Network Troubleshooting Guide including step 6 if you get to it? 

[feno3000]

thanks, spoken to multiple people on chat. gave up on the facebook chat, i'm not sure why the pinned topic on this forum tells people to DM you on facebook\socials. They are [Removed] useless and dont respond for hours at a time.

I plan on returning the gigacube today. Whilst speeds seem ok on speedtests (ookla)to vodafone owned\connected servers(350mb) , real world download tests showed that the theoretical speed didn't match reality, so after seeing a speed test of 350mb, i could only achieve top speed of 150mb at peak, the average was around 60mb.

The signal strength from direct line of sight of a mast, no real world technical articles on this, Also the lack of any kind of real support or knowledge on the hardware and the technology within the vodafone support network worries me that should i face an issue i'm just going to be sat waiting whilst people tell me to restart my router, or try it in a different window. I even tried it in the loft space which gave me the same 350mb downloads but did not improve the noise or worsen it but did have the bonus of an increase of upload speeds to 55mb which was surprising as having it in the upstairs window only got me 20mb upload. 

I thought whilst typing this i would try the loft again, keeping it away from the physical roof and placing it about 2 meters away in a clear space improved noise and gave green lights. i have retried by the upstairs window and then in the middle of the room and this had the same effect. I wonder if the glass does impact the signal in my case? even though the best practice is to place by the window? seems the physical barrier does damage the signal strength.

Maybe someone will find the above useful when attempting to place it somewhere.

Maybe in a year or two it might be worth a revisit and more masts will be up in my area which would lower the single point of failure and make this a viable option. but ive not had a great experience these last 3 days so am returning.

[MOD EDIT: This post has been edited to remove off topic/personal information/inappropriate content please see Community Guidelines]

[Amanda]

Thanks for getting back to us @feno3000 and providing that information - I know it's frustrating when things aren't working as expected.

Did you follow all the steps that Gemma mentioned above? If so, it does lead you to a template to provide some further details to allow us to look into it in more detail - alternatively, you can reply back to our Facebook message from this morning 🙂 

[feno3000]

been through all of this with people on chat. reset the services etc, 

unfortunately the guide gemma attached has been done and is rather generic.

no one i spoke to seemed interested in the fact that i had green lights and good signal on the shipped firmware, and once the firmware was updated on the gigacube to the latest version things got worse with signal\noise. such a laundry list of how bad the experience has been dealing with this i forget one thing like the above.

ive managed to negotiate a good deal with virgin so will be with them for the next 18 months. the cube(cylinder) will be shipped back to vodafone.