MTN and Google in Battle?

RudderVator

RudderVator

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Has anyone else experienced an intermittent issue with MTN on 5G or LTE where google maps and drive will insist that you are offline yet Whatsapp, google search or even a Mybb speedtest will work perfectly fine with 300mbps+ on the test?
 
I’ve been having similar issues with YouTube and Google maps, they’ll be unresponsive when I open them as if there’s no internet connection, sometimes takes a good while for them to come right, iPhone with MTN
 
I've noticed this (Google Maps) more and more in the last couple of weeks, but also with Spotify. I listen to a lot of music and podcasts on Spotify and it is an absolute disaster - nothing streams, nothing downloads. It sucks.

This afternoon after I got in my car to drive to PTA north, I decided to connect via Surfshark VPN to London (I bought a subscription recently for... Reasons ).

Boom! Instantly everything loads. All the tiles in Google Maps loads. I tried downloading a podcast in Spotify - comes down at great speed. I stream an episode - no buffering.

Could it be MTN's international bandwidth being very congested / limited, and when I connect to the VPN it goes via another route?

This is on an iPhone on MTN LTE and mostly in PTA.
 
Additional update: it continues to work very well, even if I connect the VPN to a South African endpoint instead of London/UK.

So either DNS / international routing issue, or if I want to be pessimistic, MTN is doing traffic prioritization and the VPN is hiding the types of traffic from them.

@Jan not sure if this is something you guys notice around the MyBB offices in Pretoria South?
 
Update: I was in the UK for a week, using Ubigi. Everything loaded fine and was speedy, no need for a VPN.

Got back in SA last night and immeidately started noticing MTN's slowdown again. What irks me from using SurfShark is that I can't Google - I have to do a Captcha to prove I'm not a bot.

So this afternoon I installed the 1.1.1.1 app (Cloudflare, basically a VPN that forces traffic to use their 1.1.1.1 DNS server - only way you can set a DNS server on the mobile connection on an iPhone) and this seems like the best compromise - I get good speeds without a "heavy" VPN and nothing is giving me issues so far.
 
ebendl said:
Update: I was in the UK for a week, using Ubigi. Everything loaded fine and was speedy, no need for a VPN.

Got back in SA last night and immeidately started noticing MTN's slowdown again. What irks me from using SurfShark is that I can't Google - I have to do a Captcha to prove I'm not a bot.

So this afternoon I installed the 1.1.1.1 app (Cloudflare, basically a VPN that forces traffic to use their 1.1.1.1 DNS server - only way you can set a DNS server on the mobile connection on an iPhone) and this seems like the best compromise - I get good speeds without a "heavy" VPN and nothing is giving me issues so far.
Click to expand...
This could be the answer. Don't understand why youtube has to so broken on MTN.

Google maps seems to be working well again.
 
In my case, Spotify seems to be very broken over plain MTN connections.
 
ebendl said:
Update: I was in the UK for a week, using Ubigi. Everything loaded fine and was speedy, no need for a VPN.

Got back in SA last night and immeidately started noticing MTN's slowdown again. What irks me from using SurfShark is that I can't Google - I have to do a Captcha to prove I'm not a bot.

So this afternoon I installed the 1.1.1.1 app (Cloudflare, basically a VPN that forces traffic to use their 1.1.1.1 DNS server - only way you can set a DNS server on the mobile connection on an iPhone) and this seems like the best compromise - I get good speeds without a "heavy" VPN and nothing is giving me issues so far.
Click to expand...
I’ve been using that cloudflare app as well and it helps marginally but doesn’t completely resolve the issue.
Just yesterday Google maps was dead as a dodo for 10mins just when I needed it but a speedtest showed my connection was at 100mbps.

It’s also supremely annoying with YouTube Music it will refuse to load a song or midway during a song it’ll completely die.

@Jan this is an interesting problem, maybe MTN has some kind of disagreement with Google and is taking punitive action by limiting throughput so when total traffic reaches a certain volume it just hard throttles across the board.
 
airborne said:
I’ve been using that cloudflare app as well and it helps marginally but doesn’t completely resolve the issue.
Just yesterday Google maps was dead as a dodo for 10mins just when I needed it but a speedtest showed my connection was at 100mbps.

It’s also supremely annoying with YouTube Music it will refuse to load a song or midway during a song it’ll completely die.

@Jan this is an interesting problem, maybe MTN has some kind of disagreement with Google and is taking punitive action by limiting throughput so when total traffic reaches a certain volume it just hard throttles across the board.
Click to expand...
@Jan ask MTN "What the hell man?":p
 
So I got an iPhone 15 and moved to 5G now. Still getting these issues on MTN. Still struggle Googling things or streaming music in Spotify unless I use a VPN or 1.1.1.1.
 
Last edited:
ebendl said:
So I got an iPhone 15 and moved to 5G now. Still getting this issues on MTN. Still struggle Googlung things or streaming music in Spotify unless I use a VPN or 1.1.1.1.
Click to expand...
The DNS issues persists. Truly pathetic actually. Been like this all year.

My 1.1.1.1 DNS is permanently switched on now.
 
RudderVator said:
The DNS issues persists. Truly pathetic actually. Been like this all year.

My 1.1.1.1 DNS is permanently switched on now.
Click to expand...
I'm trying to figure out if this actually causes my iPhone to heat up - bit annoying. Feels like it gets better when I turn off 1.1.1.1, but then again, nothing loads so perhaps it is just data coming through heating things up.

I need to update IOS 17 to the latest version to see if it fixes it
 
ebendl said:
I'm trying to figure out if this actually causes my iPhone to heat up - bit annoying. Feels like it gets better when I turn off 1.1.1.1, but then again, nothing loads so perhaps it is just data coming through heating things up.

I need to update IOS 17 to the latest version to see if it fixes it
Click to expand...
1.1.1.1 did seem to make my phone more snappy, but probably just imagining things. There was a time or two where it actually caused problems, didn't get Whatsapp messages for 2 hours, etc.
 
ebendl said:
I'm trying to figure out if this actually causes my iPhone to heat up - bit annoying. Feels like it gets better when I turn off 1.1.1.1, but then again, nothing loads so perhaps it is just data coming through heating things up.

I need to update IOS 17 to the latest version to see if it fixes it
Click to expand...

If you have a public ip you will get the battery drain issue.
 
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