Vodacom LTE issues at home.

[AstroTurf]

Hi,

So this is kind of more for record keeping and to upload photos in case Vodacom's email system/support system does not allow attachments.

If anyone have suggestions please respond.

Contract is for 100+100GB

Background:
We live on a plot, no Fiber, No ADSL, no level 7 or the likes and till quite recently the only cellular provider that could supply us with internet was Vodacom.

I have a "contract" with Vodacom but bought my router cash around 18 months ago. My previous agreement had gone month to month around 22 months ago. The reason I have a contract is because they called me and offered me my current data at around R200 cheaper than I was paying last year October.

I have had a data contract with Vodacom for at least 9 years now as they were the only provider that could actually give me a stable internet connection.

Anyway, back to present.
For around the last 2 months our internet at home has been erratic.
For the last few weeks it has been really problematic.

I have been forcing the Router to use 3g when LTE becomes unusable then switching back to LTE when 3g becomes unusable and some days simply giving up after numerous attempts.
I tried rebooting numerous times, sometimes it helped, other times not so much.
I tried unplugging, leaving for a few minutes then plugging it back in again numerous times (IT Crowd Style).

Anyway, I sent an email to their support on May 12 giving them all the info about the issue, my gps coordinates and any other info they may need.

Location: -**************
https://goo.gl/maps/***********
LTE Router: Huawei B315\
Data Sim Phone number: 076 *** ****

Issue:
Even though our signal strength stays at 100% our internet connection is extremely unstable to the point where there is zero internet connection at times.
The absolute maximum speed I seem able to get on LTE is just under 3Mbps download and 1Mbps upload.
Latency ranges from 38ms to simply timing out.

Is this a tower or congestion issue?
It is a relatively new issue. Only been happening for the last month or so.

I have found that I can sometimes change from lte/4g to 3g and then have a semi stable connection for a while but then this also eventually becomes unusable and I have to change back again.

Please urgently get back to me about this issue, Currently the router is off but I can leave it on from tonight till the issue has been resolved.

(12 May) They called me back, we had a long chat about the issue and they said they would forward to their network team.
I then sent them this email:

Hi, please Mention to them that we live in an elevated area, half way up Magaliesberg...

(13) They called me again the following day, we had another conversation and they said they would forward to their network team.
(16) I emailed them the following and they called me back again to tell me that they will forward the information to their network team.

Hi,

Just an update.

I stuck a telkom card into my router and had perfect internet for 12 hours.

This tells me the issue is with the Vodacom network at our GPS coordinates and not with my router.

Please update the network team on this.

I took my router to work yesterday and used it there for around 4 hours.
Here are the results:






Yesterday I was getting reasonable results (around 9Mbps) at home but today back to terrible...