Full 3G signal, everything still buffers?

[Andeh13]

Recently I got a new phonre, a Nexus 4, and a new Sim Card from 3 mobile. Who I have been with for a few months in total now.

For some reason, despite me having FULL 3G/HSDPA youtube, tunein (radio app) etc still buffer every 5-10mins and the internet stops loading/laggs horribly in the same time frame.

Switching on/off airplane mode fixes it temporarily but within minutes I am back to the internet seeming to drop at random. It is as if the internet comes & goes, or I am on a 2G connection.

Three / 3 just blamed the fact that the Nexus 4 wasn't supplied by them and is a phone fault, despite the fact it works fine on wi-fi and calling & txting is fine. They also sell the nexus 4 themselves so don't have the excuse of the phone not being compatible with their network. That being said, my previous galaxy nexus s didn't have any issues, though it would drop calls at random in full strength areas.

Can anyone else suggest a solution, short of rooting, and re-ROMing with a new radio?

[abaxas]

3g signal strength != available bandwidth.

More users on a cell == less bandwidth each.

[TheAnimus]

Have you been able to test this on WiFi?

It is possible that you have some apps running on the phone that are messing with the bandwidth available, or just those apps are terrible at their adaptive streaming (dropping and raising the bitrate).

What do you get if you go to speedtest.net or similar?

[scaryjim]

I always find TuneIn randomly rebuffers on occasion, even on wifi (although less so, obviously), and how often it does so bares no relationship to the strength of signal I have.

It's likely to simply be variable bandwidth available on the cell: years back when I had a 3 mobile broadband dongle, I got full strength reception on 7.2mbps HSDPA, but my download and streaming was more consistent with 512k. I moved house, and despite having only around half reception I got downloads consistent with a full speed connection.

[aramil]

As said above. Signal strength has nothing (very little) to do with available bandwidth.

More than likely overloaded mast or service throttling due to load. Or just good old fashioned poor service routing.

If you have full strength signal then changing the radio (modem) would not probably help (unless the radio in use is known to have issues on your network.)

Download the speedtest.net app from the store and see what you get.

That being said some apps are not very good at buffering at either low/high bandwidths.

[Andeh13]

Some interesting points. To add to the thoughts.

This is what my signal looks like 75% of the time: Though it does 25% of the time even out over on cell tower at a constant rate.

It does this when I am at my desk, at home or when driving down the motorway.









Spotify doesn't seem to be effected, expect when the phone signal is shown to drop - obviously lost signal etc.

Webpages/Reddit ARE effected like Tune in Radio, they sit there and 'load' or fail to, even though phone shows full signal.

I am a very heavy user, 5-10gbs a month quite comfortably.

3 new ROMs, 2 Kernels and it is no different. I have ordered a sim card from Giffgaff to try out - only network i can test due to my data usage! .

I would be very interested to see what people think with the above info added in^.

Cheers guys

[Infinite]

Are you using an app to get the graphs?

I get the feeling maybe 3 has some measures in place to enforce "fair usage" where by the will drop the connection if they feel that you are excessively downloading/streaming high amount of data which it sounds like you are doing.

My mother has the same setup as you (Nexus 4 from Google, running stock and a Three sim) during my short experience of browsing and YouTube streaming I can't say I have seen any of the symptoms you are describing.

[Andeh13]

Gsm signal monitoring is the app I use. I'll check how it is on wifi later.

My mobile data allowance reset a couple of weeks ago and I am only at 2gb, this has been occurring for a couple of months now. As far as I am aware 3 don't do any traffic shaping?

I would be very interested to see if your mum, using the app above, displays any similarities?