Optus data saga

I purchased a Virgin Mobile data sim on April 8, as I reported here:
http://bkhome.org/news/201504/low-cost-3g4g-data.html

And I have been using it in my cheap 4G phone, an Mlais M52 Red Note:
http://bkhome.org/news/201504/mlais-m52-first-impressions.html
http://bkhome.org/news/201504/mlais-m52-smartphone.html

I have been getting blazing speed. There is a strong 4G signal here, and uploads and downloads are typically around 1MB/sec (that's mega bytes per second). In fact, when I was uploading Quirky 7.0.4.1, the files were going up at about 1.5MB/sec.

Compared with the 3G speeds that I have been using all these years, this is phenomenal.

Until yesterday! Yesterday afternoon, the speed suddenly got throttled, so slow that some web pages never even completed loading. Some sites, such as phonearena.com/news, remained as a blank window.

Still slow this morning, so I phoned Virgin Mobile technical support. They reckoned nothing was wrong at their end, and suggested it might be a problem with my phone. My nice new M52, no!!!!

So, I embarked on a series of tests...

1. 3G
I changed the phone setting from a 4G connection, to 3G. Wow, suddenly much faster. Typical 3G speed. Changed back to 4G, slow again.

2. Vodafone data sim
I forked out $30 for a Vodafone data sim, prepaid, 3GB data expires in 30 days. Only get 3G connection at home, good speed.
Went elsewhere where got 4G connection, seemed faster.

3. Reset phone
Wiped the SD-card and internal memory, and did a factory reset. Plugged in my Virgin data and Amaysim (phone/texting) sims, set things up again -- now 4G fast speed is back!

This is very interesting. There is one thing that I did yesterday, about midday, installed 'ES File Explorer'. I wonder...

I don't want to reinstall ES File Explorer to find out. It does seem too much of a coincidence, as I didn't do anything else to the phone yesterday.

Next thing, I am going to root the phone, using Kingoroot. After that, will give ES File Explorer a miss, might install 'Root Explorer'.

Tags: light