A VPN is essential to defend yourself from the jackbooted UK government. I run my own, based on my https://GitHub.com/fazalmajid/edgewalker/
As for Three, their 4G is abysmal but they have the best 5G coverage.
I tend to agree. Unfortunately even VPN doesn't entirely solve it though.
On the one hand wiregaurd makes this feel far more transparent and comfortable technically compared to how it used to with old fashioned crappy TCP over TCP style VPN... instead we now get low overhead, low latency, native, simple configuration etc.
The only problem is the end point: Running your own makes you very uniquely identifiable; using shared gets you on tons of blocklists or excessive captcha-walls of various popular and common services and underlying services like cloudflare or auth services such as google.
Even when running your own server you tend to get blocked due to having an IP from a VPS provider rather than a consumer ISP. It's basically impossible to get normal neutral internet these days... I find myself jumping between different servers, and turning it on and off, there is no single all access method... it's like wtf leave it alone guys, we are not in north Korea.
we will eventually get everything they have in NK/China/Russia/Iran, under a thin veneer of being done for our own good and accompanied by a mass media campaign that will convince a sizeable population of useful idiots to accept it all. the venerable western democracies hate and fear dissent as much as those loathsome dictators do
OTOH for an extreme case, and non-web-browsing purposes, I can imagine automatically spinning a VM every N hours, setting up a VPN exit node by a script, and switching DNS to point to it, then spinning down your old node. It won't even need any shenanigans with WG keys if you use two (or more) keypairs in a round-robin fashion.
I think it depends on where you are. In France, my fiber connections have had a fixed IPv4 since I first got one, 10 years ago. Some ISPs have recently switched to CG-NAT, though. But they also started offering fixed ipv6.
My point is that trying to hide behind a non-fixed IP is a losing game. Plus, you can probably be indentified quite reliably but the pattern of websites you visit.
Wouldn't be that illegal?
The UK is almost as bad an enemy of the Internet as North Korea.
This was in a small urban centre... called London. Would never, ever touch them again.
Back on topic, it seems that they are not using Bluecoat/Symantec Site review (which I suspect other providers do), which has the domain categorised correctly:
https://sitereview.bluecoat.com/#/lookup-result/https%253A%2...
In any significantly built up area 4G is mostly a dice roll among the 3 major UK providers. There will be little consistency when moving between locations and even the same location will change over time.
This is because the radio bands used in 4G are now so saturated that you are aiming for the _least_ popular provider in your current location (different providers are allocated different bands). It doesn't matter how many towers they have or how good your reception is when all the users are limited to such small (radio) bandwidths in the same area, when there are too many users, you effectively have to wait your turn to "speak". This is the main selling point of 5G IMO: not the higher theoretical maximum throughput; but the real world better average throughput even in busy areas due to less user contention because there is so much radio bandwidth available that the major factor in getting reasonable throughput should be equipment, reception and backhaul rather than unpopularity.
This is actually how EE maintain higher than average throughput on their 4G networks AFAICT, because they are priced far higher than their competitors, keeping their user numbers lower... a strategy that may not continue to compete well within the 5G spectrum. Speaking of which, stay away from EE if you care about your sanity.
EE actually maintains a higher-than-average throughput because despite telecoms regulation in place they are "somehow" allowed to own a ridiulous amount of spectrum in critical frequency bands. This raw spectrum is required to provide the bandwidth and thus throughput:
For throughput on 4G mobile, the most important LTE frequencies in Europe are Band 1 and 3 (and arguably to a lesser degree Band 7). On those frequencies combined EE owns almost HALF of the total spectrum (45 of 70MHz on Band3, 20 of 60MHz on Band1, 50 of 120MHz on Band7), with the three (!) other competitors splitting up the other half.
I switched to O2 a couple of months ago and they've been ok really. Nothing amazing but at least the thing nearly always works.
Three seem to have gone down hill in a number of ways. They were also dropping free roaming (still on O2) and I stopped being able to use my laptop on the tube (works with O2).
I even asked a few strangers what network they use and how come they have reception. This is the network I switched to eventually and indeed no more problems.
I didn't pay attention to which provider I was using, since it was probably chosen by whatever deals my home provider stuck with providers over there.
First there was a stupid internet filtering proxy supposedly blocking erotic content but actually blocking a lot more, breaking many websites and forums, VPNs, etc. And also making internet access really slow. The only way to come off this was to ID at the store. This was not a legal requirement in Ireland and only three was doing this crap. All the others just give full internet access by default. I think the UK government enforces this stuff but that's no reason to force it on Irish customers. This was in 2006 or so though. I don't think even the UK had such laws back then (I know they do now).
Then I had an issue logging into their website to top up my account. I called their helpdesk (foreign) which were pure script monkeys and kept insisting my handset needed to be serviced at my expense and asking me to rub the SIM on my Tshirt. I kept trying to explain it had nothing to do with my handset but with their website which I accessed from my computer. But they just stonewalled me with their irrelevant scripts.
In the end I unlocked the handset and moved to tesco mobile. I'll never take 3 or anything from Hutchinson again.
And so many sites was blocked by Three. So frustrating when these were big mainstream baby and health sites but not necessarily in English.
Reception wise they were no worse than others, they all have big black spots in rural areas.
Absolutely no one is prepared, anyone who claims they are or seems to be are faking it.
I know someone who for a while was manager for a team of on-call engineers for a large-ish UK company.
As part of their precautions, they had contracts with all the big operators which they basically split into three groups Vodafone, Three, O2/EE.
The Vodafone contract was of course always the highest in cost, such is life with Vodafone. But nobody ever had a problem getting in touch with engineers on Vodafone SIMs, and the engineers didn't have much to bitch about either.... they could seemingly get signal and data everywhere, even basements.
O2/EE were sort of the Goldilocks option... not too good, not too bad. Data was generally better than Vodafone (O2/EE were generally quicker off the mark deploying 4G/5G whilst for a few years Vodafone customers suffered 3G in non-urban areas).
Meanwhile with Three, everything sucked. Sure they were the cheapest, but very much "get what you pay for". The Customer Service was terrible. But the main problem for my friend was the coverage. We're talking about prime Central London areas here (W,WC,EC postcodes) and the engineers on Three would regularly have either no signal or one/two bars. Infact in one office in particular, the IT room which overlooked a busy street was a Three blackspot, no signal whatsoever (meanwhile colleagues on Vodafone or O2/EE had no problems at all).
Eventually they got fedup, dropped Three and went for a two-carrier model. Three was not exactly bringing much to the table !
I should state this was around 5–10 years ago. So things might have changed. I suspect they have not changed substantially though.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/375986/market-share-held...
Have since moved over to EE which is better performing and better coverage but much pricier. 3 sadly will fall over in the next couple years I would bet.
Rather than privatisation giving democratic power over essential infrastructure to good-old capitalist citizens, I would politely argue that we appear to have sold it to the Chinese government instead.
"If you’re on Pay As You Go, or your Pay Monthly plan started before 1 October 2021, these charges won’t apply."
(I'm a happy Three customer since 2011, can't recall significant signal woes in London while I lived there and have reliable, fast 5G out in the sticks now)
What a useless, broken company, AVOID. Incidentally I hear Virgin Media are similarly awful when it comes to customer service.
Your best course of action is to never sign up to a contract (use the 30-day rolling plans) and be ready to switch at the slightest issue. For home/fixed-line, consider having 2 providers for redundancy so you don't lose connectivity while switching.
Often had to manually switch to 3G for any utility.
Also made the mistake of switching to Smarty their budget brand. Even worse (of course)
Having used Three UK on and off for two decades, this support chat lines up exactly with how I remember– 'robot humans' that say any ol' tosh to finish the contact session.
Avoid Three.
FWIW: all UK consumer telecoms services seem to have horrendous contact experiences (Though Three, of the prominent handful of providers, tops the charts in my opinion), but I've used EE for the last few years, and it has been consistently solid and fast, and thus I thankfully haven't /needed/ to contact anybody there. I cannot say the same for Three.
When this blew up last Friday[0], Three's response was, paraphrased, "you contacted the wrong department, here's how to contact the correct department. Their turnaround time is three business days."
Here we are three business days later, and it works for me.
This seems a bit overwrought?
(Content filters are an issue, but they're mandated by the UK government for large ISPs. All major mobile providers in the UK block by default. In an environment like that, false positives are going to happen; I'm not sure how this could have worked better in practice, so long as ISP-level blocking exists at all.)
As I understand, the lists are maintained per carrier but implemented based on UK regulation. I still find it baffling that despite giving extensive personal information (ID/Passport, bill as proof of address, credit score) to get a mobile contract for an adult, this is opt-out with no questions asked (for example "do you wish to enable/disable this feature?" when the contract is signed). This leaves a lot of room for abuse, as it's demonstrated here.
Personal anecdote, I had to phone Three to disable the filter a few years back when I wanted to browse 9GAG on my commute to work...
The only redeeming quality they have is their US data plan.
ThreeUK blocks access to encrypted provider Tutanota due to 'age restriction' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33981873
I switched to EE and it’s been a breeze. Giffgaff was also good when I used it.
We experience a large number of fraudulent ecommerce orders using Tutanota email domains. I'm not shocked to think that this could be an example of an algorithm gone awry based on the signals it received.
Whether ISPs succeed in any way is an entirely different ballgame, but this is absolutely the job of the ISP, especially in their role of email provider. Its ability to properly discriminate and aggressively block or plonk messages isvery much one of the reasons people like gmail.
Modern legal systems usually limit criminal liability to individuals [1]. Companies engaging in acts of collective punishment (That goes for you too Cloudflare) should at least try to raise their ethical standards to those expected by International Law.
Similar reason lots of US servers used to (? still do ?) block entire IP blocks representing large parts of Asia. If 1% of your legit traffic is coming from those blocks, but 95+% of abuse, brute-force, and exploit attempts, it's a no-brainer to just blackhole them, unless you're at such a huge scale that 1% of legit traffic is still a very large number in absolute terms.
If 90% of tutanota-orginated emails are fraudulent, tutanota is an excellent fraud indicator, even though it will block legitimate emails.
If 10% of gmail-originated emails are fraudulent, gmail is a terrible fraud indicator, even though it will let fraudulent emails pass through, possibly more than the count of fraudulent emails coming from tutanota.
I guess marketing works on everyone, even online-fraudsters ;-)
(Yes, I don't want to send my passport photo to 3IE, that's why I'm dealing with these blockers. And I heard that even if you do verify yourself, they still mess with the DNS records.)
Especially in late 4G and 5G, with ideas of low latency services (that would break if you did this), there are options to route traffic into the visiting network instead. Not sure if anyone's using this though.
From what I've read, alot of 3 Towers only have a single 1gbit virgin fibre link so you're at mercy to who else is using the same tower. If it's in a area with alot of traffic, you'll probably have pretty crap speeds.
If I, a privacy loving person were ever to migrate to the UK is it possible to have a as private and unrestricted anonymous internet as much of the rest of the sane world? Both this and previous thread mentioned some really ridiculous things like lifting restrictions through credit card or drivers license.
On phone I have EE MVNO and without VPN I get blocked pr0n, but not much else. Yes they wanted proof of ID despite having my Direct Debit details.
Personal note: But if you were to migrate to UK, probably not a good time this decade, the cost of living is hitting here hard, post-Brexit shambles are annoying and the compensation is not worth it anymore IMHO. Just the music scene is unbeatable, hence staying.
But we also know that they're watching everyone else (i.e. not in the UK) as well.
Notably, smaller ISPs tend to be exempted from the surveillance and censorship requirements. And you actually have a choice of ISPs, because infrastructure and service providers are kept separate, unlike the monopolies in the States.
So, for example, Andrews and Arnold ("AA ISP") tends to take a pretty strong stance as outlined at https://www.aa.net.uk/broadband/real-internet/. Very old-school, clueful hacker vibe. Hell, they even GPG sign their invoices.
They're also happy to proactively inform their customers about legislative corner cases, like how the overbroad legal definition of a "communications provider" allows customers to legitimately self-identify in such a way that compels A&A to discard copyright infringement notices (https://www.aa.net.uk/legal/legal-status-customers/).
There are legislative threats in the UK, like the recent Draft Communications Data Bill ("Snooper's Charter"), or government-funded campaigns against encrypted communications (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29955893). Those scare me. But thus far they've generally been beaten back, much the same as SOPA/PIPA were Stateside.
You can call it it a nanny state if you like - but what this is really about, is the loss of anonymity online. How long will it be that you are forced to id yourself to get online. I see this as a small step to that end.
One would almost be tempted to code a button that sends that email, or even ask permission to every user to send it for them automatically.
Do not go with Three. I should've ditched them long ago.
I'm assuming something similar happened to 3 where it was probably automatically picked up and blocked.
A VPN may be a solution currently, but recently a Labour Party MP - Sarah Champion proposed the government needs to do something about the VPN providers (obviously the plebs can't have too much freedom).
"Regardless of what is causing the issue, this shows why net neutrality is so important for internet users and online services alike."
For the UK that ship already sailed given its enshrined in law that ISPs have to block adult sites unless you register with the government.
The problem here is not that Three are useless. It's that they are useless AND required to interfere. Behind that is a very social root cause: we pander to morons who think they should get to decide what other people can read/see/watch. The solution is that we, as a country, grow up and either supervise our own kids or actually pay someone else to.
But no boomer will buy that, they just keep crying until someone promises them a free lunch...
That's a lie. German law enforcement can get access any time to the emails - the court orders are trivially to get. Which is a known problem in Germany as for a judge to sign off a search warrant all he needs to do is to sign the dotted line. If he wants to deny the search warrant he has to write up a justification for his denial. Judges being completely swamped in work tend to go the easy route here.
Also prosecutors not being independent but having to follow orders from the ministry of the inner (which is a reason why Germany isn't allowed to use the EU arrest warrant system btw) make political overreach very possible and plausible in such a case.
I wish this "Germany is a safe haven for data" meme would die.
