Unlimited data but dial up speeds.... "Yes Please"!

For a while now I have been a customer with Three Ireland, on the All You Can Eat data plan @ €20.33 per month for sim only. As part of this I have 300 units for texts/calls and unlimited usage of data on my mobile.

One would thing that a plan with free all you can eat data would have a respectable level of performance to allow users to make use of the uncapped data!? Well one would think incorrectly... for the past number of months I have had the following ongoing issues with my HSPA+ (3G) internet connection with Three:

1. Download speeds that are <60kB/s in most areas of Dublin city
2. Constant disconnects from the 3G network 
3. DNS issues that cause intermittent internet connectivity issues
4. Inability to use my data plan for tethering to my laptop due to the above

The response from Three has been lack luster to say the least, whereby I have been told by tech support that they have made changes to my network profile. I have not been informed of what changes and these "updates" have only slightly increased the download speeds to ~1.5Mb/s (in certain areas), but the DNS issues and connectivity loss still remain.

Now a person could say that it is a phone issue (Galaxy Note 2) or the location that I am using the phone in and I wouldn't disagree with them if they did. So to eliminate this as the issue I placed a Vodafone Bill Pay sim in my phone to do a test against the Three sim. The results were shocking to say the least:

1. Vodafone provided  Download: 7.8Mb/s and Upload: 1.4Mb/s
2. Three provided        Download: 68kB/s   and  Upload: 2.1Mb/s

I am alos not sure how Three are providing a 4G network when their 3G network is clearly lacking. My presumption is that the Three Ireland data network is oversubscribed and that it cant deal with the number of users and contention on each of the towers is becoming an issue. There is no way to improve this at the consumer level without investing further in infrastructure and this might be one of the reasons that Three is looking to purchase 02. However as this has been blocked by the Telecoms Regulator at present I am not optimistic that the Three service is going to improve any time soon.

Thus I am now currently thinking of changing my provider to solve this issue as paying for a service I am not being provided is rather retarded, especially in a situation where using the "up to 7Mb/s" or the like is clearly not a valid reason from the results shown above!

I would be interested to hear back from people on their experience of the different mobile providers in Ireland and especially with the Three Ireland network.