I'm on month 4 now of an unfixable and frustrating issue with my copper broadband line and I've had enough. There is clearly a line fault and BT/OpenReach are unable to rectify it to a level I find acceptable. We are expecting fibre cabling to be installed, but zero estimate on when (I have asked a number of times).
Switching suppliers is fruitless, as they all use the same infrastructure so I'm considering moving to 4G (and soon 5G) mobile broadband.
Has anyone else attempted this? It feels like a no-brainer to me.
Currently I pay £24.99 and get 36Mbps and 15ms latency
I can get 5G router and unlimited data for £21.00 and (using my phone) get ~280Mbps with around 30ms latency
My usage is heavy; I work from home, 2 children that utilise YouTube and online gaming services and a wife that lives on Netflix.
What's the catch? Faster speeds, less money...
THIS deal, specifically.
I empathise with you, we had an intermittent line fault for over a year, turned out that it was a worn cable in the junction box on a nearby telegraph pole that our telephone copper line came to the house from, less than 30 mtrs from our router, numerous engineers thought they'd cured the fault until the last fella from Openreach went at it like Sherlock Holmes.
"Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it's enemy action."
'Populism, the last refuge of a Tory scoundrel'.
A very useful discussion on this exact subject is here:
https://forum.tz-uk.com/showthread.p...ight=broadband
We ditched our wired connection and have been on 4G broadband for about 3 years(?) now and would not go back unless something substantial improves with the wired network, but I suspect 5G will change the goalposts for the better (for us) before that happens here anyway.
5g does seem the right call in this case.
However should you find it falls short for any reason then take a look at a&a for your broadband they have a extremely good record in fixing lines that others including but/openreach have failed to do but they are not the cheapest provider
https://www.aa.net.uk/broadband/speed-and-quality/
I've been on 4G with Three since March this year when we moved house on a £30 monthly rolling contract which is much more expensive than current deals but we had no idea how long we'd need it - ironically, I have ducting in place to get fibre to my door but no company can negotiate the 90 degree turn it makes off the drive and up the entrance path because previous owners removed the pull through rope that had been put in place by the developer. This means that I have spent 8 months fighting with Virgin to get them to agree to lift some block paving to make a new entrance to the cable into the house, at little success - I suspect I will need to engage a groundwork company to come and enact a fix.
Anyway, aside from an issue with drop outs that only rectified themselves when the router was reset (turns out there was a fault on my nearest cell tower that was urgently fixed) I've been getting between 20mb/s down and 25mb/s up on most days with unlimited usage and seemingly little to no throttling just off the A3M in Hampshire. I only really wanted fibre for redundancy of service given that we both work from home now, but honestly by the time 5G arrives here I can't see the need.
I'm fortunate to live in a 5G area and despite Three having a bad reputation, I have a stable 5G connection. Comparing my Virgin Fibre with Three (Download/Upload)...
Virgin Fibre: 99MBps//20Mbps
Three 5G: 872Mbps/27MBps
So nearly a 1gig connection on 5G. I've got an unlimited package and would be tempted to switch but I've not looked into the fair use policy and confirmed my confidence in connection yet.
Last edited by Christian; 30th November 2021 at 16:16.
Three is truly unlimited, it was the first one I tried. But despite promising speeds initially, for me it was very unstable and constantly had speeds dropping to almost zero. A router reset would fix it, but I got fed up with it in the end. To rule out the router I tried a Giffgaff SIM and all problems disappeared, however their 'unlimited' isn't unlimited and we fell foul of their fair usage cap of 650GB a month within a few months. Now with Vodafone, 20-30meg speeds (compared to about 2-3 on landline) , truly unlimited and no drop outs or slow downsOriginally Posted by Christian
Could you share the ping/response times you get with each network?
Three…Ping 13ms, Jitter 1.2ms
Virgin…Ping 10ms, Jitter 2.2ms
An old thread but might as well ask here…
Is the positioning of the 5G modem critical? Current cable modem/router is in the garage and where LAN cabling terminates so ideally would have to go there.
Depending on the frequency of 5G, location can be very important. It isn’t as good at penetrating walls as 4G so you would be best testing the speed/latency/jitter at various locations.
No way of doing that before signing up I suppose?
Would phone be of any use, if with same network (though unlikely)?
Are external aerials available and connectable?
Last edited by Kingstepper; 9th October 2022 at 13:21.
External aerials are available for 3G/4G modems so I expect they are available for 5G modems as well.
Edited to add: the answer is yes. Five seconds on Googoo produced this:
https://5g.co.uk/guides/external-5g-mobile-broadband-antennas/
When I was moving about a bit I had Vodafone's unlimited 4G router and SIM package. It was great. Even when I lived in a house in the middle of a field I obtained 45meg. I used a £9 external aerial from Amazon which helped getting a good signal.
Grab an app called 'Find Tower' as it'll help in setting it up.
I cancelled it when I moved into my new place which has FTTP (1,300meg down, 1,000meg up - not the standard Sky router I might add).
Andrews and Arnold ISP will get it fixed. I think their deals are limited downloads though, if I was running a business I’d go with them. They are the only ISP BT prioritises because they really know their stuff, they also run a proper helpdesk without scripts.
We use one as our line got damaged about 10 years ago and they've never fixed it properly.
It's pretty good but suffers badly when there are heavy low-level clouds.
I use my mobile phone (iPhone 13 pro max) and pair it with my PC, it seems to work better than the TP-link router with EE.
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