is there any point in home internet

romany

romany

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I have EE as a supplier (not fibre broadband ) which recently keeps dropping out so I decide to do a speed test
it came back with a download speed of 6.47 and an upload speed of 1.04 on my lap top, same test on my mobile on tesco PAYG using wifi router slightly faster, but when I turned the broad band off forcing the phone to use 4g even though I only had two bars showing the speed test came back 10.34 down load and 2.25 upload hence why am i paying 23pound a month for crap broad band when my phone is quicker
 
Yes but what about your data allowance ?

We lived for years with 5Mb/s.
 
For me virgin media cable gives me a decent broadband speed so well worth it .

77938015-7B6D-4F30-A05B-BB2CF48EEDCE.jpeg
 
hilldweller said:
Yes but what about your data allowance ?

We lived for years with 5Mb/s.
Click to expand...
Yes something I am going to check I am assuming that any data sim would give me the same speed as it is the phone that regulates the download speed. or is that wrong ?

I'm about to buy a data sym as about to go more or less full timing anyway so need to work out my monthly use suspect its around 10 gigabyte
 
I did this the other evening, just with a tablet, and my 4g was 3x faster than my home broadband, have just started connecting all devices at home to test before ditching home BB.

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romany said:
Yes something I am going to check I am assuming that any data sim would give me the same speed as it is the phone that regulates the download speed. or is that wrong ?

I'm about to buy a data sym as about to go more or less full timing anyway so need to work out my monthly use suspect its around 10 gigabyte
Click to expand...
3 had unlimited data for £20 month. Use mine for streaming TV, often use 39gb plus in a week away and no throttling of speed
 
When we changed our contract 2 months ago it was cheaper to have super fast broadband than standard cost is £8.99 by I get referrals discount so pay less than a fiver a month. Due to there being dozens on joints on the line to the nearest fibre box (SIL is a local Openreach eng) so we only get 52 - 54 MB/s.
When we had ordinary broadband we only got 3 MB/s it was useless for streaming.

The problem with using 4G data it that unless you are in a very good signal area the speed varies enormously, we have a fairly good signal it still varies between 10MB - 40MB/s. 10 is just about OK at the moment but as sites get more intense & power hungry will it be any good in a year or so, we all used to use dial up you couldn't even get a basic site to load with that now.
 
We live in the "wilds" of North Wales where fibre to the premises only reaches two telegraph poles away from my house.

Having lived for years with a 0.5mb connection waiting in vain for BT to find a way to bring the FTTP cable a further 200 yards, I gave up this Spring and got EE 4g mobile broadband. It's great - I'm getting near fibre speeds at times (20-40mbs).

The only downside is the data allowance. You can't get unlimited data like a fixed connection. I have a lifetime £20 discount, so get 100gb a month for £35. It is just about enough... but the next time they do an offer I will upgrade to 200gb. It's a rolling 30 day contract so I can get out easily if better comes along.

The upside is we can use our UK data allowance in the router I've put in the van when we are away in Europe. No need for mifi units, tethering mobiles or additional data sims - I've just hacked into the 12v supply for the EE router that came with the home package, as I bought a better new one.
 
Larrynwin said:
For me virgin media cable gives me a decent broadband speed so well worth it .
Click to expand...

Nice bit of willie waving there Larry.

But the reality is 5Mb/s will give a perfect video feed, what do you do with the other 200Mb/s ?

The other side of the coin is the provider might have nothing like 200Mb/s and then you are stuffed. This happens some weekends when watching bike racing. I upgraded to fibre not knowing if it was the local cable or the provider causing the stuttering and found fibre better, of course, but occasionally I can still get stutter at peak periods.

But for anyone watching video, the gotcha is the data allowance. A one hour movie could be 2GB.

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Last time I checked the monthly data download at home it was something like 700 plus GB ..
Kids, TV streaming.. I need home broadband..
Currently with plusnet fibre at £27 a month. (y)
 
Lenny HB said:
The problem with using 4G data it that unless you are in a very good signal area the speed varies enormously, we have a fairly good signal it still varies between 10MB - 40MB/s. 10 is just about OK at the moment but as sites get more intense & power hungry will it be any good in a year or so, we all used to use dial up you couldn't even get a basic site to load with that now.
Click to expand...

As long as it makes do for a year or two 5g will be along to blow current speeds out the water.
 
Glas Robin said:
We live in the "wilds" of North Wales where fibre to the premises only reaches two telegraph poles away from my house.

Having lived for years with a 0.5mb connection waiting in vain for BT to find a way to bring the FTTP cable a further 200 yards, I gave up this Spring and got EE 4g mobile broadband. It's great - I'm getting near fibre speeds at times (20-40mbs).

The only downside is the data allowance. You can't get unlimited data like a fixed connection. I have a lifetime £20 discount, so get 100gb a month for £35. It is just about enough... but the next time they do an offer I will upgrade to 200gb. It's a rolling 30 day contract so I can get out easily if better comes along.

The upside is we can use our UK data allowance in the router I've put in the van when we are away in Europe. No need for mifi units, tethering mobiles or additional data sims - I've just hacked into the 12v supply for the EE router that came with the home package, as I bought a better new one.
Click to expand...

Glas Robin - have you tried the EE Hub abroad yet?

I’ve got one and the last time I tried to use it in France, I got a message saying I could not use the allowance outside the UK.

If your works then I’ll need to find out why mine didn’t.
 
hilldweller said:
Nice bit of willie waving there Larry.

But the reality is 5Mb/s will give a perfect video feed, what do you do with the other 200Mb/s ?

The other side of the coin is the provider might have nothing like 200Mb/s and then you are stuffed. This happens some weekends when watching bike racing. I upgraded to fibre not knowing if it was the local cable or the provider causing the stuttering and found fibre better, of course, but occasionally I can still get stutter at peak periods.

But for anyone watching video, the gotcha is the data allowance. A one hour movie could be 2GB.
Click to expand...

With several of us in the house it copes where our BT 4mbs in our last house continually dropped out.
 
Thankfully as we are near to the fibre box we get a decent download speed, 60+mbs, which we need as we both work from home connected over VPNs to company networks. I often use 4G when I am at customer sites and the variation in signal and available bandwidth is considerable. In some large towns/cities you can get a perfect signal but get appalling download speeds of a couple of mbs due to contention, at home I get a fairly average signal but can regularly get 10+mbs downloads. When we finally no longer need the broadband for work we will probably look at the 5G signal strength and what data deals are available and get rid of the home broadband completely, especially as we expect to be off in the MH as much as we can.

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The main downside of relying on solely on 4G is the download limit (even "unlimited" ones usually have a fair use policy hidden within the T&Cs). With the advent of 5G this might change, but only time will tell whether we actually get some truly unlimited mobile broadband solutions.

romany said:
I'm about to buy a data sym as about to go more or less full timing anyway so need to work out my monthly use suspect its around 10 gigabyte
Click to expand...
10GB is not very much at all.....I suspect you'll need a lot more unless you hardly use the internet.
A couple of weeks ago I had to work from home using my work phone's hotspot and by early afternoon I'd already used 1gb. And that was just with emails and a bit of browsing.....no videos, no ip phone calls no software updates, and actually it was a pretty quiet day too, so there weren't any large email attachments to download either.
I have a data monitor on my personal on my mobile and I average 15GB per month (4G and wifi combined) - and that's without regularly using it as a hotspot.

If I was relying solely on mobile broadband I'd want a minimum of 100GB per month for basic online activities, more if I wanted to also stream media. For me, mobile broadband has a long way to go before it can replace a fixed line.
 
We ditched home bb a while ago and tethered everything to our phones.
Ee 100gb per month and can use abroad.
2 smart tvs and a smart washing machine connected.
We stream catch up and the odd film but mainly spotify around 3 hrs a day.
Highest usage so far was 72gb.
Not noticed that we haven't got home bb really.
As soon as we get home everything connects automatically same in the mh with the firestick.
We trialled it first by turning the router off for a week. If you dont notice anything different then you have your answer.
 
I'm not a heavy net user a couple of forums I use and camper contact and others for route and site planning my wife and i are quite happy to watch local tv in France or Spain so don't stream much, Wasap is the way we communicate with family with the occasional phone calls but I suspect I will be surprised how much we do use
 
My old contract with "Three" had unlimited data downloads & at the time was considerably quicker than our SKY Broadband, so we ditched Sky & tethered to my phone til SKY got they're act together.

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I could be in a never ending spiral and disappear up my own backside.:moon2:
No phone signal in my road so have to have the internet for the Vodafone Sure Signal to work and enable me to use my phone.
 
ShaKen said:
Glas Robin - have you tried the EE Hub abroad yet?

I’ve got one and the last time I tried to use it in France, I got a message saying I could not use the allowance outside the UK.

If your works then I’ll need to find out why mine didn’t.
Click to expand...

I must admit I have assumed it'll work. The only time I tried on our recent trip, the signal was so poor it wouldn't connect. So I gave up and put my unlimited work phone SIM in the router instead. That worked everywhere - and although it said I had an 850mb cap before throttling, it seemed to reset every day/each new country and I never noticed any throttling.

It's entirely possible that it won't work and I've misled you!!
 
We have managed the last few years with only a 15Gb allowance with no home broadband. Obviously we did no video streaming or even music. We only came close to that twice - downloading sat nav info was about 7Gb!
We have now got 32Gb allowance between 2 phones (1 on EE and 1 on 3 to give us the best chance of one having a signal wherever we are). We're not bothered about streaming otherwise this is clearly not enough.
 
We've recently dumped our home broadband and are using 3 home hub with unlimited data and have been told that we can use it abroad, subject to the 19Gb limit the same as phones so with our phone data limits as well as long as we don't use them all at once we'll have 27Gb a month which hopefully will be enough as we only really use it for a couple of forums each - including both of us using this one!

Denise
 
I dumped Virgin fibre broadband about 4 years ago and i initially started by using a 4g mifi on 3 with a 20gb monthly package. My reasons for this was that i could use the mifi when away in the motorhome and also the service from Virgin could be dire. Depends what you need it for but i only got close to the limit when Microsoft downloaded an update without me realising.
About 6 months ago now, i switched my phone package with 3 to unlimited data, calls and text for £21 / month. I now just hotspot my phone and use that.
I have watched live tv and you tube videos without any issues. The fair usage policy in the small print i seem to remember was about 1000Gb / month, which it suggested would mean streaming films 24hrs a day all month, so i have no worries about limits.
I do live near a mast so no problem with signal at home.

Mike

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My Vodaphone 4G is noticeable faster on the upload speeds than my home broadband too, then later I noticed it was also a lot faster at downloads too.

When I picked up the phone and used it as a mifi this weekend in the van it was the same as at home - the old fixed broadband's days are numbered.
 
For 13 years I paid BT £30 a month for ½ mb . I don't how we managed but we did, I now have a steady 40 and even when everyone in the house is streaming, It still feels fast enough. Speeds on my phone on a good day are twice as fast as the landline.
 
We had our home broadband and landline shut down about a month ago . This after testing out a mifi over the space of approx 6 weeks , loaded with a smarty unlimited data sim , which is an offshoot of the 3 company, therefore runs on the 3 network . Mifi and sim has never failed for any appreciable time , both at home and while away in motorhome or visiting family etc. And we have also been in some fairly remote spots, so coverage (so far ) has been good.

Our internet usage is the usual internet browsing and we have also begun video and music streaming. Again from home and away in motorhome...... Using the mifi and smarty sim we have not had any buffering or other problems. As far as we understand the fair usage policy and smarty effectively being 3 in another guise , the fair use policy is up to 1000Gb per month..As also described above by another poster, this equates to 24/7 streaming over the entire month to reach that kind of usage. For £25 per month , on a 30 day rolling contract it so far meets our needs .

All being well, our next move will be to remove the sat dish from the motorhome and stream tv etc via mifi/sim /poynting roof fixed antenna.
 
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I live 10 minutes walk from a reasonably sized town within the built up area....Virgin fibre is nowhere to be seen

Best”deal” is Voda land line at £20month for 45mb
Like Jim , paid BT for years 0.5 mb
 

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