Using phone hotspot to replace home broadband

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Exactly, i am looking at all my reoccurring outgoings in at attempt to reduce them. For example I am probably going to ditch sky sports and bt sports because I just don’t watch them that much. I’m Not doing this because I’m skint but when I’ve totalled up all my fixed outgoings, it’s pretty scary to say the least. I’m not struggling for money, that’s not the driver here. I just want to get my monthly costs down to a more sensible number (well as it can be with the mortgage and other bills). I own two expensive performance cars so that will be another area I will be looking at. I thought this place would be a good to get a good answer regarding broadband.

To answer some questions in this thread :

- yes I own the iPhone X outright
- yes three allow tethering and they changed it recently so it’s unlimited
- no I don’t have a copper line. Fttp only. Phone goes through fibre through some converter in my house

I am already on the absolute best haggled fibre deal with bt. Regarding the suggestion to get one of these Huawei home routers and SIM cards... I’ve considered that, However, it then defeats the point as that doesn’t save much compared to just paying an extra fiver on my phone bill for unlimited data.

I use my sisters Netflix.

So it sounds like the main concerns with using 4g tethered as home broadband are:

4g May not be fast enough to stream Netflix
And
iPhone battery life (as someone said above I’d leave it plugged in all the time)
 
Soldato
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4G is definitely fast enough to stream netflix so no worries there.

In your case I’d definitely go down the router route (ahem) as it’ll just be less hassle in the long run. Suppose your other half needs net access and you and/ or your phone isn’t available?
 
Soldato
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4G is generally fine for streaming as long as you have a decent signal. You're cutting your fibre bill down to zero, knocking Sky Sports (£23/m rrp) and BT Sport (27.99 rrp) on the head and presumably saving the best part of a ton? Yet struggling to justify spending £13-17 extra on-top of the bolt-on you've already chosen as your solution so your wife has the option to use netflix/iplayer if you aren't at home/forgot to put your hot-spot on. Also have you felt how hot an iPhone gets in a case on charge for 12hours and used as a hot-spot? Probably a good idea to at least take it out of the case and budget for a new battery longer term (£65 from apple... or about what you could buy a 4G router for).

Either way, hope it works out, if it doesn't it's easily remedied :)
 
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Soldato
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If you don't go the 4G router route, i would look at sourcing an old android that supports 4G and you can leave that tethering/charging without having to worry about its battery life at all.

But again you're back in the position of the 4G router is probably going to be a similar price, but would be considerably more efficient to run that a phone. Keep your eye on ebay and see if a deal comes up there.
 
Soldato
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Just got another price rise off VM so phoned up and put my 30 days in.

Managed to get a Huawei B311s-220 router off eBay for £37 and think I'll get a Smarty unlimited sim for £18.75pm.

Smarty is on Three same as ID Mobile on my phone and that gets 35.6/8.95Mbps in the place I am going to put this router.

Even if it's only for a few months it should give me 'new customer' status back at Virgin if they have any decent deals on.
 
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Thanks guys.

I think the general feeling is that its best to stick with a fixed FTTP Line, at least for now. Maybe 5g will change things in the future. Me and the Wife don’t use our phones a lot bu then a lot of apps (eg one drive) are configured to only upload on WiFi. I have no idea how much data we use on the WiFi.

Anyway thanks for the help. Glad that some people understand my motive behind trying to cut costs. I’ve naturally over time built up a list of things that I pay for monthly and don’t question, because it’s affordable. Adding it all up was quite scary so now I’m simply thinking “do I need it or can I do it cheaper?”
 
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