replacing home broadband with a 4g router?

[Beans on toast Dave]

my home broadband is nearly up again for the yearly negotiations

i thought this year i would possibly change it to a 4g router on 3 with unlimited downloads

for about £20 a month i could do that which would make it cost effective

whats it like compared to virgin? i dont game at all, only stream and download

is it worthwhile?

 

[lltfdaniel]

This is a subjective question,

Do you mean virgin media mobile, if so virgin uses the ee network and it has been shown that the ee network is a bit faster in national average speeds, if you look this up on google it will show you that.

If you only stream and download but no gaming where pings are important then yeah go for it because pings vary on mobile networks by quite a bit but the download speeds i think are more consistent.

If you are cautious i suggest going with a contract free mobile provider like smarty which uses the three network > https://smarty.co.uk/plans/unlimited the best thing about this deal is there is no contract and is a bit cheaper than £20 a month so if you want to see how good the service is then go with smarty.

Vodafone also do home broadband but costs way more on a contract> https://www.vodafone.co.uk/gigacube/

Then there is three > http://www.three.co.uk/store/broadb...2eMgi1lliIaAqGEEALw_wcB&gclsrc=aw.ds&aidset=1 but yeah i think you are going with a sim card option where it cost 20 quid from three and putting that into a router.

Hopefully someone can help you fully,

My 2 pence,

Dan.

p.s/edit. Going with smarty is a bit of a no brainer, no contract to be locked into so if your not happy with the service you can leave just like that and also cost less than 20 pounds a month and you can also use the smarty sim card in a router.

 

[Philyaris]

I am in the process of the same thing, fed up with Virgin prices, I bought a TP-Link Archer MR200, just waiting for the 3 sim - hopefully Saturday. If this works then looks like a move to the Smarty sim after a few days trying out the set-up.
I am paying Virgin approx £492 per year for 200mb speed, the 3 monthly sim was £29 but can cancel if working, then the smarty is £18.75, this will be a big saving if it works, not bothered about the slower speed.

 

[Rroff]

After moving house and the pain of going from multiple fibre lines to barely 20Mbit speeds on the one FTTC connection I supplemented with a 4G router (TP-Link MR6400) and a Virgin Mobile sim (grabbed one of the lifetime triple data deals which was a good deal at the time). Surprisingly speeds are for the most part quite good despite being a long way from the mast(s) without great line of sight and most of the time the latency is pretty stable at around 30ms most of the time it is actually perfectly playable for online gaming... however 4G is hugely varied from place to place and can be affected by so many factors it doesn't take much to go from perfectly fine even for gaming to absolutely abysmal.

Fortunately unlike the early days of 3G/4G it is pretty rare to get a disconnection or other serious packetloss, etc. problems unless you are in a poor area for reception whereas a few years back even with a good signal you'd often get multiple disconnections and sporadic serious packetloss.

Typical peak time results:

Typical off peak:

Of late I've seen the overnight speeds around 40Mbit down and solid 26ms latency which is quite impressive given the conditions (I'm out in the country with lots of hills and trees, etc. between me and the mast which is over 2.5km away so I was quite surprised to see 30Mbit). Daytime latency is pretty consistent at the moment at 42-44ms but does get some spikes to ~76ms.

EDIT: Sadly Vodafone isn't as good as EE/Virgin Mobile here or I'd get one of their unlimited plans - generally around half those speeds at best and other networks the signal is poor with barely 3G connectivity and lots of drop outs.

 

[Avalon]

4G by its very nature is variable. Things like weather, number of other people in the area (think local events etc) and your router location can make a significant difference as well as an external antenna. If you are expecting a consistent result, stick to Virgin and negotiate on price - it’s not difficult to get a better deal. If you have no other viable faster option (you do) and decent 4G coverage, then it may be viable.

 

[tezmo]

I have tried this for a while mate in favour of my up-and-down-like-a-tarts-knickers BT FTTC (18-5 against a quoted minimum of 25-5 and endless visits from openreach), but ultimately sacked it off and went back to the hardwire. Obviously YMMV very much applies because of the vagaries of where you are and the signal levels you can get, but in my experience even when things are perfect (I have had 100/20 fairly repeatedly out of three) it is still infuriatingly unreliable - now and again requests will just time out, then instantly come in on a retry. Saturday afternoons in particular are bad (maybe this is related to loadsa people in the vicinity here for the football?). And when things are bad - like rain, for example, you may as well not bother. I have farted around with things like external antennas too to try and optimise things. Its really tempting to convince yourself that it might work for you before you've established that it hasn't (not unlike placing a bet I guess!?) and I'm sure that fully wireless is how we will get home broadband in the future, for right now at least, unless it is literally the only option, its no option at all.

 

[TerrierHTFC]

I have tried this for a while mate in favour of my up-and-down-like-a-tarts-knickers BT FTTC (18-5 against a quoted minimum of 25-5 and endless visits from openreach), but ultimately sacked it off and went back to the hardwire. Obviously YMMV very much applies because of the vagaries of where you are and the signal levels you can get, but in my experience even when things are perfect (I have had 100/20 fairly repeatedly out of three) it is still infuriatingly unreliable - now and again requests will just time out, then instantly come in on a retry. Saturday afternoons in particular are bad (maybe this is related to loadsa people in the vicinity here for the football?). And when things are bad - like rain, for example, you may as well not bother. I have farted around with things like external antennas too to try and optimise things. Its really tempting to convince yourself that it might work for you before you've established that it hasn't (not unlike placing a bet I guess!?) and I'm sure that fully wireless is how we will get home broadband in the future, for right now at least, unless it is literally the only option, its no option at all.

Would echo this. Mine is better and preferable to the 2mb/s we could get (cant get any fibre) but its unreliable and cuts our regularly, despite not being far from the mast. Even if I could get 10mb/s down cabled I think I'd stick with that.

One thing I haven't done is bother with an outdoor aerial as I didn't want to bother with drilling through the wall for what is hopefully a short term measure, so that may improve things.

 

[labcoattech]

5G home broadband is not far off

 

[Avalon]

5G home broadband is not far off

Given that many rural locations still have little or no 4G and the fixed broadband side of 5G strongly favours an external antennae install, i’d not hold my breath. That said, at least at this early stage the networks seem to have grasped the opportunity to compete in a new market and ‘unlimited’ is being used in the sense of always on, but rate limited unless you pay a premium. Sadly, at least for the short term, 5G will compete in densely populated locations where FTTC/FTTP/G.Fast/Cable/small fibre networks already tend to exist.

 

[SB118]

We've just done this. VM were charging a bomb, after much haggling we got them down to £37/month so we ditched them and used a 3 sim card for a month.

Gaming was fine (Fallout 76, didn't have any more lag or disconnection than usual), Netflix was fine (i ditched the 4k option from our package, so that saved the price of a can of coke a month too), youtube was ok (turned down from 4k again).

We used the one month rolling sim, just to test if it was any good (picked up their Huawei router for £50) and we were just about to jump in to the 12 month contract when we got a mail shot from VM offering us a phone line and 100meg line for £27/month, so you might get that occurring.

If it wasn't for having to reinstall Forza4 over the 4G connection, i might have stuck with the 3 sim card.

 

[Deleted member 209350]

Forget 4g, why not wait for a 5g router? You get the benefit of much faster speeds, but im not sure about the price

 

[Rroff]

Forget 4g, why not wait for a 5g router? You get the benefit of much faster speeds, but im not sure about the price

Some people might be waiting awhile until 5G is available near them.

 

[Simeon Leigh Wetherill]

Not sure if I'm on the right link, but changed to Three 4g router for our broadband, then installed an external multidirectional aerial, with LAN speeds of download 25mbps and upload of 28mbps. However I after a couple of weeks the speeds have dropped to 6-10 mbps download.
My readings are as follows RSRQ -11.0dB, RSRP -82dBm RssI -55dBm SNR -5dB. Cann anyone advise

 

[TerrierHTFC]

Might as well stick this in here rather that start a new thread, I have a three sim plugged into a TP Link Archer MR200. Works nicely during the day, speeds are variable as youd expect with 4G but the signal strength is consistently 3 bars out of 4, 75% in the router settings.

Then, seemingly every night circa peak times, the signal strength drops intermittently to 1 bar 25%. It didn't used to do this but has done so for a while now. I imagine its some short of throttling, but if not any other ideas?

 

[WJA96]

Might as well stick this in here rather that start a new thread, I have a three sim plugged into a TP Link Archer MR200. Works nicely during the day, speeds are variable as youd expect with 4G but the signal strength is consistently 3 bars out of 4, 75% in the router settings.

Then, seemingly every night circa peak times, the signal strength drops intermittently to 1 bar 25%. It didn't used to do this but has done so for a while now. I imagine its some short of throttling, but if not any other ideas?

it’s unlikely to be throttling. Much more likely someone is turning on a device (TV, satellite unit etc.) that is interfering with your signal reception.

 

[TerrierHTFC]

it’s unlikely to be throttling. Much more likely someone is turning on a device (TV, satellite unit etc.) that is interfering with your signal reception.

Possible that it's something in somebody else's house? As I cant think what it could be in ours that would be different at different times, but could well be houses on the line of site between router and mast (of which there are many!). Suppose they are more likely to have things switched on during the evening.