Has anyone ditched their landline for 4G home broadband?

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gaz_l

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Greetings, Citizens.

I've just about had enough paying BT every month for doing sod all. They connected the landline 22 years ago when I moved in, and they've never been back since. I don't use the landline for voice any more (the mobile covers all that) so I only use it for broadband. I do use the internet a lot when I'm at home, so a decent connection is important.

What's really got my goat is that despite the fact that I live in the middle of town, and a stone's throw from the exchange, BT refuse to fibre up our cabinet. If you look at the fibre availability map of our town, it's a sea of red apart from a little white triangle in the middle. Guess where I live? Yep. I reckon BT won't fibre us up as they'll have to pay the council to dig the main road up and lay a conduit, and it's probably not worth it for the ~30 dwellings served by the cabinet. Furthermore, my connection speed's dropped from the c. 17 MB/s I got when the exchange was upgraded to ADSL2, down to 8 MB/s now. My router tells me me the line rate is still the same, so it's obviously being throttled.

So, anyway, I've been looking at cellular as a possible alternative and I think it's pretty much got the stage of being viable. I'm with 3 for my mobile, their coverage can be a bit patchy but it's OK at home since they rolled out 4G so an LTE modem should work. Also, they've just introduced a new data-only tariff which gives you 100GB/month for 30 quid. That will be more than adequate and works out cheaper than what I'm paying at the moment. The router you get with the deal is pretty basic but I've no objections to chucking a few quid a getting a better one and although I don't have LOS to the nearest cell, some of the routers I've seen have diversity inputs so a couple of external omni antennas should sort that out. Or a high-gain yagi..

Has anyone else done this? If so, feel free to rain on my parade. Does the 4G signal get upset by atmospherics? I know when we had Sky it used to crap out when it rained, but we're taking completely different frequencies. Any thoughts welcome..

Cheers,

Gaz
 
Furthermore, my connection speed's dropped from the c. 17 MB/s I got when the exchange was upgraded to ADSL2, down to 8 MB/s now. My router tells me me the line rate is still the same, so it's obviously being throttled.

Contention ratios have gone up drastically too...

Notice they don't publish them any more and can still keep dropping prices all the time.
 
No reason why you can't do this at all. We do it often as pop up Internet for construction sites on monthly contracts to give them Internet Access very quickly. We use mainly ZyXEL SBG3300-N routers with unlocked Huawei USB Modem dongles circa 50 quid on Vodafone.

We have a portal we can provision a stock of SIMS we have in stock in about an hour. I did this on Friday actually for a small chain of Vape shops. Gave 20Mb/s up & down.

At home at the moment I have a mixed bag. Two copper phone lines with two copper ADSL2+ lines. One phone line from Potters Bar exchange on BT network & one phone line from Hatfield exchange on Talk Talk Business network. Then a satellite ADSL connection with Avanti. Then finally a 4G Vodafone connection with 100GB data.

The 4G is my primary connection I use for all my devices & TV. Guests get the slowest copper line. Wife & kids get slightly faster copper ADSL2+ line.

ADSL2+ gives 3.5Mb/s on one line & 4Mb/s on the other. both with about 0.5Mb/s up. The Satellite gives 15Mb/s down & 5Mb/s up but obviously has high latency. The 4G givrs between 15-25Mb/s down and 5-10Mb/s up. I have an external high gain antenna coming out of the USB dongle from the router.

The 4G is by far the best all round just slightly more expensive. We are quite rural but still close to Brookmans Park/ Welham Green & in between Potters Bar & Hatfield so not middle of nowhere. I think the govt are banking on the 4G/5G mobile networks to provide decent broadband to rural areas that Openreach have failed to provide for some years & likely never will.

My folks were up today from Seaford east of Brighton. They are retired & only use Internet for basic day to day stuff. They already get 50Mb/s on their FTTC connection & told me today Virgin are cabling their area and street as well! So they will be able to access 200-350Mb/s connections as well! The don't live right in the main town bit either. Comical.

Trouble is the are making already fibred & fast areas faster as it is easier to do rather than tackle to seriously lacking & rural areas that desperately need it. The has the effect of allowing the govt to announce silly figures on UK average speeds that aren't real-world, accurate and misleading. Someone getting 350Mb/s & now Hyperoptics 1Gb/s connections skew the ton of people only getting a couple of Mb/s. Ridiculous in my book.
 
We got rid of our landline, but for cable instead. - 50Mb down and no annoying sales calls.
 
Following with interest. I would love to be rid of BT & Openreach.

17 years of promises and we still have broadband on copper that drops at least once a day and has a maximum speed of 1.2 but an average of 0.75.

Satellite is expensive with hopeless latency.

Mobile is just to expensive with two teenagers and us.

So no matter what I try, I am a BT captive. Trapped in their 96% receive high speed broadband claims. I have been in the 4% for 17 years now.


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Gaz, I take it you’ve got no access to Virgin Media?

Best thing I ever did was ditch BT. VM has been incredibly reliable and super quick.
 
I am unfortunately stuck with 6MB broadband via a BT copper line as there is nothing else cabled in the area or likely to be. On top of that I have a virtually non existent mobile signal. To make a call I have to stand in the middle of the garden so 4G broadband isn't going to be an option.

The comments about BT and Openreach are interesting and born out by my experience. It's very telling that a company operating so inefficiently can still make a profit, due only to it being virtually monopoly provider. I used to think they'd get better as the old guard retired and new blood came in but they don't seem to be improving much.
 
Gaz, I take it you’ve got no access to Virgin Media?

Best thing I ever did was ditch BT. VM has been incredibly reliable and super quick.

Sadly not Will. POTS is all we have.

Cheers,

Gaz
 
BT = Broken Telecom with their infrastructure partner NeverReach. They were supposed to launch fibre in our village but the rumour is they connected it to the wrong place (?) and are going to have to re-install the fibre to the exchange - doh.
 
I've been with BT for a lifetime and, as long as you don't have a problem, they are fine. The only issue I had was when we moved into our current property, 11 years ago, and I became embroiled in a sub continent call centre.

I just upgraded to fibre and my regular ADSL speed has doubled to 16meg. Once fibre starts on 13th, it will go to a minimum of 54meg, and that's in a sleepy Kent village. Very happy with that.
 
For balance, at this house, 70Mbps down, 20Mbps up or better, at the last house on ADSL2, usually close to signalling rate pretty much all the time.

A mate was on BT living in London but was tempted by Virgin. Switched, performance dropped dramatically and they did nothing about it so he reverted back to BT.

Having worked with them, I can sympathise with the Open reach guys.
 

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