Hey guys, again it’s been a while! But I just wanted to get your input on whether it’s better to stick to using an ISP for WiFi or if it would be better to jump ship & use mobile data.
Background
I live in the middle of nowhere in the UK, my current broadband speeds are so bad & unstable I’m getting flashbacks from the dial-up days. On a good day, my speeds may look something along the lines of this:
Download Speed: 14Mbps
Upload Speed: 0.25 Mbps
Now that’s a good day & let me put an emphasis on how few good days there are, anyhow, cutting to the chase, I ran the same test on my mobile, using mobile data, the difference was pretty epic.
Download Speed: 32Mbps
Upload Speed: 15Mbps
Still nothing to brag about, but substantially better, given that my local infrastructure seems to be dog sh**, everyone in a 3-mile radius tends to have the same input regarding their WiFi, regardless of the provider.
Summary
So, I’ve been contemplating in taking a jump to use a sim based router, just get a plan with some provider where I have unlimited mobile data. Considering 5G is being rolled out slowly, it seems like a sensible idea to make that jump, but considering I’ve never done anything like this before, I was wondering if there’s anything I should be made aware of?
Has anyone else decided to use 100% mobile data instead of using fibre broadband? Are there any major issues that anyone’s encountered? Security issues? Any risks I should know about?
Apologies for my lack of knowledge regarding the world of networking, I’m a software/web nerd more than anything else.
Personally, I find that mobile connections are under the mercy of a lot more factors than a wired connection such as bad weather, signal interference, etc.
With that said, you should probably try to run a prepaid internet account from the same provider if they offer it to get a trial experience. Functionally, if you are not requiring a latency senstive connection such a online gaming, you should be fine with the transition to a mobile connection.
Vodafone does their gigacube thing. That’s 4g/5g. And is £50 a month for 4g at 300gb a month. 5g is unlimited.
You will be hard pressed to find anyone selling unlimited 4g routers. And if you do they’re probably compromising somewhere. (Or your paying more maybe £80 a month)
300gb though is usually plenty, and in fact probably more than you need.
Unfortunately my provider doesn’t have any such package where you can purchase a prepaid package or anything of the such, at least not to my knowledge, worth looking it up to say the very least.
As for latency, my current connection is so bad that I think even the latency would improve, I just did another test, my WiFi’s ping was ~585ms, mobile data was 33ms, I think that goes to show just how awful my local area is regarding broadband.
This is a genuine result… * depressing sigh *
@Eden Thank you for that input, again, it’s certainly something to think about, as for the 300gb a month, I agree, for the most part that should be more than enough, but there are times where I’m downloading or uploading tonnes of data. As for the unlimited 4g routers, I think I’ve seen some in the past, but they were FAR from cheap…
Download and upload less. This is one of those pick and choose moments I think. If you want the capacity and bandwidth you can pay to have fibre installed.
Or you can limit your data usage and go with a mobile solution.
I couldn’t agree more & I’ve been harassing my IPS for years about it, I’ve even changed providers to see if that would actually do the trick, it’s like they don’t care.
I see what you mean now, in that instance, I think I’d go with the mobile data alternative!
You could try aaisp they’re quite good at hassling openreach. It’s not the ISP who has the fault though usually, it’s almost always an openreach part of the network. Best thing is a formal complaint if they aren’t doing their job to fix it (to your ISP).
Sounds like the most rational option before trying mobile data, worst comes to worst, I could always get an unlimited data plan for my mobile phone & tether, it’s a bit of a win-win in my eyes then. I guess a part of this process will obviously require some experimental phase…
Like you said, it’s unlikely that I’d use more than 300GB for a single month for 99.99% of the time, but like this month, I’ve downloaded a lot of my AAA title games, this alone has consumed the majority of 250GB of data, I mean to be fair, just a single AAA title video game can be around the 70GB mark.
A colleague of mine has a VDSL + LTE connection from T-Mobile with 50 Mbits. They call it “Hybrid DSL”. Maybe there is something like that in the UK.
The scenario is the same as yours: Rural area, lacking DSL speeds / stability.
A very hacky way to do it would be a multipath VPN over DSL and LTE. You’d need a custom router (small linux box) and a server on the internet for that though.
That is a very interesting input, to say the very least I wasn’t expecting someone to suggest anything along those lines… To say the least, that is an interesting thought process, but I’m probably too hesitant to try a solution like that…
I will not bring much to the discussion … But if the mobile solution gives better speed, why not? The issue is limits on data and prices. I would not think about 5G that much. First of all, it is more marketing than actual use and secondly 5G will be mainly in big cities. Before someone invests in the 5G range at the end of anything, it may take years.
As for any “G” you can also think of several operators if they have a separate infrastructure and they are not just virtual and then invest in an aggregation modem to several sim cards to increase reliability and in some sense speed. Although to increase the speed in this case, you would still need to invest in a good server with a good symmetrical uplink that would aggregate this traffic and spit it out as one.
I totally agree, it’ll be great when it finally gets to my area, but as you’ve said, that’ll be years away, alternatively I could try out Three’s option(s), like their Three HomeFi Plus product.
That is a very nice idea, the only potential issue being that could in theory add up to an unpleasant bill per month, but then again, I guess I’d have to do a lot more research into this option…
Once the dust has settled with COVID & all the other current chaos in my life, this is one thing that I was going to heavily invest some time & money into, I was thinking about really going to town on getting the best I can get, not just performance, but security also… I was thinking about being a bit harsh & setting up virtual networks, adding specific devices or users to specific networks, throttling certain networks… Such as the a “guests” network, I’d basically make that as lock that down as much as possible, within reason of course… I’m sure you get the general idea though, I’ve kinda gone a little off topic here now!
It will be expensive. If you theoretically pay X for one subscription, multiply it by several times depending on the number of additional subscriptions. But if the local infrastructure is outdated / clogged, it won’t work.
Well if your DSL craps out completely you could get a router that supports failover with a second connection (in your case LTE). But that won’t help for merely “crappy” DSL.
I’ve done the same with my Fritbox (I’m German that’s why my router is called Fritz) and a LTE-USB-modem.
It’s not a bad suggestion, to be fair last night through to ~10am this morning I had no access to the internet at all… It’s food for thought to say the very least!
On a separate note, what kind of wired connection are you using? I’m currently on aDSL in my backwater 3rd world country. I swapped out the modem that the ISP provided me and it had significantly increased stability, with less disconnects and a more evened out latency.
Also a lot of internet service providers are subcontracting to smaller services to install and maintain their lines. Maybe you have a very naughty subcontractor who gets paid by service ticket. If they have a lot of work to do, they get paid more. Do check on that angle as well. Maybe they are misbehaving.
