Mobile Broadband

[umgolaarmagh]

Lads,

mobile broadband is doing my head in at the moment, coverage and speed is absolutely crap

is there any good products out there

[general]

Bump on this thread - been a while 

Ive purchased a new house in the 6 counties - home internet is still in the stone age - near dial up!

Looking at getting mobile broadband - some people say its great - plug a router in and put a sim in - can anyone advise? no phone line required

[LeoMc]

It will only ever be as good as your signal. If you have a good 4g signal you can get equivalent speeds. Get a decent 4g router with a couple of LAN ports.and run a few CAT5 cables wand put in a few POE WIGI points.

[armaghniac]

Never buy a house without checking the broadband first!

[TabClear]

Bump on this thread - been a while 

Ive purchased a new house in the 6 counties - home internet is still in the stone age - near dial up!

Looking at getting mobile broadband - some people say its great - plug a router in and put a sim in - can anyone advise? no phone line required

Have you looked into the Rural Broadband FTTP scheme. A friend works for a Utility and he was saying they are going round loads of rural locations installing fibre direct to the house. However I dont know if

1 The home owner has to apply
2  If the instal is free/full cost/subsidised
3  If you are tied into getting a contract from the installer (Fibrus I think)


Sorry, more questions than answers but someone on here might know the answers to the above.

[armaghniac]

Bump on this thread - been a while 

Ive purchased a new house in the 6 counties - home internet is still in the stone age - near dial up!

Looking at getting mobile broadband - some people say its great - plug a router in and put a sim in - can anyone advise? no phone line required

Have you looked into the Rural Broadband FTTP scheme. A friend works for a Utility and he was saying they are going round loads of rural locations installing fibre direct to the house. However I dont know if

1 The home owner has to apply
2  If the instal is free/full cost/subsidised
3  If you are tied into getting a contract from the installer (Fibrus I think)


Sorry, more questions than answers but someone on here might know the answers to the above.

Fibrus is the solution, mobile can only be a stopgap, the only question is when they will arrive in your area.

[gander]

I have 4G and its faster than anything I'll ever get from a fixed line, 30mb+.  once 5G rolls out it'll be even faster

[johnnycool]

Bump on this thread - been a while 

Ive purchased a new house in the 6 counties - home internet is still in the stone age - near dial up!

Looking at getting mobile broadband - some people say its great - plug a router in and put a sim in - can anyone advise? no phone line required

depends on your location.

I'd to go the 4G router via 3 to get anything decent as BT could only offer 5M at best.

the 3 router is pointing out a bedroom window direct at a mast and can get up to 40M on a good day but other days its in and around 9M..

£22 a month so not so bad.

Some day I'll put up a proper antenna but haven't gotten round to it.

[TabClear]

Bump on this thread - been a while 

Ive purchased a new house in the 6 counties - home internet is still in the stone age - near dial up!

Looking at getting mobile broadband - some people say its great - plug a router in and put a sim in - can anyone advise? no phone line required

Have you looked into the Rural Broadband FTTP scheme. A friend works for a Utility and he was saying they are going round loads of rural locations installing fibre direct to the house. However I dont know if

1 The home owner has to apply
2  If the instal is free/full cost/subsidised
3  If you are tied into getting a contract from the installer (Fibrus I think)


Sorry, more questions than answers but someone on here might know the answers to the above.

Fibrus is the solution, mobile can only be a stopgap, the only question is when they will arrive in your area.

Any idea who pays for it? I have been told different things that range between "its all fully funded as part of the DUPs sweetner deal at Westminister", to "the owner has to pay for it" or "the owner pays for it but can get a grant?"

[Main Street]

Bump on this thread - been a while 

Ive purchased a new house in the 6 counties - home internet is still in the stone age - near dial up!

Looking at getting mobile broadband - some people say its great - plug a router in and put a sim in - can anyone advise? no phone line required

Congrats with the new house but decent broadband is an even bigger issue.
I live outside the zone of broadband coverage but the cavalry arrived with blessed 4G. I have the one subscription and there are 4 wifi connected sim cards feeding off the one unlimited download sub. I have an external antenna with a 10m cable to the modem. You should be able to trial the whole set up before committing yourself, eg find out if the external antenna makes a difference. I  went for a directional antenna and have it pointed in the direction of the cell tower. It blew down in a half storm and now she's patched up and fixed in position with a few of those stretch tie ropes.
Depends on your house but  circumstances might favor the use of another wifi sender 
For signal loss, better to have an antenna with a 5m cable if possible, I just needed the 10m one.

[StephenC]

I think you can pre-order Starlink - it'll be something like €100 per month plus installation.

[armaghniac]

I'd say the fibre optic will arrive in most rural areas before 5G, so I wouldn't put too much faith in it.

[general]

I'd say the fibre optic will arrive in most rural areas before 5G, so I wouldn't put too much faith in it.

Unfortunately it appears that not every residence or business presence that is currently outside the scheme of Openreach's FTTP rollout will be covered by Project Stratum. Worth checking by putting your postcode/address in at www.hyperfastni.com

Great news! Your property is within our network deployment plan for project Stratum
Your area is scheduled for planned completion in Spring 2023

Thanks for all comments above! Its a big help - i think ill try out the "3" 4g router system - I noticed on viewings that my ROI Work phone had very good 4g signal via 3 - hopefully this will work out. I'm moving from a relatively new housing development which was lucky to have had fibre to the home installed from day dot - running off silly speeds! Saying that - I dont think I make the most of these speeds anyway - no games consoles, couple of firesticks and a laptop would be the most.

[tbrick18]

I know a few folks that are using 4G mobile data for home broadband. Some of these points have been covered already, but just to go over them...

* The potential speeds, both up & down you get will depend on the signal strength from the mobile networks base stations (BTS), the amount of spectrum being made available from the BTS and what the received mobile data device can handle, and contention on the local masts (i.e. the amount of people using data at a particular BTS at any one time). In a few cases, weather can also be a factor, but not for most people.

* In good signal areas, the built-in aerials in the mobile data modem/router will likely be sufficient but in many other cases an external aerial will usually give an improvement in both download and upload speeds.

* In the north, 3 have by a significant margin the lowest monthly cost of all the main Mobile Network Operators for supplying unlimited monthly broadband, though this has come at a cost of the service being effectively oversubscribed in some places due to so many users using data at 3's BTS. In some of these places 3 are in the process of upgrading capacity both via the backhaul from the BTS and also adding additional spectrum to the same that wasn't used locally until now, though some mobile data modems (especially older ones) can't make use them. YMMV.

* In terms of effective 4G spectrum that is capable of delivering the most data capacity, it's potentially a tie between EE and Vodafone. However neither operator have in my experience rolled out much more than a "base" layer of spectrum for their 4G coverage in rural areas - the advantage here with EE in that their base layer has twice the size of spectrum over Vodafone, though trying to explain the ins and outs would need me to get a bit more technical.

* For 5G I wouldn't get your hopes up too high right now unless you live in or around Greater Belfast, and even then there are plenty of 5G blackspots. The only network west of the Bann at the present time with any 5G coverage is O2, whom have coverage in a part of Derry city centre. IMO the eventual roll out of 5G in NI looks like being similar to how slow the roll out of 3G was back in the 00's and early 10's, and that it might take at least 5 years before we see 5G coverage levels match the present 4G levels.

My advice for checking what 4G mobile data performance will likely be at your location? Get a PAYG sim card from an operator, put it in an old smartphone, top it up and buy a sufficiently large enough data bundle to test, then put the phone into WiFi hotspot mode and test performance in different parts of the building. Note that a mobile phone hotspot will usually not provide as big of a coverage area compared to a dedicated modem/router, but it should give you a reasonable idea. Once you're satisfied with a certain provider (either a "real" network or a "virtual" one that uses a real network's backbone e.g. Giffgaff on O2), then you can look at something more bigger/permanent.

Edit: Just to note that while many operators provide "unlimited" data packages, in some cases for sim-only offers there might be limit in the T&C's to the number of devices that can be connected to the mobile data modem at any one time e.g. with EE it is deemed to be "non-personal" use to have 12 or more devices connected at any one time. Not to mention that some will also have a "fair use" policy whereby using an excessive amount of data in any month or period beyond it (despite it being labelled "unlimited") may see disruption to your service (e.g. speed caps temporarily placed on your connection during certain times of the day), though this is nothing new - most "wired" ISPs have been abusing this "unlimited/fair use" meaning for years, albeit these days many of them now promise that unlimited actually means unlimited.

5G I think will take a full 10 years to roll out to the same level that 4G is currently at. The very nature of 5G dictates that more Cells are required than for the 4G network as it doesn't have the same range and is easier to block. This is why you are likely to still get blackspots in 5G coverage in cities, with 4G filling in the blackspots. It will take a long time for any city to be fully 5G. By extension, if moving to rural areas, it will be very difficult to roll out 5G and  I would think we'll probably never get to the same rural coverage levels that 4g currently has (which isnt great).

The best hope for rural coverage is the fibre roll out.

[armaghniac]

It doesn't seem that long since 3G was the dogs bollix.
Will there be additional bandwidth are lower frequencies resulting from the last reshuffling of the TV channels and the removal of channels above 50 or so?