4G Broadband for Rural Areas

Ok, aerial & router installed. We tested it with my ee Simm and got 30MBPS, but the supplied O2 Simm is not much better than our BT service.
This was to be expected and the ee Simm is on its way, as the company closed their deal with ee last week and are now able to provide that service for £31.99pm.
We should be running at full speed either tomorrow or Thursday :grin:

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Our broadband contract with TalkTalk is due to expire shortly. This is a telephone line service with which we can get speeds of up to a 4.9Mbps. For this we have been paying £25/month. They now want to put this up to £35!

It was probably two years ago when Openreach came here and decided that they couldn’t find the junction box in the lane so were unable to provide a fibre connection any time soon and we were pushed to the back of the queue. I don’t understand why they needed to find the copper cable junction box in order to supply fibre; surely they could just lay a fibre run alongside the lane?

We had an online chat with TalkTalk to see if there was anything better they could offer, but were told that the best option would be their Fibre 35 plan. We had already told them that there’s no fibre within 0.5 miles of our house, but still they offered the Fibre 35 plan. After many exchanges, we asked to speak with someone who understood the problem, but again they offered the Fibre 35 plan!

Consequently, we’ve started investigating 4G broadband. Both using Three for our mobile phones, we tried the Three 4G modem/router. However, this delivered a download speed of just 0.77Mbps.

Next I guess we’ll be investigating National Broadband, which a close neighbour appears to be having some success with, albeit with an external aerial and higher cost. Fingers crossed we can do better than we have currently.

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Clive - that seems a very slow speed. Presume you tried the router at various upstairs windows ? What speed do you get using Speedtest on your phones ?

Starlink have an amazing offer on at the moment £99 for the starter kit.

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I tried the Three 4G unit downstairs because that’s where my computer is located as well as the connection to Hive and the home network. The speeds I quoted were over WiFi on my iPhone.

I might try the Vodaphone Gigacube to see if I get a better result with Vodaphone coverage.

Ok. Well, that may explain it.

My own situation. Broadly speaking I get speeds of 10 next to my computer, 20 in lounge, 65 in bedroom 1 and 75 in bedroom 2 - last three are all measured right up against the window.

I compromise a bit by siting the 4G Router in bedroom 1 - because it’s right above my streamer in the living room, so I get a full WiFi signal. No Ethernet connections these days - WiFi sounds a little better to me. I dedicate the 5GHz band solely to streaming. The WiFi in the rest of the house is provided by a couple of RE550 units.

My advice : Before you write off Three, do try testing on the windowsill in all upstairs rooms. You might be surprised.

I couldn’t try it upstairs because the computer, LAN and Hive are all downstairs in the study.

The problem now is that I took the Three unit back because it was SO bad. Interestingly, I got the guy to test it in the store just in case it was faulty. He plugged it in under the desk and instantly got 57Mbps!

Well that has been a frustration filled day.
Apparently the EE Simm that I received today is one of a batch that has been discovered to be problematic.
A new one will be sent out as soon as they receive them from EE🤷🏻‍♂️
I know it’s fast when it’s working, as we ran it with one of our own EE SIMM’s yesterday afternoon and got 30mbps.
Will do the same later…

Just had a call from the National Broadband Technical Manager.
He talked me through a router setting change and profile creation and we’re up and running :+1:t4:
At last, HiRes Streaming…

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10/10 for perseverance👍

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I dream of seeing a result like that! Well done.

I’m now trying a Vodafone Gigacube. Unfortunately it’s no better and mostly worse than the 4.9Mbps I am getting today down the telephone line with Talktalk. Typical download speeds are ~1 Mbps, but I did get one reading of 45Mbps by positioning it in the north facing windowsill in one of the bedrooms. That doesn’t really help when I need to plug stuff into the LAN ports in the study downstairs! Crap!

What are you plugging in Clive? No option to connect devices wirelessly?

You need to forget about having the hub where it seems most needed and site it where it gets the very best signal.

I’ve suggested the solution already. If you get one of the RE550 repeaters (other types are available) then you can have your hub upstairs transmitting WiFi and one of the repeaters plugged in next to your downstairs stuff. Add a switch and you can have as many Ethernet connections as you’d like.

Thank you, that’s interesting. I think I need one of these devices which works in reverse. I need one which receives a signal from the modem by WiFi and delivers that to a switch, to which I can then connect my PC, ND555, Core, NAS and Hive. I shall make enquiries at PC World tomorrow.

Whilst I have ordered a pair of mesh devices, the Vodafone Gigacube router keeps losing signal. One minute it shows a speed of 12Mbps, the next it’s 0.4 or less. This is with the cube positioned on a north facing bedroom windowsill, which is where I was getting the best signal.
It looks like I may have to go back to the TalkTalk copper landline solution to enjoy a reasonably steady ~4.5Mbps and accept the price increase to £35pcm.

What’s the best speed you get testing upstairs with your phones on Three (and EE, if you can borrow a SIM) ?

In the bedroom just now I could get about 25Mbps on my iPad. My wife got >40 on hers. That’s with a Vodafone SIM. Unfortunately, the SIM in my phone is a nano SIM, whereas the Gigacube uses micro SIM, so can’t easily try a different network.

However, if the signal is consistent in the bedroom, the mesh units should enable this downstairs too. Those mesh units are due to arrive on Monday, so I should know the answer then.

Woohoo! I’m now streaming from Qobuz at 24 bit, 192 kHz. I’m not sure it’s much better than 96 kHz as I think it’s the bit rate that really counts. But at last I have fast-ish broadband downstairs. Thanks for your advice.

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