Three UK - 4G Home Broadband - any users here?

[Murph7355]

Gad-Westy said:

I'll try and get hold of them or is this something that can be checked online?

Actually a little annoyed with them at present. I'm only 8 weeks into a new phone contract and already have a small price rise.

How much data are you using? Wonder if it may be the FUP....?

IME their network is 4x faster than 3 where I am. So now I have EE working with the rest of my network, I'm pretty happy.

I think they increase prices at a set time each year.

[Gad-Westy]

Murph7355 said:

Gad-Westy said:

I'll try and get hold of them or is this something that can be checked online?

Actually a little annoyed with them at present. I'm only 8 weeks into a new phone contract and already have a small price rise.

How much data are you using? Wonder if it may be the FUP....?

IME their network is 4x faster than 3 where I am. So now I have EE working with the rest of my network, I'm pretty happy.

I think they increase prices at a set time each year.

Cheers. Kids stream a lot though doubt we're much higher than a typical household.

They claim to have no FUP on unlimited contracts. Is the reality different?

https://ee.co.uk/help/help-new/offers-and-services...

ETA, I see that small print suggests that 600gb/month+ would be considered commercial use. Ignoring how illogical that is, that's 20gb per day. I'd be very surprised if we're over that. Any way of checking via EE?

Edited by Gad-Westy on Friday 5th March 14:36

[Gad-Westy]

Thanks Ian82 and Funkygibbon. Sounds like I should give the B818 a try.

[page3]

Gad-Westy said:

ETA, I see that small print suggests that 600gb/month+ would be considered commercial use. Ignoring how illogical that is, that's 20gb per day. I'd be very surprised if we're over that. Any way of checking via EE?

Ridiculously no. You can check data usage on other plans but not on “unlimited “ ones. You also can’t transfer more data to it, making it worse than a “proper” 600Gb plan.

Your router may well have a way of tracking usage though. Remember upload also counts towards usage.

[Murph7355]

Gad-Westy said:

Cheers. Kids stream a lot though doubt we're much higher than a typical household.

They claim to have no FUP on unlimited contracts. Is the reality different?

https://ee.co.uk/help/help-new/offers-and-services...

ETA, I see that small print suggests that 600gb/month+ would be considered commercial use. Ignoring how illogical that is, that's 20gb per day. I'd be very surprised if we're over that. Any way of checking via EE?

Edited by Gad-Westy on Friday 5th March 14:36

I'm on a business contract with a 1Tb FUP I think...I was quite surprised to see how much we use - a good 30Gb per calendar day on average! Which puts us not far off the 1Tb. Family of 4, two of us WFH, plenty of live lessons during home schooling, the kids are too young for online gaming but do what online content (iPlayer, kids YouTube etc).

On my router (Huawei B818) there's a statistics section that tells you how much data is being used. I think yo can also text 'BALANCE' to 150 and it might show you.

I don't know if they automatically do anything on fair usage or if it's just them reserving the right. I guess it may depend on how many people are connecting to the cell tower (that would be the "fair" way of doing it).

As a slight aside, I'm impressed by the Huawei. Nice piece of kit. We get 90Mbps down and 14Mbps up in a rural area. And the speeds seem pretty consistent through the day. Latency is on the high side (40-50ms) but it seems to cope OK with WFH.

[Gad-Westy]

Gad-Westy said:

Thanks Ian82 and Funkygibbon. Sounds like I should give the B818 a try.

Well I did just that and speed and stability has massively improved. To recap I was using a TP link router with external antenna. Now just using a B818 with its own internal antennas.

Pre B818 we were down to typical speeds of 5 down, 1 up. More like 50 down and 10 up now. Massive difference. I'm now starting to think the old external antenna must have been knackered.

Only issue I now have is that, with the Huwaei, I can now monitor daily usage and it looks like we are going to be around 30gb per day which is worrying as kids are in school. Going to be worse at weekends and school holidays so certainly concerned about hitting the 600gb per month fair use limit.

I understand I can throttle quality of certain apps so could prevent kids watching netflix in 4k etc. Going to look at that now.

[Gad-Westy]

Just as a follow up. Maybe this is question for another thread but here goes anyway,

Of 25gb of data used in last 24 hours, half of it is upload. That seems an awful lot to me. Had one 30 minute video whatsapp chat and a couple of screen shared teams meetings. Daughter maybe had an hour of facetime with her friends. Doesn't seem like that would get up to anything like 12gb.

Any other typical consumers of high amounts of upload data? We do have 4x Alexa devices. We have a PC Laptop and 2 apple computers. All of them run dropbox accounts and backblaze but that stuff should only be uploading data as and when its created.

[Gad-Westy]

Sorry, another question. I'm paying £36 for EE consumer unlimited data SIM. A business plan which claims to be truly unlimited is £27. Am I missing something?

[S6PNJ]

VAT?

[Gad-Westy]

S6PNJ said:

VAT?

But still cheaper for a better service.

[OnaRoll]

It's upgrade time for me!! Any one get a good deal come upgrade time?

My 24 month contract is ending this week. I've the B311 router and I've been paying £22 a month.

I am sure 3 will offer me a deal.

Realistically, with a bit of bartering, what is available? Cheaper monthly payment and a router upgrade would be nice.

No chance of 5g around here for some time to come but having said that FTTP is being rolled out on our road. No idea when that shall go live but would still be a pain getting it installed.

I'm very rural down a very long lane.

[Murph7355]

Gad-Westy said:

S6PNJ said:

VAT?

But still cheaper for a better service.

I have a business unlimited plan and am pretty sure it's £27 a month including VAT.

Two things:

1) You obviously need to have a business account
2) There is still an FUP on it, albeit 1,000Gb (1Tb)

I'm not sure how rigid they are on the FUP and what measures they apply - whether they slam the door totally, throttle the speed or rarely do anything unless there's genuine congestion. I guess I'll find out if/when I hit it

The only other option would be a provider that has no FUP. '3' currently don't....but the speeds I get here from 3 are a quarter of EEs. It's possible the two things are not unrelated

[page3]

Gad-Westy said:

Just as a follow up. Maybe this is question for another thread but here goes anyway,

Of 25gb of data used in last 24 hours, half of it is upload. That seems an awful lot to me. Had one 30 minute video whatsapp chat and a couple of screen shared teams meetings. Daughter maybe had an hour of facetime with her friends. Doesn't seem like that would get up to anything like 12gb.

Any other typical consumers of high amounts of upload data? We do have 4x Alexa devices. We have a PC Laptop and 2 apple computers. All of them run dropbox accounts and backblaze but that stuff should only be uploading data as and when its created.

Last 30 days...



Family of three. Around 600-800Gb/month.

Edited by page3 on Sunday 14th March 11:32

[RanchoGrande]

I'm a few days into a new Three 5G broadband setup and so far it's proved to be inconsistent with speeds as low as 7mbs and highs of 70mbs!

It's going back as soon as a fixed line is setup.

[Gad-Westy]

Murph7355 said:

Gad-Westy said:

S6PNJ said:

VAT?

But still cheaper for a better service.

I have a business unlimited plan and am pretty sure it's £27 a month including VAT.

Two things:

1) You obviously need to have a business account
2) There is still an FUP on it, albeit 1,000Gb (1Tb)

I'm not sure how rigid they are on the FUP and what measures they apply - whether they slam the door totally, throttle the speed or rarely do anything unless there's genuine congestion. I guess I'll find out if/when I hit it

The only other option would be a provider that has no FUP. '3' currently don't....but the speeds I get here from 3 are a quarter of EEs. It's possible the two things are not unrelated

Thanks. I might have a chat with EE about options to switch over to a business plan. Would save some money and give us a bit of head room. Wife and I both self employed working remotely so 50% of our usage is likely business anyway.

[Gad-Westy]

page3 said:

Gad-Westy said:

Just as a follow up. Maybe this is question for another thread but here goes anyway,

Of 25gb of data used in last 24 hours, half of it is upload. That seems an awful lot to me. Had one 30 minute video whatsapp chat and a couple of screen shared teams meetings. Daughter maybe had an hour of facetime with her friends. Doesn't seem like that would get up to anything like 12gb.

Any other typical consumers of high amounts of upload data? We do have 4x Alexa devices. We have a PC Laptop and 2 apple computers. All of them run dropbox accounts and backblaze but that stuff should only be uploading data as and when its created.

Last 30 days...

Family of three. Around 600-800Gb/month.

Edited by page3 on Sunday 14th March 11:32

Just checked our stats. Last 5.75 days, we're averaging 22gb per day. That includes two weekend days where the kids will use more data so I expect we'll just about be under the 600gb FUP number but it's close and I've turned resolution down on everything to get there. Must admit, I'm finding the lack of options quite annoying although we might get fibre broadband here back end of the year. Fingers firmly crossed.

[sparkyhx]

we've been having trouble with house internet for a month or so, and my wife has switched to consistently using our MiFi we bought for the caravan and thats been working absolutely fine, more reliable than the house internet. As a therapist she uses it for Zoom for 7ish hrs a day solid, and the house internet reliability was becoming a serious problem for her.

Really impressed by it actually.

[Murph7355]

Gad-Westy said:

Thanks. I might have a chat with EE about options to switch over to a business plan. Would save some money and give us a bit of head room. Wife and I both self employed working remotely so 50% of our usage is likely business anyway.

It took me a little while to get my EE sim working with my B818, so have not yet had the sim running for a full month. If I remember, I'll post usage once we've done a full month - like you we have 2 of us working from home. Kids back at school but hammer it in the mornings, evenings and weekends.

If you end up using a B818 router (it's a very nice piece of kit) and happen to be using Unifi equipment, specifically their USG, for the rest of your network my thread including solution is here : https://www.pistonheads.com/gassing/topic.asp?h=0&...

[Gad-Westy]

Murph7355 said:

Gad-Westy said:

Thanks. I might have a chat with EE about options to switch over to a business plan. Would save some money and give us a bit of head room. Wife and I both self employed working remotely so 50% of our usage is likely business anyway.

It took me a little while to get my EE sim working with my B818, so have not yet had the sim running for a full month. If I remember, I'll post usage once we've done a full month - like you we have 2 of us working from home. Kids back at school but hammer it in the mornings, evenings and weekends.

If you end up using a B818 router (it's a very nice piece of kit) and happen to be using Unifi equipment, specifically their USG, for the rest of your network my thread including solution is here : https://www.pistonheads.com/gassing/topic.asp?h=0&...

Cheers. I am indeed using a B818 and unifi access points. Though not USG. I shall have a read though. Many thanks.

[S6PNJ]

Anyone using Port Forwarding with their B818? I bought one a few months back (now sold) and couldn't get it to work. I was using a Three SIM (not that it should make any difference AFAIA).