Alternatives to normal internet
Alternatives to normal internet
Author
Discussion

LukeBrown66

Original Poster:

4,479 posts

76 months

Tuesday 8th June 2021
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Am hoping to move very soon and have been blessed for over a decade with very good broadband, usually via cable. This has changed my downtime life significantly to the point where I would not want to be without decent 50m+ broadband AT LEAST from now on.

Am finding areas to live are often back to stone age, 10mg etc, villages even small tons sometimes have very poor service.

What alternatives are there for decent streaming speeds if your area is not connected to a decent speed via normal ways?

joshleb

1,550 posts

174 months

Tuesday 8th June 2021
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4/5g sim routers or starlink are the two frontrunners I believe.

Slow

6,973 posts

167 months

Tuesday 8th June 2021
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I had 1.5 mb download and 0.3 upload on a good day. Rural Scotland with neighbours a mile away.

A local community broadband thing was set up using some sort of line of sight from a dish on my house to a dish elsewhere. I don’t know the full details.

I now get 30 down, 10 up with a very loose 1tb data cap, go over it they don’t really care, go to 2tb every month they ask questions.
Options for 40 down and up are available too. 15-20 ms ping.


See if the community have any form of their own broadband going.

Harpoon

2,542 posts

244 months

Tuesday 8th June 2021
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Lots of 4G discussion in this thread:

https://www.pistonheads.com/gassing/topic.asp?h=0&...

TallMark

596 posts

257 months

Tuesday 8th June 2021
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In my village there is a wireless broadband service. I connect to a local church using a ubiquiti antenna, and they act as a relay station to somewhere else where there is a central PoP. I get 30Mbps down, 15Mps up, except that the download is heavily congested in the evenings.

There was an alternative provider who offered faster speeds, and you connected to somewhere a few km away, but you need a direct line of sight and wasn't possible from my property when they came to do a survey.

Another alternative is to get multiple connections and bond them, but this is expensive.

hyphen

26,262 posts

120 months

Tuesday 8th June 2021
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"This has changed my downtime life significantly to the point where I would not want to be without decent 50m+ broadband AT LEAST from now on."

Sounds like you are moving OP, anywhere nice?

MissChief

7,997 posts

198 months

Tuesday 8th June 2021
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LukeBrown66 said:
Am hoping to move very soon and have been blessed for over a decade with very good broadband, usually via cable. This has changed my downtime life significantly to the point where I would not want to be without decent 50m+ broadband AT LEAST from now on.

Am finding areas to live are often back to stone age, 10mg etc, villages even small tons sometimes have very poor service.

What alternatives are there for decent streaming speeds if your area is not connected to a decent speed via normal ways?
What checkers are you using to see what's available? Anything Openreach or BT based won't show available option such as Virgin or any 'altnet' options such as Cityfibre/B4RN/Gigaclear etc.

LukeBrown66

Original Poster:

4,479 posts

76 months

Tuesday 8th June 2021
quotequote all
Moving yes, but I cant move to a place with third world (lol I bet some of them have far better) broadband, the best I can get is about 15meg, which is not really enough for what I do evenings, weekends etc.

Can't get any non BT based stuff there, I checked, presume one location, one cabinet serves everyone and they are all happy with garbage broadband.

I have no idea about using 4G etc, I am not a tech wizz so don't understand how that works.

rxe

6,700 posts

133 months

Tuesday 8th June 2021
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LukeBrown66 said:
Moving yes, but I cant move to a place with third world (lol I bet some of them have far better) broadband, the best I can get is about 15meg, which is not really enough for what I do evenings, weekends etc.

Can't get any non BT based stuff there, I checked, presume one location, one cabinet serves everyone and they are all happy with garbage broadband.

I have no idea about using 4G etc, I am not a tech wizz so don't understand how that works.
Sheesh, is pR0n in 8K now? :-).

We are in an area with crap internet - you only need to be > 1.5 miles from the cabinet, and you’ll be on sub 20 Mb. Unfortunately, these areas also coincide with poor mobile signal in the main. Here I am, 29 miles from Hyde Park Corner as the crow flies, and I have 18 Mbit + zero Vodafone network, 2G, 3G or 4G.

I’ve ordered Starlink as I’m bored with BT. Allegedly coming “later this year”.

If you have 4G (just do a speed test from your phone) you can get dedicated routers to provide a connection to the house. But in principle, it is the same as running the internet off your phone. You won’t get much more than 10 Mbit off it. If you have 5G, the sky’s the limit. I’ve had 650 Mbit in Central London…

essayer

10,410 posts

224 months

Tuesday 8th June 2021
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Have you checked whether Gigaclear have the location on the roadmap? They’re doing a lot of villages now which historically haven’t had great connectivity

LukeBrown66

Original Poster:

4,479 posts

76 months

Wednesday 9th June 2021
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I checked all the places that might be coming and all they do is ask to go on a email reg so they will tell you when new stuff is coming, best I have seen is about 10mbps, which is OK I guess, but for the amount of gaming and updates I have this would mean a 5 gig update would take hours, so really it is next to useless.

What annoys me even more is there is very little price deduction, I would be going from 110mbps to perhaps 15 at best and the price is about a fiver cheaper, it truly is pathetic in this country and these companiesa re taking the mick with their yearly price increases for nothing, I would not mind, but this is a village of 4000 people, businesses, on a main A road and yet the choices are shockingly bad, and for guys like me means a house move there is now not an option.

Slow

6,973 posts

167 months

Wednesday 9th June 2021
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Before we went to line of sight we got BT to quote us for fibre. £95k if we dug the trench, this is why they don’t upgrade everyone as the money to do it is insane for the little recoup they get. Will take the gov offering to pay every penny to connect up rural people imo.

C n C

3,914 posts

251 months

Wednesday 9th June 2021
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LukeBrown66 said:
Moving yes, but I cant move to a place with third world (lol I bet some of them have far better) broadband, the best I can get is about 15meg, which is not really enough for what I do evenings, weekends etc.

Can't get any non BT based stuff there, I checked, presume one location, one cabinet serves everyone and they are all happy with garbage broadband.

I have no idea about using 4G etc, I am not a tech wizz so don't understand how that works.
As has been mentioned, 4G will not give you the speed you're looking for. 5G will, but if you're in an area out in the sticks, then it's unlikely you'll have 5G available.

Starlink is likely your best bet depending on how much you want to pay for fast internet. Those with it so far are reporting 140 - 200 meg.
Starlink thread
I believe it's around £500 for the kit (including the satellite dish) and £90 per month for the service, which is a lot, but then again, as it's via satellite, you can get it in the middle of nowhere.

Ronstein

1,729 posts

67 months

Wednesday 9th June 2021
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Broadband availability follows no logic. We moved from an urban location just outside the M25 with maximum 3.5Mb broadband (copper to the cabinet) to a very rural location a mile outside a small village in North Wiltshire with a choice of two FTTP providers, so now I have 150Mb dedicated fibre in my home office!!

Bacon Is Proof

5,740 posts

261 months

Wednesday 9th June 2021
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Just bought myself a new Huawei mifi 4g dongle thing and now get 20+Mbps, living in the sticks. I'm content with standard hd porn however.

e-honda

9,548 posts

176 months

Wednesday 9th June 2021
quotequote all
15meg really isn't that bad.
Alternatives are going to be costly, less reliable, less consistent.
It is really only UHD media that is going to be affected day to day.
As long as you can put up a dish for sky you can still watch plenty of things in UHD.

eharding

14,648 posts

314 months

Wednesday 9th June 2021
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C n C said:
LukeBrown66 said:
Moving yes, but I cant move to a place with third world (lol I bet some of them have far better) broadband, the best I can get is about 15meg, which is not really enough for what I do evenings, weekends etc.

Can't get any non BT based stuff there, I checked, presume one location, one cabinet serves everyone and they are all happy with garbage broadband.

I have no idea about using 4G etc, I am not a tech wizz so don't understand how that works.
As has been mentioned, 4G will not give you the speed you're looking for. 5G will, but if you're in an area out in the sticks, then it's unlikely you'll have 5G available.

Starlink is likely your best bet depending on how much you want to pay for fast internet. Those with it so far are reporting 140 - 200 meg.
Starlink thread
I believe it's around £500 for the kit (including the satellite dish) and £90 per month for the service, which is a lot, but then again, as it's via satellite, you can get it in the middle of nowhere.
FWIW, my Starlink service has stabilised at around 150 Mb/s, but now very solid without perceptible dropouts, and I'm contemplating ditching my existing FTTC link - when I first got the Starlink Beta at the start of the year, it was a lot less stable, but now it's my primary link and I can't remember the last time I swapped back the default route to the BT FTTC (famous last words...). Speeds had been as high as 250 mb/s at one point, but I'm guessing they're tweaking the dish firmware to maximise stability. They're also bringing on line ground stations in the UK which might increased the speed, since at the start the ground link was via France and hence a longer overall signal transit distance.

Have seen some rumours that UK Gov are dragging their feet on granting SpaceX all of the spectrum they're requesting in the UK to fulfil anticipated demand, speculation that as they've spaffed £400m up the wall on One Web they're reluctant to give Starlink too much of an initial market lead - what the legal implications of that are, if indeed it isn't total cobblers, I don't know.

Tim O

648 posts

199 months

Wednesday 9th June 2021
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C n C said:
As has been mentioned, 4G will not give you the speed you're looking for. 5G will, but if you're in an area out in the sticks, then it's unlikely you'll have 5G
Not so, I’m on EE 4G, directional antenna and I’m getting consistently over 50 mbps. Quiet time of day it goes to 70.

MissChief

7,997 posts

198 months

Wednesday 9th June 2021
quotequote all
Tim O said:
C n C said:
As has been mentioned, 4G will not give you the speed you're looking for. 5G will, but if you're in an area out in the sticks, then it's unlikely you'll have 5G
Not so, I’m on EE 4G, directional antenna and I’m getting consistently over 50 mbps. Quiet time of day it goes to 70.
With a directional external aerial those speeds are available almost all the time for most people within a mile or two of a tower. Some people get more pretty consistently as well.

C n C

3,914 posts

251 months

Wednesday 9th June 2021
quotequote all
MissChief said:
Tim O said:
C n C said:
As has been mentioned, 4G will not give you the speed you're looking for. 5G will, but if you're in an area out in the sticks, then it's unlikely you'll have 5G
Not so, I’m on EE 4G, directional antenna and I’m getting consistently over 50 mbps. Quiet time of day it goes to 70.
With a directional external aerial those speeds are available almost all the time for most people within a mile or two of a tower. Some people get more pretty consistently as well.
Fair enough - I stand corrected.
I was partly going on personal experience with a 4G router on GiffGaff in NW London and stuff I'd heard from others.

Good to know faster speeds are attainable. thumbup