General advice required. Am hoping to move house from my current location with high speed Unlimited Virgin Broadband, to a place out in the sticks where Broadband doesn’t exist. There is 4G to the house and so my question is how best to manage it.
At home we use Spotify, Sonos, Netflix, IPlayer, Amazon, Apple TV etc. 4G works well enough on most of those applications but the problem is the amount of 4G you can actually lay your hands on.
Audio streaming is unlikely to be an issue but video streaming certainly is. (Although I wont rest until I’ve proved that my Sonos arrangement can cope)
My plan is to get a router that can cope with a data sim card which should fool the house into thinking that we have proper connectivity. Out of the UK domestic providers, Vodaphone advertise 50GB per month for £25 which looks reasonable. The problem is, with four to five adults in the house, that isn’t going to be nearly enough.
Does anyone have any similar experience that can turn into hints and tips?
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Gary says
If it’s general advice you’re after, I’m your man. So here goes: 1. Always steer into a skid, 2. Look not at the trees but at the gaps between the trees when cycling through a forest, and 3. When swimming lengths, ignore the time and count instead the strokes you take.
Lodestone of Wrongness says
Cometh the hour, cometh Gary. The man he speaks the truth, hear?
ps a simple village dweller asks – what is this 4G of which you talk?
I was in 3G2 but for O-levels I was in Lower 4.1. Hope that helps…
Martin S says
Looks like I’ve come to the right place! On the plus side, the village does have a letter box that is emptied twice per week.
fentonsteve says
That’s called “upload speed” in the brochure.
Vulpes Vulpes says
Backhaul by Astra Van.
bobness says
Some advice I recently received on wildlife photography. (Specifically things that don’t move an awful lot)
1. Get close
2. Get down to their level
3. Take the lens cap off.
I don’t know much about 4G, sorry, but I suspect you’ll need an awful lot of it to power a house with 5 adults, as you say.
A couple of my mates live in the middle of nowhere in Nigg, near Cromarty, and they have broadband, are you 100% sure no-one goes where you’re going? Are you going in the middle of the Heelans?
Martin S says
Sky and BT will provide it down the telephone line but can only guarantee a speed of 0.5 MB. The Max would be 1 or 2MB. 4G would be much faster. I suspect in the not too distant future, fixed Broadband will become obsolete, but not yet a while!
retropath2 says
Nigg: I was always told that Nigg was so called because survivors of the Spanish Armada washed up there, after sailing over the top, leaving their swarthy dark looks and black hair in the gene pool, with shuttles along the way explaining the black hair in Ireland and up the west coast of scotland and over the top. (The locals have, also, an endearing way of describing where they are from. True.)
Sadly I discover now that Nigg is not the gaelic for black but for the notch (An Neag). Black would make it called Dubh.
So then, why is the area called the Black Isle?
Bloody urban myths, never what you think.
Kid Dynamite says
Dublin is Blackpool, dontcha know
bobness says
From that there Wikipedia…
According to the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, it was originally called Ardmeanach (Gaelic ard, height; maniach, monk, from an old religious house on the wooded ridge of Mulbuie), and it derived its customary name from the fact that, since snow does not lie in winter, the promontory looks black while the surrounding country is white.
I’ll tell you tomorrow if that’s true, as I’m flying up there in the morning.
What I do know is that the top road on the way to/from Cromarty gives an absolutely stupendous panoramic view of the Cromarty Firth, with all its oil rigs, and the hills beyond.
bigstevie says
What, like this one? It’s the first one on the page I look at(orange).
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-42662597
davebigpicture says
Edit: Apologies for previous incorrect info. Looks like you can’t get unlimited data in the way you want to use a mobile SIM.
http://www.techradar.com/sim-only/unlimited-data-sim-only-deals
Martin S says
At the moment Vodaphone sell it in chunks of 50GB. Without video streaming that would be more than enough but that video genie is out of the bottle! I’ll need at least two of those per month I reckon.
Leedsboy says
My son used this for a while and he seemed happy with it. He used EE – something similar to this. Not cheap mind.
https://shop.ee.co.uk/dongles/pay-monthly-mobile-broadband/4gee-wifi/details#
fentonsteve says
An Engineer’s lateral thought: ditch the Spotify and Netflix, etc. Buy a FM radio, CDs, DVDs, perhaps a Freeview PVR or get VHS deck down from the loft.
Telly broadcast data rate is much faster than 4G.
Martin Hairnet says
Sorry, no hints of tips, but we live in a remote location in Spain, where Movistar has just started offering dedicated 4G internet contracts, with their own routers. Some kind of receiver had to be attached to the outside of the house, with a clear line of sight to the 4G signal. Prior to that we had internet via satellite which was patchy and expensive. This new system is much cheaper – about 50 Euros a month, I think, and offers unlimited data at around 2MB/s, which is fine for streaming in HD. Only four devices can connect at once.
I’m not sure if Vodaphone – a big Movistar rival in Spain – offer a similar service yet. But if companies are starting to roll out these services over here, I’m sure it won’t be long before they appear in the UK.
davebigpicture says
There are still quite big holes in UK 4G coverage and capacity problems in cities, ie I have full signal but can’t load a web page. I like the idea of ditching the landline and using mobile but I reckon it might not happen until 5G is completely rolled out.
Leedsboy says
Jus noticed your comment about the Vodafone 4G option. There is a difference between a dongle which may give you a short distance wifi range and a 4G wifi router. The dongle is great for using in one room but won’t give you a great house experience.
RedLemon says
On the plus side, I think that there is going to be a Universal Level of Service requirement forced upon Openreich of 10MB down for everyone. Supposed to be by 2020 IIRC, but I wouldn’t hold your breath.
Mike_H says
On a purely technical level, it shouldn’t be that difficult to replace all Openreach’s copper cabling with fibre. Just needs the will to spend the money.
And surely other providers ought to have the same access to Virgin’s cable infastructure as they now have to Openreach’s.
RedLemon says
BT have historically done all they can to milk their old technology despite it being rather obvious that full fibre will be needed eventually. They are presently engaged in rolling out tech that increases the speed for just a small area around their fibre cabinets instead of doing the job properly.
Leedsboy says
It’s only difficult in the sense that you need permission to dig up roads and pavements from every single council in the country, you may need permission from all building owners to connect the new cable in their buildings (and they all have different lawyers to pay), you will need to replace all the switches and HW and buy significant amounts of fibre which is both expensive and has lead times.
And that’s before you factor in the cost of labour and project management to do all the work and testing.
And other providers do have access to Virgin cable – they sell wholesale like BT and other network providers (who are typically city/metro networks).
Mike_H says
I wasn’t aware that Virgin cable were already selling wholesale to other providers, so that’s my misconception corrected.
As far as replacing the existing copper, the underground cable ducts are already there so not all of it requires digging new routes. A lot of what’s needed is just pulling the copper out and replacing it. New equipment and additional labour are considerable fresh costs, of course.
Perhaps the government, who have been harping on for years about how important it is to upgrade the infrastructure, could sort out some kind of proof-of-progress-dependent tax breaks for getting the job done in a timely fashion.
Leedsboy says
Well you still need to block off the road etc. to pull cable, It is a lot of work organising it more than just doing it. But I agree with your main point – it needs to be done faster.
Funny how the stuff that got the government kudos a few years ago (raising dosh through selling shares in BT) is coming back to haunt them as infrastructure doesn’t get built – who’d have thought that would happen).
RedLemon says
I believe around that time BT offered to fibre the entire country in return for the right to use this system to supply TV content.
proposal sadly rejected by the government.
moseleymoles says
My only nugget of wisdom:
Well son. It’s a funny thing about regret. It’s better to regret something you have done than something you haven’t. If you see your mother be sure to tell her – SATAN!