BT wireless Hub

[nod]

We’ve had a line booked for a couple of months BT seem quite reluctant and seem to be steering us towards a wireless hub We have a BT temporary minu hub Which seem to run  ok 

Has anyone any experience of the mobile hubs ? 

 

[ProDave]

If you are getting an adequate speed from the 4G / 5G network, I would not even entertain anything involving BT or OR and just seek out the best deal you can get from any of the mobile providers.  But do check the mobile provider with the best deal does cover your address, e.g. three seem to offer the best deals but their signal is non existent here. 

[nod]

11 minutes ago, ProDave said:

If you are getting an adequate speed from the 4G / 5G network, I would not even entertain anything involving BT or OR and just seek out the best deal you can get from any of the mobile providers.  But do check the mobile provider with the best deal does cover your address, e.g. three seem to offer the best deals but their signal is non existent here. 

Thanks Dave 

Im surprised that the Temporary dongle has worked so well

Ill shop around

[ProDave]

1 minute ago, nod said:

Thanks Dave 

Im surprised that the Temporary dongle has worked so well

Ill shop around

BT gave us one of those when we had a line fault.  It never worked for us.  There was so little diagnostic available on the thing I still have no idea if it was lack of signal or it was not enabled or set up properly.  At that time I know we got almost no signal from EE which is the network I believe it uses.  Only some time later did EE build a new mast closer to us that gives us a better signal, but even that is not brilliant.

[nod]

41 minutes ago, ProDave said:

BT gave us one of those when we had a line fault.  It never worked for us.  There was so little diagnostic available on the thing I still have no idea if it was lack of signal or it was not enabled or set up properly.  At that time I know we got almost no signal from EE which is the network I believe it uses.  Only some time later did EE build a new mast closer to us that gives us a better signal, but even that is not brilliant.

Yeah

Ive a mate who fits aerials He said the same 

We have four massive masts about a mile away which May of helped 

[MikeSharp01]

1 hour ago, nod said:

We have four massive masts about a mile away which May of helped 

1 mile is beyond range of 5G mm wave, very high speed, which has a max of 600m range, low band 5G would get there but is much slower maxing out at 50Mbs top end of 4G is in theory better but your speed will be all about how busy the cell is.

[TommoUK]

Try EE 4g broadband with an external antenna. If this doesn't work or isnt fast enough then 'Starlink' is the best option. This will give you 150-200mb. The downside is the kit costs £400 and the monthly cost is £75.

[ProDave]

The whole coverage thing with mobile signals is a very complicated subject and one that is hard to get full information on.

 

The new EE mast "near" us is in fact about 3 miles away, would be line of sight if some trees were cut down (a whole forest of them)  However not all providers offer the same service.

 

My main phone provided by 1P Mobile used the "full" EE network, and that gets a good signal at home and gives 4G and voice no problem.  Network Cell info is a handy app to have on your phone, and this tells me it is getting it's signal on "Band 20" one of the lower 800MHz bands hence it goes further.

 

I also have an "activity phone"  Not usually used as a phone but rather as a small tablet it has mostly navigation and walking apps.  To enable it to access a bit of data, it has a bargain basement sim with RWG, another provider that "uses the EE network"  But, being a bargain basement service it does not offer either WiFi calling, or VoLTE (voice on the 4G network)  The result of not using the full EE service is that phone does not operate on band 20 so rarely gets a signal at home, and then it is very weak.  So that service would be woefully inadequate as my main phone 

 

All that is a long winded way of saying you really don't know what you will get until you try it.

[Kelvin]

9 minutes ago, TommoUK said:

Try EE 4g broadband with an external antenna. If this doesn't work or isnt fast enough then 'Starlink' is the best option. This will give you 150-200mb. The downside is the kit costs £400 and the monthly cost is £75.

£299 plus £20 shipping then £75/mo. Starlink has really improved the latency averaging under 30ms so web pages load quickly and works well with Teams/Zoom if you need that for wfh. 
 

I would check to see if you can get 5G access from three. We live very rurally but can actually pick up 5G from Three from the local town which is down the hill into the valley below us. However, three, in their infinite wisdom claim we are outside the coverage area. I bought a three unlocked 5G router from eBay and a three data SIM and it worked. We’re getting 60Mbps download, 20Mbps upload with reasonable latency. Plan is to test it for a few months and if it’s reliable ditch Elon. 

[crispy_wafer]

4g/5g then Starlink, alternatively you may have an ‘air fibre’ provider in the area, worth checking.

[nod]

My initial thoughts where that I would use a mobile hub 

But the little mini hub is better than our landline bt at our old place So I was presuming that a permanent hub would perform at least as good 

 

Thanks to all for the info 👍

[PNAmble]

3 hours ago, TommoUK said:

The downside is the kit costs £400 and the monthly cost is £75.

Buying reconditioned reduced that to £200. But as normal if you are working on airtightness get the externals run the appropriate ducts. 
 

two people working from home where I live 4g is too slow and 5g doesn’t exist.  
 

id not buy or build a property if it didn’t have fibre or StarLink. 

[Oz07]

I didn't go with fixed line in current place due to OR needing to put a pole in front of my house and i didn't want it. Just stuck with 4g. However i have a duct there to the front and fibre in the footpath so would be an easy upgrade. 

 

Why do people advise against a fixed line? Is it the ongoing line rental cost?

[ProDave]

12 minutes ago, Oz07 said:

Why do people advise against a fixed line? Is it the ongoing line rental cost?

My hatred of anything involving BT or OR.  The most lousy backwards looking,  awkward to deal with inflexible pair I have encountered.  If you have an alternative, I would go for it (I did when one became available)

[billt]

8 minutes ago, ProDave said:

My hatred of anything involving BT or OR.  The most lousy backwards looking,  awkward to deal with inflexible pair I have encountered.  If you have an alternative, I would go for it (I did when one became available)

That's something of an over reaction. BT as a billing company have a very bad reputation and I don't use them, but most people use lines which are handled by Openreach. If you use a decent provider like Andrews and Arnold or Zen, who can chivy Openreach along and sort problems out you shouldn't have an issue with Openreach as they will handle the interaction with the bureaucracy. I've always found the people actually doing the job very good.

 

Had a 3 dongle at our flat for a couple of years which could just about cope with simple browsing or emails but tended to fail if you tried to do anything more demanding. No 5G there and the 4G was flaky. Gave up and reverted to the old Openreach line which is looking a lot more usable. (80Mb FTTC; fibre only available from Virgin who have as bad a reputation for customer service as BT.)

[ProDave]

9 minutes ago, billt said:

That's something of an over reaction. BT as a billing company have a very bad reputation and I don't use them, but most people use lines which are handled by Openreach

We only had ADSL available.  so changing supplier would not improve what we had available.  Briefly tried Talk Talk.  They would not fix a line fault, they just kept sending me a new router, so had to move back to BT, still with the line fault and at least they got OR to fix it.

 

I was waiting for FTTC I would have been happy with that.  They could have installed a cabinet at the top of our road and all the houses here could have had FTTC which would have been a vast improvement, fibre already went past the top of the road.  But no, they were not interested in such an easy improvement.  Star link was not available and mobile signal too weak and too slow.  So we were stuck with a monopoly offering a poor service not interested in upgrading to offer something better.

 

When another local wireless (not mobile phone network) supplier extended their network to cover us I was happy so swap to a forward thinking local supplier and now have 100MBPS both ways and customer service you can actually speak to.

 

It would be a sad day if I had to go back to the lousy under invested sub standard offering that was all that anything involving OR could be bothered to offer us.