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> [...] in hopes of luring customers away from the cable cos and telcos or other wired providers. For some, like me it's not a mere lure but a liberation - out

by tomxor 5y ago

> [...] in hopes of luring customers away from the cable cos and telcos or other wired providers. For some, like me it's not a mere lure but a liberation - out of sheer bad luck, the fixed line internet speed at the last 3 places I've moved in a UK city have gotten slower each time, ending up at <2Mbit in the centre. There is no fiber, if you have fiber know that you are merely lucky, for everyone else it's a question of how noisy your copper twisted pair is, which will only get worse. LTE internet is my only practical option, and it's not simply competitive, it completely obliterates the fixed line competition in my area providing me with 30-100Mbit (depends on time of day), for £35/mo no contract. I know this is different in the US, but right now in the UK there are 3 major LTE providers which all have unlimited data plans! - even better, 2 of them have unlimited plans without a contract, which IMO is vital because you must test out reception. LTE definitely beats ADSL in this country, only fiber can compete, but availability is very patchy.

celsoazevedo 5y ago
> £35/mo And you can find cheaper. For example, Smarty (Three sub brand), £16/month, unlimited data, 30 days contract. When on 5G (their 4G sucks), I get up to 800Mbps up and 100Mbps down: https://www.celsoazevedo.com/files/random/Screenshot_20220326-130250_Speedtest-3c0.png https://www.celsoazevedo.com/files/random/Screenshot_2022032...
- tomxor 5y ago
  I tried them first for quite a while, but they have a high contention ratio, that's why it's so cheap... although it may depend on where you are. I could pull 100Mbit in the middle of the night but it would go down to 3Mbit in the middle of the day (you can burst higher but the average even over 20 seconds was very low and not very usable). I'm using it for work so 3Mbit in the middle of the day didn't cut it, vodafone/voxi gives me 30Mbit at that time so well worth the extra money. Only issue I have with vodafone is some weird MTU stuff going on. These LTE modems have some kind of end point MTU negotiation which is quite low on Three (1300 ish), on vodafone it starts on 1500 but then later the effective mtu changes to 1464 which is kinda maddening because the modem doesn't seem to detect this and your larger outbound packets will just vanish (doesn't even send back a fragmentation packet)... so now I have to manually set all the wifi interfaces to 1464, which is pretty silly (also silly that consumer LTE routers don't let you set this, but to be fair it's highly variable between networks and it makes sense that most people shouldn't be playing with it - if only it worked properly)... anyway other than that little issue it's pretty damn smooth. Oh also I tried EE... which I recommend avoiding, I will never try them again unless they release a no-contract service, they couldn't even activate my sim, customer service is a nightmare, failed promise after failed promise, took me 6months to be rid of them and didn't get all my money back after they didn't deliver even 1 byte. Was a good reminder of why not to do contracts where possible. I think these issues will work themselves out as more and more people start using this stuff for home broadband.
  - nonrandomstring 5y ago
    We tried EE 5G in a bigish UK town and it was a big fail, ended up swapping the modem for an 4G one. It seemed too bursty/congested to reliably do videoconf (the main reason we got an extra connection).
    - tomxor 5y ago
      The thing that really left a bad taste with EE was the amount of my time they wasted, I can't ever do business with them again knowing they value peoples time that little.
  - Reason077 5y ago
    > ”I could pull 100Mbit in the middle of the night but it would go down to 3Mbit in the middle of the day” Are you sure you’re on 5G? Or maybe you’re quite far from a tower with a weak signal? I’ve used both Vodafone and Three 5G in London and never see speeds that low with a good 5G signal. Certainly never below 100 Mbps, and rarely below 200, even at peak times. Rarely below 400 on Three, and often as high as 800! On Vodafone even the 4G network is usually 30+ Mbps. But Three’s 4G is absolutely awful.
    - tomxor 5y ago
      > Are you sure you’re on 5G? Or maybe you’re quite far from a tower with a weak signal? I'm not using 5G, I was commenting on LTE in general competing with fixed line, but i'm using a Gigabit Cat20 modem with 2 MIMO antennas so it's not exactly slow and I have excellent signal close to many towers. With this setup reception has never been an issue for me and UE throughput is good when there is capacity, as far as I can tell it's contention ratio, but I guess it's not necessarily that simple, admittedly I don't know how to tell if the contention is at the LTE part in spite of the signal and full carrier aggregation, or the backhaul (which I had previously assumed) and now you got me thinking. > On Vodafone even the 4G network is usually 30+ Mbps. But Three’s 4G is absolutely awful. Ya, this was my experience.
  - celsoazevedo 5y ago
    It seems that Three didn't invest much on 4G (hence the low speeds), but they fixed that with 5G. They now own a lot of spectrum (Three 160MHz, EE 120MHz, O2 100MHz, Vodafone 90MHz) and at least in central London you can see difference. On 5G, I often see 2x higher speeds on Three/Smarty than I do on Vodafone. But again, 5G. Performance on Three's LTE is completely different. I believe they rank last on 4G speed tests here in London, behind EE, Vodafone, and O2. I didn't have a positive opinion about them (used them for a year and then left, this was 5 years ago), but some people were getting interesting speeds with their 5G[0], so I ordered a Smarty SIM (30 day plan) just to test. While not as stable, it's certainly cheaper and faster than my FTTC connection (60Mbps/15Mbps for £30/month). EE has always been very good in this area, even indoors - I was getting 150Mbps/15Mbps inside my flat, then moved to Vodafone which gives me similar speeds as my wired connection - but as you said, contracts are a problem. I'm not going do a 12 or 24 contract just to test 5G :-P Anyway, if you have access to 5G equipment (a phone, 5G modem, etc) and have 5G coverage, test again. You may see completely different results compared to 4G. --- [0] https://forum.kitz.co.uk/index.php/topic,23787.30.html https://forum.kitz.co.uk/index.php/topic,23787.30.html ; https://forum.kitz.co.uk/index.php/topic,26761.0.html https://forum.kitz.co.uk/index.php/topic,26761.0.html
Nursie 5y ago
Cable internet is available too, I had gigabit DOCSIS from Virgin for the last few years. You make it sound like the UK is in a terrible state for internet connectivity - it’s cheaper and better than many other countries by a long way, and those fibre providers which aren’t yet everywhere are insanely good where they are starting up. In the place we just moved out of, we could get 900/900 for around £20 per month!

by tomxor 5y ago

celsoazevedo 5y ago

> £35/mo And you can find cheaper. For example, Smarty (Three sub brand), £16/month, unlimited data, 30 days contract. When on 5G (their 4G sucks), I get up to 800Mbps up and 100Mbps down: https://www.celsoazevedo.com/files/random/Screenshot_20220326-130250_Speedtest-3c0.png https://www.celsoazevedo.com/files/random/Screenshot_2022032...

tomxor 5y ago
I tried them first for quite a while, but they have a high contention ratio, that's why it's so cheap... although it may depend on where you are. I could pull 100Mbit in the middle of the night but it would go down to 3Mbit in the middle of the day (you can burst higher but the average even over 20 seconds was very low and not very usable). I'm using it for work so 3Mbit in the middle of the day didn't cut it, vodafone/voxi gives me 30Mbit at that time so well worth the extra money. Only issue I have with vodafone is some weird MTU stuff going on. These LTE modems have some kind of end point MTU negotiation which is quite low on Three (1300 ish), on vodafone it starts on 1500 but then later the effective mtu changes to 1464 which is kinda maddening because the modem doesn't seem to detect this and your larger outbound packets will just vanish (doesn't even send back a fragmentation packet)... so now I have to manually set all the wifi interfaces to 1464, which is pretty silly (also silly that consumer LTE routers don't let you set this, but to be fair it's highly variable between networks and it makes sense that most people shouldn't be playing with it - if only it worked properly)... anyway other than that little issue it's pretty damn smooth. Oh also I tried EE... which I recommend avoiding, I will never try them again unless they release a no-contract service, they couldn't even activate my sim, customer service is a nightmare, failed promise after failed promise, took me 6months to be rid of them and didn't get all my money back after they didn't deliver even 1 byte. Was a good reminder of why not to do contracts where possible. I think these issues will work themselves out as more and more people start using this stuff for home broadband.
- nonrandomstring 5y ago
  We tried EE 5G in a bigish UK town and it was a big fail, ended up swapping the modem for an 4G one. It seemed too bursty/congested to reliably do videoconf (the main reason we got an extra connection).
  - tomxor 5y ago
    The thing that really left a bad taste with EE was the amount of my time they wasted, I can't ever do business with them again knowing they value peoples time that little.
- Reason077 5y ago
  > ”I could pull 100Mbit in the middle of the night but it would go down to 3Mbit in the middle of the day” Are you sure you’re on 5G? Or maybe you’re quite far from a tower with a weak signal? I’ve used both Vodafone and Three 5G in London and never see speeds that low with a good 5G signal. Certainly never below 100 Mbps, and rarely below 200, even at peak times. Rarely below 400 on Three, and often as high as 800! On Vodafone even the 4G network is usually 30+ Mbps. But Three’s 4G is absolutely awful.
  - tomxor 5y ago
    > Are you sure you’re on 5G? Or maybe you’re quite far from a tower with a weak signal? I'm not using 5G, I was commenting on LTE in general competing with fixed line, but i'm using a Gigabit Cat20 modem with 2 MIMO antennas so it's not exactly slow and I have excellent signal close to many towers. With this setup reception has never been an issue for me and UE throughput is good when there is capacity, as far as I can tell it's contention ratio, but I guess it's not necessarily that simple, admittedly I don't know how to tell if the contention is at the LTE part in spite of the signal and full carrier aggregation, or the backhaul (which I had previously assumed) and now you got me thinking. > On Vodafone even the 4G network is usually 30+ Mbps. But Three’s 4G is absolutely awful. Ya, this was my experience.
- celsoazevedo 5y ago
  It seems that Three didn't invest much on 4G (hence the low speeds), but they fixed that with 5G. They now own a lot of spectrum (Three 160MHz, EE 120MHz, O2 100MHz, Vodafone 90MHz) and at least in central London you can see difference. On 5G, I often see 2x higher speeds on Three/Smarty than I do on Vodafone. But again, 5G. Performance on Three's LTE is completely different. I believe they rank last on 4G speed tests here in London, behind EE, Vodafone, and O2. I didn't have a positive opinion about them (used them for a year and then left, this was 5 years ago), but some people were getting interesting speeds with their 5G[0], so I ordered a Smarty SIM (30 day plan) just to test. While not as stable, it's certainly cheaper and faster than my FTTC connection (60Mbps/15Mbps for £30/month). EE has always been very good in this area, even indoors - I was getting 150Mbps/15Mbps inside my flat, then moved to Vodafone which gives me similar speeds as my wired connection - but as you said, contracts are a problem. I'm not going do a 12 or 24 contract just to test 5G :-P Anyway, if you have access to 5G equipment (a phone, 5G modem, etc) and have 5G coverage, test again. You may see completely different results compared to 4G. --- [0] https://forum.kitz.co.uk/index.php/topic,23787.30.html https://forum.kitz.co.uk/index.php/topic,23787.30.html ; https://forum.kitz.co.uk/index.php/topic,26761.0.html https://forum.kitz.co.uk/index.php/topic,26761.0.html

Nursie 5y ago

Cable internet is available too, I had gigabit DOCSIS from Virgin for the last few years. You make it sound like the UK is in a terrible state for internet connectivity - it’s cheaper and better than many other countries by a long way, and those fibre providers which aren’t yet everywhere are insanely good where they are starting up. In the place we just moved out of, we could get 900/900 for around £20 per month!