Replacing fixed line internet with 4G?

Pawnless Endgame

Pawnless Endgame

Pawnless Endgame

Soldato
Joined
10 May 2004
Posts
13,073
Location
Sunny Stafford
Hope this is the right section. I'm on Virgin £30/month for the internet and I had a letter to say it's increasing to £33/month. That's only on the 'medium' tariff too. Sure I turned a blind eye to the odd 50p increases, but a 10% increase is too high for me to ignore. Note that I don't have a landline, so my options are Virgin fixed line or 4G. I know in principle I could always haggle with Virgin, but I'm not very good on the phone for that as I don't like confrontations.

My phone is a Samsung Note 4 which is on contract until July 2017. Unlimited calls/texts and 5GB data per month. £37/month. This is on EE via the Carphone Warehouse.

What are my options? My browsing habits require about 50GB/month tops.

1. A data bolt-on onto the existing phone contract? Would the bolt-on run for as long as the phone's contract, or is it month by month? Note that EE are tethering-friendly.

2. Do I approach the EE shop or the Carphone Warehouse who issued my phone?

3. Any recommendations outside of EE / Carephone Warehouse?

I'm currently paying £33 (Virgin) + £37 (EE), so £60 all-in, so the aim of this thread is to amount to a combined phone/internet bill that is less than £60.

Cheers!
 
Im with three paying £23 a mo on a 12 month contract (sim card only).

Knowing you can turn on wifi on the phone and use the phones internet

https://motorola-global-portal.cust...portable-hotspot---moto-g-plus-4th-generation

If i wanted to do what you want to do i would have 35.9gb worth of data here.

b67301d086.jpg


Download speed on three ranges from 10mbps to 20 mbps download with a 2 mbps upload.
 
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I think i misread sorry about this.

Edit title is replacing fixed line internet with 4G?

So tethering it is then.
 
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As for your phone get a new sim card prehaps from three make sure you pick the right sim card size as the sim card cannot be snapped to pieces to make it lets say micro sim to nano sim.

They only do 1 size thats all with three that is and not on ee.

Make sure your phone supports tethering ok?
 
Pings on three can be 50ms to 100ms or 150 ms.

But mostly out of all my speed tests its in the range of 50 to 100 ms.

The slowest i have seen three be is 4 to 5 mbps, but most of my speed tests give me 10-15 mbps in bournemouth uk that is.
 
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EE which i also have in the field or a park i get 40-50 mbps but ee won't give you as much data as three do.

slower speed with bigger data allowance or ee speed with smaller data allowance which is no where near 50gb which is why i am recommending three to you as it is the only data provider in the uk to do this allowance.
 
Ignoring the phone tethering aspect - I had involvement with a project where a business was relocating to new premises and before they could get a leased line installed they ran on 2x 4G routers (purely for bandwidth) and they had quite high latency.
 
Actually.. you have reminded me there hyburnate.

EE do a 50gb data deal here .

yes http://shop.ee.co.uk/dongles/pay-monthly-mobile-broadband/4g-home-broadband/details

I solely recommend ee to the op now, knowing i get pings on my phone on ee in the range of about 20-30 ms when i tested it, it would also be faster than three here but i think three works out cheaper.

But if you like to be mobile then i would look at three tethering.

I do not know of any other provider doing 4 g routers apart from ee as i mentioned.
 
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Ahhh thanks guys!

I didn't know that 4G home broadband existed, so that might be the best bet for me.

As for online gaming, Word of Warcraft died 7 years ago and I don't play anything else online :-)
 
lltfdaniel said:
Actually.. you have reminded me there hyburnate.

EE do a 50gb data deal here .

yes http://shop.ee.co.uk/dongles/pay-monthly-mobile-broadband/4g-home-broadband/details

I solely recommend ee to the op now, knowing i get pings on my phone on ee in the range of about 20-30 ms when i tested it, it would also be faster than three here but i think three works out cheaper.

But if you like to be mobile then i would look at three tethering.

I do not know of any other provider doing 4 g routers apart from ee as i mentioned.
Click to expand...

and costs way more than virgin, stop being silly and stay with virgin. its not only your cheapest option, its your best option.

also are you sure you only use 50gb on your wifi as that's low, especially if playing online games.
 
I know you said you don't like phone confrontations, but.. if you phoned virgin and said you want to cancel, when they ask you why your leaving they'd probably give you that £3 off or possibly a little more when you tell them the reason.

No current mobile 4G deal is a true replacement value wise for virgin media unlimited cable broadband .. especially latency wise if you do any gaming. All this talk of 50mb speed is pointless if your best local ping is 30ms compared to 5 or 10ms on virgin. The virgin internet will always feel more snappy loading webpages or gaming compared to a higher latency mobile internet no matter how much bandwidth your getting (unless your virgin area is over subscribed).

Stick with the virgin broadband you'll be surprised how fast you can use a couple of hundred gb as well!
 
Not my first experience but - spent a few days in a bed and breakfast recently relying on 4G - or rather about 75% of the time it would jump between 3G,H,H+ (usually doing around 2Mbit down/1Mbit up in terms of average speed) and at times fall out completely for minutes at a time :S somehow managed to use 1/3rd of my 20GB allowance as well. Its not really a replacement for home broadband unless you are a very casual user.
 
I had to spend a week using my phone as a router around the house as there was a screw up when I moved home. Had the unlimited Three contract back then and seeing how I had 45Mbps+ signal on 4G it sure as hell beat the ADSL line that was installed!
 
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