Broadband: mobile vs fixed

Hazzabee

Apologies if this query has been raised previously.
I'm trying to sort out internet access for my new flat which I'm moving in to this week.
Talk Talk and Primus have both said it will take several weeks for them to connect my property. I need internet access at home straight away, plus I have no requirement for a landline phone so it seems pointless paying for line rental, so I'm thinking about getting a mobile dongle package instead.

Three seem to do a good deal; £16/month, 15GB allowance, up to 21mbps. (apparently they've increased their download speeds this week)

A few Qs:

• I'm about 500m as the crow flies from my nearest 3 mobile mast. Can I expect reasonable internet speeds compared to a fixed connection? Or is mobile broadband going to be significantly slower, more intermittent and generally very frustrating?
• My internet usage will be mainly web browsing for a couple of hours per day, emails sent via hotmail and about 3hours/week of iPlayer and internet radio. Will 15GB/month cover this?
• Is 3's premium dongle (£17/month) significantly quicker than their standard device (£16/month)?

Any advice much appreciated.

macman

Mobile broadband is rarely an adequate substitute for ADSL broadband, you need to check the 3G signal at the location-just being near a mast is not enough.
It always takes 3 or 4 weeks to get a landline provisioned by OR-this is quite standard.
Why not use a PAYG dongle in the meantime?

Hazzabee

Cheers for the advice. I'll look in to PAYG dongles.

Mark_In_Hampshire

We use Three for our primary home connection, but here, it is the only broadband option as we're nearly 3km from the exchange and can't even get 2Mbps via ADSL.

The Three service provides 5.4Mbps down 1.5Mbps up though the downstream can drop as low as 3Mbps at times and the upstream can drop to 0.5Mbps.

It streams stuff fine and is OK - it's not that quick but then 5Mbps isn't that quick.

That said, both ADSL and 3G are highly location dependent. I wouldn't dream of taking out a contract for 3G without trying it first unless you're certain you can take it back and have it revoked if it doesn't work well for you.

To answer your points:

1. We're 2.5km from the cell. 500m is fine. Our 3G service is 3x as fast as ADSL could manage. Both can be slow and frustrating, it's location dependent

2. Yes

3. We have the E367 one which I think is the premium one. It is faster than the one we had before which was an older one, but whether that's design (I think partly true) or that the old one was failing (mostly true) means I can't compare.

Snakeeyes21

macman wrote: »

Mobile broadband is rarely an adequate substitute for ADSL broadband, you need to check the 3G signal at the location-just being near a mast is not enough.
It always takes 3 or 4 weeks to get a landline provisioned by OR-this is quite standard.
Why not use a PAYG dongle in the meantime?

Yet the majority of people who have it and post on these forums dont have a bad word to say about it..

More often than not the speeds avaliable are higher than those with a ADSL service.

I live over a mile from the nearest 3 mast and get speeds on my mifi of 3-4mb all day every day, a hell of a lot more than when I was using ADSl which very rarely went over 1mb.

15gb should be enough for anybody, people use mine for browsing, general downloading, voip calls etc etc laptop connected, xbox, 2 android phonnes.. and it lasts for the month without worrying whether it will get used up. but I keep one of those sims with 1gb usage in the drawer just incase

Mobile broadband has one huge benefit over fixed line, for renters you dont need to pay line install fees, and then cancellation fees when you come to move part way through a contract.

You can take the laptop out and about, ah sitting atop a hill overlooking the bay doing a bit of work, like to see people with a landline based service do that out camping, festivals etc etc the list is endless.

IMO mobile broadband has come on a long way since people started to pick up on it, it should match the needs for the 'average' user perfectly fine, depending on network coverage.

IMO forget using the normal dongles, use a MIFI device, even if you spen £50 to get a payg one and stick the monthly sim in, it really is a great little gadget.

PlutoinCapricorn

Three Network prepaid dongles are good to start with as they are cheaper than PAYG: I have had nothing else at home for almost three years now and am perfectly happy with the service.

macman

You're not comparing like for like. Obviously if you want it for 'out and about' then it's the only option, except for the odd free wi-fi location, so fine.
But the OP wants it in a property-a fixed location. If your network (or any network) doesn't give an adequate signal there, it's rather a waste of that contract. So the crucial thing is to check that first.
The average ADSL line speed is greater than the average mobile broadband speed-your 1Mbps line was at the bottom end of the scale.

bigmaz

We do not have a fixed broadband connection in our house yet. We have been using my HTC Desire as a Wi-fi hotspot, using my 3G connection. I use this PAYG three sim:
http://threestore.three.co.uk/payg/dealsummary.aspx?offercode=DSL15PP283
It costs me £15 per month, and gives me:

300 minutes
3000 texts
All-you-can-eat data

Which is a great deal..... So I can have a mobile phone, plus home broadband connection for £15 per month. Its fast enough to stream off the net, obviously not HD content though. I do all my surfing and downloading on it. I stream Spotify all day in work. I love it. I have to buy a £15 voucher every month to top it up, but its much better than paying monthly, as the same unlimited data deal with 3 would cost £25 per month. Although you get more texts and minutes, but I do not need more than 3000 texts and 300 minutes that I get for £15 per month.

Mark_In_Hampshire

The comparison is interesting but tricky to do. First, for ADSL - of the last six properties I've lived in or worked out of, four could not have ADSL anyway (line too long or too poor quality) and of the other two, one could manage a broadband connection - just one street away from the exchange, so a 7Mbps sync (7150kbps) and the other - here - at 2.5km from the exchange with a line 3680m long - can manage a sync of 2048kbps and a profile of 1750kbps, so throughput around 1.5Mbps. Not even broadband in my book.

That may be a particularly atrocious line - perhaps aliminium, perhaps poor quality repairs, perhaps the array of GPO circuitry on the verge of perishing. But for my own experiences, as far as ADSL goes, it's quite good in that at least I could have it even though it was more or less useless.

My 3G history doesn't go back very far. My experiences with it when out and about on O2 on my phone are poor to fair (speed and coverage). I don't know whether the four previous places could have a 3G service now, one of them can have ADSL now, looking at the checkers, the others remain as they were all those years ago. All urban, all built up towns. But at least 3G might provide some service and be better than dial up.

For this fixed location where I use it I can say that ADSL is no substitute for mobile broadband @ 5Mbps to 6Mbps, and probably the same in those other places. Likewise 3G is no substitute for cable.

The average 3G speed is apparently about 2.2Mbps and the average ADSL speed is between about 4Mbps and 6Mbps depending on which survey you believe. The gap is nowhere near as wide as it ought to be. Indeed our 3G cell is very near the phone exchange, it's just that oxygen and radio are better broadband conduits than a BT telephone line.

About 86% of phone lines can manage a slow narrowband 2Mbps service. About half of the phone lines in the country can supply a broadband service at 4Mbps or above.

However the rub is - that since 3G is a highly contended service (that 7.2Mbps top speed isn't for each person!) the more people who take it up potentially the slower the speeds unless the networks are upgraded. That's much easier than e.g. replacing all the phone lines with fibre.

In essence, ADSL is in my experience usually pants because you cannot get broadband signals to go down phone lines and get decent speeds; the network is a phone network not a data one and is fairly ancient and decrepit.

But it's all in the location. If you're right next to a phone exchange you could perhaps get a 15Mbps service or maybe even better and you'll see more of that 15Mbps to yourself as contention is lower. I'd also venture that the speed will be more stable if you use a decent LLU ISP. On the other hand, if you live 2km+ from a telephone exchange and have a line length of 3.5km+ and especially if it's poor quality then 3G is certainly viable and may well outperform it.

But the data allowances are lower and the modem doesn't like living outside when it rains.

I'd prefer a fixed line solution if ther was one that was actually useful but I don't see Virgin Media popping round to cable our area any time soon.

kwikbreaks

Mark_In_Hampshire wrote: »

However the rub is - that since 3G is a highly contended service (that 7.2Mbps top speed isn't for each person!) the more people who take it up potentially the slower the speeds unless the networks are upgraded.

And those saying it is good here all seem to be in rural locations so possibly almost alone on the the cell. I doubt that many in towns will see those sorts of speeds from 3G - I have a Vodafone sim in an unlocked Mii which I use less than 200m from a cell and it's rare that will do much better than 2Mbps down.

The 3 cell is less than 500m away but my phone struggles to work at all with that most of the time - another advantage of a rural location I suspect is the less cluttered environment leading to longer ranges.

Mark_In_Hampshire

kwikbreaks wrote: »

And those saying it is good here all seem to be in rural locations so possibly almost alone on the the cell. I doubt that many in towns will see those sorts of speeds from 3G - I have a Vodafone sim in an unlocked Mii which I use less than 200m from a cell and it's rare that will do much better than 2Mbps down.

The 3 cell is less than 500m away but my phone struggles to work at all with that most of the time - another advantage of a rural location I suspect is the less cluttered environment leading to longer ranges.

I'd agree with this. If the local cell I connect to offers up 7.2Mbps in total and I see 6Mbps of that, then there can't, by definition, be all that many people using it

That cell is about 2.5km away and we have near line of sight to it.

Now, if you take, for instance, that housing estate in Welwyn Garden City we lived in, where nobody can get a fixed line broadband (4Mbps+) service and (I'd guess) hardly anyone can even get an ADSL service - it's over 3km from the exchange, with poor or long lines again...

And you then put one 3G cell in the centre of that estate with 7.2Mbps in total to share between several hundred homes...