Ditch BT and go Mobile for Broadband??

Twiddy

Apologies if this has been covered on another thread but after scanning through the many thousands I can't find one that fits my question......

At the moment I'm paying whole bill for my BT landline, but I also need to keep this line open to service my Plusnet broadband. I'm paying roughly £12 a month with BT and £6.49 a month with Plusnet. Because of my current mobile phone deal I hardly use the landline (only for 0845 and 0870 which I have recently learned can be ditched for saynoto0870!)...Aaaaaanyway, I'm basically keeping my landline open to service my Plusnet broadband for £18.49 per month (BT plus Plusnet bills), and was wondering has anybody ditched BT to go with a mobile broadband provider?

I've spotted a good deal with T-Mobile for their Pointer for £10 a month which I can hook my laptop and XBox 360 to, saving me £8.50 per month in broadband and landline bills.

Has anybody got any experience of doing this and views on this and general mobile broadband performance etc.....?

Cheers
T

:beer:

iniltous

Mobile broadband can have small download limits something like 3Gb for £15/month, fine for the odd bit of surfing and e mail, but watch a bit of video or on line game and that will soon be consumed

Mark_In_Hampshire

Mobile broadband is capable of hugely outperforming ADSL broadband. But the performance of both is extremely location specific. For instance, here, we're 2.5km from the exchange with a poor line 3.6km long which can manage 1.7Mbps. Mobile broadband with Three manages over 4Mbps almost all the time, 5.4Mbps average, 6.6Mbps is the best I've seen. Until you try, you won't know. Fortunately you can take it back if it doesn't work out for you (though do check before buying, and start on PAYG perhaps). So it is possible to improve speed in both directions and save money. Doesn't mean it's likely though.

The one thing ADSL will amost always have over 3G is less latency, which is important for online gaming. Our 3G averages a ping time of about 70 to 80ms which is not great and may be a problem.

Finally, as iniltous says, the usage allowances are lower. If you watch stuff online you'll get through the data quite quickly so check it's enough for you.

HappyMJ

Mark_In_Hampshire wrote: »

Mobile broadband is capable of hugely outperforming ADSL broadband. But the performance of both is extremely location specific. For instance, here, we're 2.5km from the exchange with a poor line 3.6km long which can manage 1.7Mbps. Mobile broadband with Three manages over 4Mbps almost all the time, 5.4Mbps average, 6.6Mbps is the best I've seen. Until you try, you won't know. Fortunately you can take it back if it doesn't work out for you (though do check before buying, and start on PAYG perhaps). So it is possible to improve speed in both directions and save money. Doesn't mean it's likely though.

The one thing ADSL will amost always have over 3G is less latency, which is important for online gaming. Our 3G averages a ping time of about 70 to 80ms which is not great and may be a problem.

Finally, as iniltous says, the usage allowances are lower. If you watch stuff online you'll get through the data quite quickly so check it's enough for you.

That's the same here too. 3G faster than ADSL......but.....limits. I download/upload 40Gb and very few mobile allowances will alllow that.

Twiddy

Thanks for the replies so far guys. For additional info we are not online gamers and only tend to do a bit of surfing/online banking with very minimal downloading. We may upload the odd photo to social networking sites but we don't do anything that I'd class as major internet activity. Nor do I do any online gaming via my XBox, so based on your comments I'd say ditching BT and giving Mobile Broadband a go might be sufficient for our needs giving us an MSE style saving to boot :money:.

Cheers
T

:beer:

samba

From what I can tell the T-Mobile pointer is 3.6Mbps max. Additionally the £10/month deal has a 1GB FUP. It would be worth checking your current usage to see if this will be sufficient before signing up to anything.

I am also looking into this but from my experience of using an android mobile (with HSPDA) on T-Mobile it is fine during the day, but in the evening I can barely get above dial-up speeds, at which point I usually switch my phone over to use my wifi network. So I have decided against ditching the landline for this reason (plus not every number you may need to call is on saynoto0870).