BT service

Mrs_Mac_1

Can anyone offer any help, advice or opinion, please?
I am with BT for landline, broadband and television.  The WiFi is very poor; we are in a rural area and BT have become fed-up with me complaining about the poor WiFi.  They guarantee a speed of 18, but are unable to provide this to me as they have told me that I am getting an average speed of 11.  As "compensation" they released me from my contract with them.  They tell me that WiFi will improve when the infrastructure is updated by Openreach but there are no plans for this in my area. Any other providers that I have checked with cannot provide in my area, and surely, even if they could, they would be using the outdated Openreach infrastructure.   I am paying around £40 per month and just got a letter today to say they are upping their prices again as usual in March 2021.  What should I do?  I need the patchy broadband that we have as children are doing remote learning and we are working from home.  It is often the case that for sending documents, we have to do it at silly o'clock in the early hours of the morning.  Thank you for reading this far.

Mnoee

What's the 4G signal like? If you'd be happy with a consistent 18mbps, that's very achievable with 4G. 

JJ_Egan

ISPs do not provide wifi as such  . If you want better wifi spend circa £300 on a better router .

However re reading your post its not a wifi problem rather you are in a poor area for BB .

if incoming is 11 then not much you can do  with that , Using Ethernet cable as opposed to wifi will give a better connection but cannot increase the poor speed in .4G as above is probably your best option as BT can do nothing .

ballyblack

What's the 4G signal like? If you'd be happy with a consistent 18mbps, that's very achievable with 4G. 



poster was asked what 4g speed was like on mobile...........failed to answer?

So forget ?

Mrs_Mac_1

Thanks for the replies guys.  I am completely clueless regarding technology, and sorry if this is a really stupid question, but how do I get 4g on a computer or laptop??  The mobile phone 4g signal is usually "ok" but not good when sending lots of documents at one time.  
Also, am I therefore wasting my money paying for WiFi with BT?

Mnoee

You can buy a 4G router, or turn your phone into a mobile hotspot and 'tether' to it from your laptop or PC the same as connecting to a WiFi network. Check with your sim contact/plan as to whether you're allowed to tether, and how many devices. Smarty do a sim with unlimited data and unlimited tethering for £20 a month that we used for a house move with no issues, check the referrers board as they offer a free second month. 

JJ_Egan

Lots of posts re Mobile Dongles in the Phones and Mobiles section .

Repeat you do not pay BT or any ISP for wifi .Best connections are always via Ethernet cable from router .But if very little coming in to router not much you can do .

Money_Grabber13579

If the 4G struggles when sending documents, I reckon it’s going to be worse that the home broadband. With a speed of 11, that should be sufficient for streaming video on at least 2 different devices at the same time. If you aren’t able to do that, I’d try a wired connection and see if that helps compared to wireless (when I did it with mine, the speed increased by 50%)

dsab

You need to figure out what the real speed provided by BT is by doing a measurement while having your PC connected by cable to the router. Poor WiFi in itself might not necessarily be a BT Issue, as the signal strength can be influenced by many things within your house...thickness of walls & ceilings, location of router, interfering signals from other devices or properties etc. Depending on the router model you have from BT it could also be that the router itself isn't great. The newer models like BT Hub 5 or Smart Hub 2  are actually quite decent for the standard user these days, whereby earlier models were of questionable quality.

We have BT Fibre and had some challenges with the WIFI reaching all areas of the house with the provided router, but I knew that the speed provided by BT to the house wasn't the Issue. So I got myself a mesh system that has made a major improvement to the WiFi in all areas of our house.

JJ_Egan

OP has said BT cannot supply above 11  and are willing to void contract ..

BETTER WIFI

 

Try turning the router on its axis . Even moving router a few feet can help .

The higher up the router is positioned the better .

 

Set the wireless channel

A wireless channel is the frequency zone of operation for your router's wireless network. This ranges from channel 1 to 11 with each channel differing marginally in frequency values to keep them apart. This should be done because if you are having other wireless routers in your area (or neighborhood), you could be using the same channel they are using, which will cause interference in both networks and reduce the efficiency and speed of your wireless network. If you know what channel other routers in your area are using, set yours apart from theirs by at least three channels apart. In order to find out the channel numbers of other routers in the vicinity, you can use a utility that will scan the wireless network and list it out to you. You can use inSSIDer for Windows on a laptop or WiFi Analyzer on an Android device.

Use     1  6 OR 11

 

Connect to the 2.4GHz or 5GHz Band?

On the client device side, all other things being equal, 5GHz connections will provide better performance at short ranges than 2.4GHz. This is because 5GHz, while somewhat faster, can't travel as far or transmit through some objects due to that band's shorter wavelengths. The 2.4GHz band tends to have more congestion and fewer channel options. That said, if you want to keep using 2.4GHz, consider experimenting with the channel selection. "Auto" usually does a decent job of hopping around the channel options and finding the best one, but if you're struggling with client connections, try manually setting the channel to 1 or 11. The 2.4GHz band has a total of 11 channels you can switch between to avoid interference, with channel 6 usually being the default. When you select a given channel, there's usually some signal spillover. So, selecting channel 2, for example, will often spill traffic onto channels 1 and 3. Thus, switching to the extremes of 1 or 11, the farthest points from the default of 6, can sometimes ensure the best-performing connections.