Do I need home broadband?

zagfles

My TalkTalk contract is coming up for renewal, was paying £24 a month they want to put it up to £34 increasing with inflation plus 3.7% in April. FTTC 35Mbps.

Looking around at other deals it all looks a minefield with contracts which change price mid term being the norm and some with vague "price may change during contact" without specifying how much. Reviews for the cheaper providers are very offputting. 

Using a wifi hotspot on my phone on 1pmobile, I get 65Mbps speed, so twice the speed of current broadband, and I tested streaming a film with other internet usage going on and it worked fine. 1p offer "unlimited" data for £25 a month plus £12.50 a month for an additional unlimited SIM (there's just me and wife in house).

So £37.50 would give us both unlimited data SIMs which as well as providing us faster home internet would also cover both our mobiles when out and about. Even inc EU roaming. 

Looks a no-brainer. Any disadvantages? They have a fair usage cap of 500GB but I doubt we'd exceed that. They allow tethering. We don't need internet at home when we're not there. Don't mind losing the landline, I switched to a VOIP service years ago and the only calls we get on the landline are spam. 

If I changed my mind in a few months and decided to go back to using landline broadband would there be a charge to reconnect the landline (not sure if they disconnect unused lines at the exchange etc)?

matelodave

If you get that sort of speed on your phone then you might get even faster with a dedicated 4G/5G router. You can also connect a lot more items to a router and you wont be compromising the capabilities of your phone or knackering the battery

There are quite a few around and you dont need to spend a lot - have a look here - https://gadgets-reviews.com/uk/review/3495-best-4g-router.html or have a shufti at Amazon or E-bay

We've got a Huawei B535 that we got several years ago  for around £60 that we use in the caravan when we go away - its not wonderful at home as we don't have such good mobile coverage - the best we can get is around 20mbit/s but we've had 80mbit/s or more where there's better mobile signals. I might get better at home with an external antenna but as we've had 100mbits FTTP for the past 5 years  I wont bother

housebuyer143

As above but you will be surprised how quickly you can hit 500gb. We used an unlimited SIM in a 5g router and had to set a cap on the router to alert us when getting close. We almost hit it every month and we turned all the streaming services down to good quality down from high. 

flaneurs_lobster

Sounds doable.

Couple of points, you should be able to look at your TalkTalk stats on your online account to give you an idea if that 500GB a month fair usage cap would be an issue. HD telly uses ~2GB/hour.

Prolonged hot-spotting on a mobile phone will do it no good, can mush the battery or other components.

Might look at a Mi-fi or 4g/5g router, Cex can be good for these reconditioned, recently got an unlocked 3-badged Mi-fi for travelling for <£20, decent router more akin to the TalkTalk one with ethernet ports will be more.

zagfles

matelodave said:

If you get that sort of speed on your phone then you might get even faster with a dedicated 4G/5G router. You can also connect a lot more items to a router and you wont be compromising the capabilities of your phone or knackering the battery

There are quite a few around and you dont need to spend a lot - have a look here - https://gadgets-reviews.com/uk/review/3495-best-4g-router.html or have a shufti at Amazon or E-bay

We've got a Huawei B535 that we got several years ago  for around £60 that we use in the caravan when we go away - its not wonderful at home as we don't have such good mobile coverage - the best we can get is around 20mbit/s but we've had 80mbit/s or more where there's better mobile signals. I might get better at home with an external antenna but as we've had 100mbits FTTP for the past 5 years  I wont bother

Thanks - only problem with that is we'd need a third SIM, which would increase the cost to £50/month which is far more than we pay now for broadband and mobiles. Or have to keep swapping SIMs between the router and phone when going out/in, which I don't think is practical, and wouldn't get calls/texts on mobile when SIM is in router. 

flaneurs_lobster

zagfles said:

matelodave said:

If you get that sort of speed on your phone then you might get even faster with a dedicated 4G/5G router. You can also connect a lot more items to a router and you wont be compromising the capabilities of your phone or knackering the battery

There are quite a few around and you dont need to spend a lot - have a look here - https://gadgets-reviews.com/uk/review/3495-best-4g-router.html or have a shufti at Amazon or E-bay

We've got a Huawei B535 that we got several years ago  for around £60 that we use in the caravan when we go away - its not wonderful at home as we don't have such good mobile coverage - the best we can get is around 20mbit/s but we've had 80mbit/s or more where there's better mobile signals. I might get better at home with an external antenna but as we've had 100mbits FTTP for the past 5 years  I wont bother

Thanks - only problem with that is we'd need a third SIM, which would increase the cost to £50/month which is far more than we pay now for broadband and mobiles. Or have to keep swapping SIMs between the router and phone when going out/in, which I don't think is practical, and wouldn't get calls/texts on mobile when SIM is in router. 

True, though your costs might be less if you didn't have unlimited data plans on your phones.

zagfles

flaneurs_lobster said:

Sounds doable.

Couple of points, you should be able to look at your TalkTalk stats on your online account to give you an idea if that 500GB a month fair usage cap would be an issue. HD telly uses ~2GB/hour.

Prolonged hot-spotting on a mobile phone will do it no good, can mush the battery or other components.

Might look at a Mi-fi or 4g/5g router, Cex can be good for these reconditioned, recently got an unlocked 3-badged Mi-fi for travelling for <£20, decent router more akin to the TalkTalk one with ethernet ports will be more.

I can't find anywhere on the TT account that shows usage, do they even meter it? But I doubt we'd get anywhere near the fair usage particularly as it's 500GB each so 1000GB in total. The only major thing we stream are a few films a week, if we watch TV it'll usually be through the aerial not streamed. 

zagfles

flaneurs_lobster said:

zagfles said:

matelodave said:

If you get that sort of speed on your phone then you might get even faster with a dedicated 4G/5G router. You can also connect a lot more items to a router and you wont be compromising the capabilities of your phone or knackering the battery

There are quite a few around and you dont need to spend a lot - have a look here - https://gadgets-reviews.com/uk/review/3495-best-4g-router.html or have a shufti at Amazon or E-bay

We've got a Huawei B535 that we got several years ago  for around £60 that we use in the caravan when we go away - its not wonderful at home as we don't have such good mobile coverage - the best we can get is around 20mbit/s but we've had 80mbit/s or more where there's better mobile signals. I might get better at home with an external antenna but as we've had 100mbits FTTP for the past 5 years  I wont bother

Thanks - only problem with that is we'd need a third SIM, which would increase the cost to £50/month which is far more than we pay now for broadband and mobiles. Or have to keep swapping SIMs between the router and phone when going out/in, which I don't think is practical, and wouldn't get calls/texts on mobile when SIM is in router. 

True, though your costs might be less if you didn't have unlimited data plans on your phones.

Very true, we don't use our mobiles that much except when away on holiday, so usually don't need a lot of mobile data. So what we could do is just have minimal data on the mobile SIMs, and when going away, take the router SIM out and put it in my (dual SIM) phone! 

alanwsg

If you're prepared to pay upfront, you can do much better than that.

I use a data only EE SIM from Scancom (On Amazon), it cost £220 for 17 months, so around £13/month.

If you can use the '3' network, for £130 you can have a 500Gb/month SIM that expires in Nov 2026.
So that's around £6/month. If you're worried about hitting the 500Gb limit, just buy two.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Three-500GB-Data-SIM-Preloaded-Pink/dp/B0D2XWPPXB

330d

Have you asked Talk talk how much it would be of you locked yourself in a 12 month contract? I just got a letter from them saying my price is also increasing to £35 a month but will be £23 if I go into a 12 month contract.

zagfles

alanwsg said:

If you're prepared to pay upfront, you can do much better than that.

I use a data only EE SIM from Scancom (On Amazon), it cost £220 for 17 months, so around £13/month.

If you can use the '3' network, for £130 you can have a 500Gb/month SIM that expires in Nov 2026.
So that's around £6/month. If you're worried about hitting the 500Gb limit, just buy two.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Three-500GB-Data-SIM-Preloaded-Pink/dp/B0D2XWPPXB

Seem to be business only, though not sure how they'd check, or even why? Would want to confirm the speed I'd get so a shorter term one might be an option.