I trust that the OP is well content ... and I tip my hat to mixture. (I shall remain silent in the matter of that outfit which once briefly sported a logo which swiftly became known as the Prancing Pederast ... and worse things ... lest, if I vent but a whiff of my viciousness on that topic, I be banned from this place forever).
Copper pairs worked quite well for early, very slow digital stuff (railway telegraph), tolerably well for LF analogue (voice telephone), but thenceforward the higher the frequency, the greater the signal leakage via the cable self-capacitance ... which of course gets worse as the cable gets longer. It follows that you should never expect crackingly good 'broadband' at the end of a long, copper exchange line, no matter how determinedly and fluently the sales people lie to you.
Being at the end of a couple of Km of waterlogged multicore (interrupted not long ago by people who like to recycle such stuff via the scrap merchants) I long looked forward to the day when cellular internet connections might be worthwhile. The creaky GSM services in my rural patch were unsatisfactory, but eventually 3G arrived with an acceptable 2.1GHz signal. I have been pleasantly surprised, and so now pass on my experiences in case they may benefit others.
It would be daft to sign up for a contract before making sure the service was acceptable (or ever, for me, as now I know) and at first I was deterred by the charging structure offered by celluar ISPs who perversely cap both data use and period of use on prepaid deals. (Surely a noteworthy marketing gaffe because that way, whichever expires first, the punter feels he has missed out on the other one). I now wish I hadn't been, and had jumped in sooner.
Although my data traffic is quite modest, because most of my use is for reading, rather than downloading videos etc., I expected that I would scoff my quota long before my first, exploratory 30-day 'trial' expired. Not so! - the traffic metered was ~ ¼ of my estimate, based on my ADSL/WiFi traffic. I was astonished, and I suspect that the difference may be at least partly due to excessive 'dropped packets' (electronic equivalent of "Say again?? ....Say again??") on a poor landline connection (... hmm ... nice little earner, no?).
I was impressed; the only drawback was having to wind back security settings on my email service due to frequent IP address changes.
The upshot is that, now, I have:-
- no "service" "engineers"
- no exasperating conversations with Bangladesh
- no line rental (no line, grand!)
- no damned direct debits
- no router tantrums
- no contract (prepaid SIMcards), ergo, no phishing (full anonymity, no junkmail)
- no 'excess' charges (just bin SIMcard on expiry, have another ready)
- a reliable, hassle-free internet service at last, for less each week than half the price of a good pint.
- ...and, WRT the OP, one I can use in any UK holiday place within range of a suitable base station.