Wireless Internet - pros and cons
 

My local Council have written to me saying that because of my remote location my sub 2mb/sec broadband service will almost certainly never be upgraded to Superfast Broadband - I'm on an Exchange Only line some 5k+ from the exchange. They advise I am eligible for a subsidised satellite installation or a £350 maximum voucher towards the installation cost of an alternative technology service. 4G mobile broadband is not an option as we don't have 4G coverage here.

Poor latency seems to be an ongoing problem with satellite broadband. An established wireless internet provider is going live in my area within the next week or so and a repeater station will be 1.4km away with a perfect line of sight. Of their three packages the one I am looking at is their middle one with 15mb/sec download, 10mb/sec upload and 100GB/month quota, priced at £49 per month.

So, pros and cons, guys - anyone with experience of wireless internet? Do you actually get the speeds offered?

The advertised speeds are the maximum that may be obtained. Bear in mind that these speeds are advertised in bits, not bytes, so eight times slower than you might expect if compared with computer disk read/write speeds. 15mb/sec is adequate for most people and with 100GB/month data cap, you won't be streaming HD movies 24/7. In the absence of any better alternative, it seems the only way of getting any type of decent internet speed, for a price!

Regarding the speed, this is affected in two main ways, the quality of the signal and the contention for the resource.

You may have a poor signal (and therefore a lower speed), but if few others are using the resource it may still be acceptable. You might have a great connection, but the throughput could be limited by contention if a lot of people are utilising the same link.

It's also possible that you could have the worst of both.

SD

My broadband service is served by a microwave backhaul to the village hall and then a 5.8Ghz WiFi connection covering the village. I have a 14cm Nanobeam antenna mounted to the side of my house in line of site to the village hall mast. Distance is about a quarter of a mile but the Nanobeam supports 6+ miles and up to 150Mbps where the provider permits it.

The provider prides itself on minimising contention and that's exactly my experience. For £40 per month I pay for a 20Mbps service up and down and in practice get 19.6+Mpbps both ways. latency is typically 25ms to any major UK speedtest server - low enough that pages on fast servers such as BBC News load "instantly".

I work from home when I am not abroad and Skype for Business VOIP calls with desktop sharing are rock steady, and 20/20 is proving perfectly adequate for HD iplayer streaming on multiple devices as well as other concurrent web activity including file backup to the cloud and Skype video calls.

Edited to add: Having ported my telephone number to VOIPFONE and dispensed completely with my landline, my total communications bill (broadband plus telephone line and calls) has fallen by £250 p.a. as a nice Brucie bonus on top of kicking a chronically slow ADSL connection in to touch.

I hope this helps and wish you good luck.

Some good food for thought, guys - thanks very much! Doubt whether I can dump the landline as Mrs D is very deaf and her hearing aids are linked directly to a Phonak handset - otherwise she can't hear conversations on the phone.

https://www.solwaycomms.com/why-uk-lagging-broadband/

(Courtesy of Solway Connections)

This might give an idea of what's going on. I've just had my fibre optic supplier upgrade to the 'extra' service which should give me up to 70mbs, but guess what it doesn't. During the evening it drops to around 9-15mbs and there is nothing anyone can do about it. 4K streaming is impossible. I've had a BT engineer in who changed the box on the wall, however he did say that with a copper wire connection no one will ever get a good fibre optic speed. New build houses have such a cable connected, but I can't see BT digging up our Close to relay cable anytime soon. He also stated that living at the end of the road the signal drops yet again. Funny it seems Romania has normal speeds of 300mbs. No wonder we are so far behind in technology.

We're in a brand new house and we have fttc. BT were willing to put in fttp but the developer had had such bad experiences at another development that they demurred and said 'no'. It would seem that whatever the problem was BT have now sorted it out and as all the cabling to the houses is in ducting someone on the estate is getting BT to quote for blowing fibre down the ducts to individual houses - haven't seen any prices yet. Having said that the fttc gives us 70mbps download and I do ask myself if we really do need fttp (we don't have children surfing all day!).

That is the 50% of the population that have high speed broadband ie they live in the cities.


It appears that as a latecomer to the digital world they started off with self-funded little local fibre LANs - which were easy to connect together when high speed internet came in.

Re the phone line, it is very easy to set up VoIP and use SPA devices to "covert" BT landline phones (ie. Normal phones) to VoIP so you can use your old phones with your new, non-Openreach connection and save on line rental. This usually works out significantly cheaper than BT anyway. My provider, Sipgate charges £12 for unlimited calls within the EU and significant discounts abroad.

Regarding your actual connection, I pay £40 for 100Mb/s up and down upgrade to 5Gb/s - this is pure fibre to the property (FTTP). I'm rather lucky and in the minority but the deal you get looks reasonable however, you might want to ask Gigaclear if they might be interested in your area...