Mobile broadband

[rob1]

Anyone using mobile broadband instead of fixed line? We have a really slow broadband speed and also have a second home so we thought we could go mobile and up the speed and only need one contract, but I dont know much about the pros and cons

 

[hollister]

Yes. Very simple to setup these days. I went from 6 mbs to 40. Using smarty sim, unlimited data for £20/month (monthly rolling to check signal). SIM is in a tp-link router that takes a SIM card directly and is downstairs in the middle of the house and gets decent signal. Would definitely recommend looking in to it for your area.

 

[rob1]

Yes. Very simple to setup these days. I went from 6 mbs to 40. Using smarty sim, unlimited data for £20/month (monthly rolling to check signal). SIM is in a tp-link router that takes a SIM card directly and is downstairs in the middle of the house and gets decent signal. Would definitely recommend looking in to it for your area.

Does the unlimited cover streaming netflix ?

 

[hollister]

yes, I think the point where they do anything like throttling or capping is 1000GB, not hit it yet.

 

[rob1]

yes, I think the point where they do anything like throttling or capping is 1000GB, not hit it yet.

great thanks for that will check them out

 

[upnortheast]

Have a read of the slooooooooow thread . just below this. Lots on there

 

[Cowabunga]

I just might test their 'fair use' limit of 1000GB [1 terabyte] this month. I've been uploading a 500GB file non-stop for the past few days. Even with 4G it has been uploading for three days and may have a day left. Mind you, when I last uploaded a similar size file, it took over three weeks of uploading for 18 hours a day. This time uploads should be over 20 times faster.
In first world countries, like Korea, pretty sure I could upload this file in a matter of hours, not days.

 

[bobk]

Anyone using mobile broadband instead of fixed line? We have a really slow broadband speed and also have a second home so we thought we could go mobile and up the speed and only need one contract, but I dont know much about the pros and cons

Depends how good your signal is ?

 

[Y Fan Wen]

I just might test their 'fair use' limit of 1000GB [1 terabyte] this month. I've been uploading a 500GB file non-stop for the past few days. Even with 4G it has been uploading for three days and may have a day left. Mind you, when I last uploaded a similar size file, it took over three weeks of uploading for 18 hours a day. This time uploads should be over 20 times faster.
In first world countries, like Korea, pretty sure I could upload this file in a matter of hours, not days.

The mind boggles as to what is in that file. Lifetime collection of high fidelity 'art' photographs?

 

[steveR]

The mind boggles as to what is in that file. Lifetime collection of high fidelity 'art' photographs?

I duly boggled, but in all honesty, an offline backup will easily take 500gig.

 

[Cowabunga]

The mind boggles as to what is in that file. Lifetime collection of high fidelity 'art' photographs?

You are not too far out. It seems to have finished uploading last night, but I can't see how, because there remained around 15,000 individual files averaging just under 10mb each to upload, from the folder, last time I looked yesterday. There were a few far bigger files in the folder, so the size of folder remaining could vary depending on whether the bigger individual files had uploaded or not at the time I looked.

 

[bobk]

We've EE mobile broadband and it's excellent , BT is poor here , saying that I would sooner have 2 tin cans and a piece of string than deal with bt .
Even odder when you realise BT own EE . chalk and cheese ime

 

[Cowabunga]

I duly boggled, but in all honesty, an offline backup will easily take 500gig.

A full backup takes up 1.8Terrabytes for me. I'm in the middle of a partial backup now as it happens, and have been for about 20 minutes using a 2GB WD external drive connected through USB3 [not the faster USBC/Thunderbolt] At the moment it is stuck freeing up space on the drive at 168GB of a 482GB partial backup.

I have actually bought a new WD mechanical 4TB external drive to use instead of the 2TB drive for backups as 2TB capacity is not large enough for a full backup and several partial backups of various sizes. The 4TB is attached to my second desktop at the moment, where I have formatted it ready to go. All of which reminds me to get my finger out and swap it over and do a full backup to it. I have a little app called Amphetamine which I use to keep the computer awake, over-riding the auto-sleep schedule when required, so I'll set that to keep the computer awake for 24 hours [screen can sleep] so that it can back up overnight for however long it takes.

I've done other things during the writing of this and the backup [Timemachine] is still freeing up space on the 2TB external drive by deleting older backups. It has been a good 20 minutes now and it is still at 168GB written so far out of 482GB

 

[Cowabunga]

Update about an hour later and for the first time ever the Time Machine backup has failed due to a lack of space, so it is now backing up to the new 4TB external drive.It is going at quite a reasonable speed of 1GB every 1.5 minutes. It only has another 900GB to go. Speed is not that important for backups. It can take as long as it like in the background and will not effect the desktop performance at all [mine has 64GB RAM installed and an 8 core processor]

 

[colhonk]

Hmmm, Got EE4g broadband week and a half ago, great 65 mb for a few days, last couple of days down to 1mb to 4 mb , dont know what is going on.

 

[Cowabunga]

Hmmm, Got EE4g broadband week and a half ago, great 65 mb for a few days, last couple of days down to 1mb to 4 mb , dont know what is going on.

It does vary a heck of a lot more than fibre. I had a similar experience where it almost died after a few days. However I got the installers to contact EE and they updated the mast and it has been fine for the past six weeks or so for the most part. Having said that, over the past two days it has slowed somewhat to an average of 16mbps both ways. That could be because I have been uploading a 500GB file to the cloud; I don't know.

In the first couple of days I also had an issue where the SIM card had not been installed securely enough in the aerial. It is worth checking. But first, switch your modem off and leave it off for about ten seconds before switching it back on to see whether that makes a difference.

 

[Cowabunga]

Update about an hour later and for the first time ever the Time Machine backup has failed due to a lack of space, so it is now backing up to the new 4TB external drive.It is going at quite a reasonable speed of 1GB every 1.5 minutes. It only has another 900GB to go. Speed is not that important for backups. It can take as long as it like in the background and will not effect the desktop performance at all [mine has 64GB RAM installed and an 8 core processor]

Update about an hour and a quarter later and it has backed up a bit more than 200GB in that time.
Further update at 11.45pm it finished the whole 900GB backup to the new external drive.

Also just checked 4G speed which was about 16 both ways early evening and it has now [11.45pm] sped up to 67mbps download and 25 upload, which is very satisfactory.

By the way, have you tried an alternative server when doing a speed check? I use Oopla as the checker and find that Newport gives fairly consistently faster speed than others from where I am, even though there are a few closer. Not sure how the 3G network decides which server to use and what speed one gets when in normal use.

 

[upnortheast]

When we were on EE 4G there were occasional days when it slowed right down. usually coincided with some work happening at the mast.
If it doesn`t improve trying ringing EE

 

[steveR]

When we were on EE 4G there were occasional days when it slowed right down. usually coincided with some work happening at the mast.
If it doesn`t improve trying ringing EE

Does it help....?

My experiences of EE when I called CS to complain about a huge drop in signal/performance, and was told that they had been improving the service and that we should now be getting 4G, left me rather unhappy.... I could barely make a voice call.

I moved.

 

[upnortheast]

Hmmm, Got EE4g broadband week and a half ago, great 65 mb for a few days, last couple of days down to 1mb to 4 mb , dont know what is going on.

Are you checking your speed on Wifi or wired connection.
Wired usually gives more accurate result of the incoming speed - there is usually a speed drop over your onsite Wifi
Have you tried moving your router so it has better "sight " of the local mast.
Do you notice the speed drop while using the internet or only if you do a speed check ?