How does the 4G wholesale market work!?

[doctor-bond]

Hi, I’m currently tearing my hair out over poor rural 4G service. We’re with Quickline and have a home 4G setup. It’s always been a bit slow and prone to crashing, but recently has become appalling.

Quickline’s standard response is, “no problem at our end, we checking with our 3rd party supplier”. This raises a bunch of questions:

• The ISP presumably buys a chunk of bandwidth from a wholesale supplier. (LTE SIM supplier?)
• Can the wholesaler turn the flow up or down or cap users independently of the ISP? (Suspiciously, our supply often cuts out at the same time each evening suggesting an invisible cap has been reached, or a peak time surge has caused a crash).
• How many wholesalers are there in the UK 4G market? Do they have geographic monopolies? My concern is that if I swap ISP, I’ll still be buying the same wholesale data and be subject to the same poor supply.
• Does going with a larger ISP like EE mean that they have better control over supply, or more clout with wholesalers?

Thanks!

 

[kommando828]

I get 4G from all the 4 main providers, Voda, EE.O2 and Three, the postcode checker on Quickline's site says there are no services available from them in my area. Never heard of them before and going by their website there is no mention of 4G. Very odd to only provide 4G in certain area's and not in a full coverage area.

Anyway no info on their site about who they use for 4G, you may have to pull the sim out of the router and stick into a phone and then use the settings screen to find out what network it connects to.

 

[Mark.J]

Quickline doesn't use 4G, they're a Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) ISP with their own unique wireless network. Problems with speed are thus most likely down to signal or their own limited network capacity supply to a specific area.