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How reliable is Mobile Broadband as a whole???

Malcky

Casual Member
Evening folks,

I am currently with Virgin Media for broadband only (1Gb down/100Mbps up) and for its service I cannot complain as it has been super reliable for the 3 years I have been with them.

However, come May 2025 when it's time to renew or change.....I have been thinking about going Mobile as it is only £20 p/m with a smarty SIM card......compared to nearly £60 p/m currently.

The question I have is....on the whole, how reliable is mobile broadband in terms of maintaining a decent speed and also keeping the service up and running, do you lose signal a lot that needs the modem to be re-booted/re-started to get it going again?
Do most of the users here use mobile broadband because there is very little alternative for you?
I am lucky enough to have loads of ISP options available to me, and could easily swap to another provider come May next year.....so I am just really weighing up my options.

One thing I will mention is.....I DO NEED a super reliable connection....as I am the network guy of the household, but I am also out of the house 10-11 hours of the day working....so I cant have any issues arise when I am not in the house to sort it out.

Thanks
 
Evening folks,

I am currently with Virgin Media for broadband only (1Gb down/100Mbps up) and for its service I cannot complain as it has been super reliable for the 3 years I have been with them.

However, come May 2025 when it's time to renew or change.....I have been thinking about going Mobile as it is only £20 p/m with a smarty SIM card......compared to nearly £60 p/m currently.

The question I have is....on the whole, how reliable is mobile broadband in terms of maintaining a decent speed and also keeping the service up and running, do you lose signal a lot that needs the modem to be re-booted/re-started to get it going again?
Do most of the users here use mobile broadband because there is very little alternative for you?
I am lucky enough to have loads of ISP options available to me, and could easily swap to another provider come May next year.....so I am just really weighing up my options.

One thing I will mention is.....I DO NEED a super reliable connection....as I am the network guy of the household, but I am also out of the house 10-11 hours of the day working....so I cant have any issues arise when I am not in the house to sort it out.

Thanks
Stay with Virgin if they've had a good track record in your area.
Mobile can be very moody and can run well for periods of time and then go 180 degrees and be nothing but trouble.

Perhaps there's a way to get a better deal out of Virgin somehow.
 
However, come May 2025 when it's time to renew or change.....I have been thinking about going Mobile as it is only £20 p/m with a smarty SIM card......compared to nearly £60 p/m currently.
Currently thinking about doing the same, it expires for us in about a week or so but hoping Virgin renews for a reasonable price for M125 (we have M250 through Volt but we're not really bothered about 280mbps). Only other remotely viable options is Vodafone 5G and Three 4G. EE keeps having outages lately and O2 goes down too much. Openreach isn't viable, 17mbps ADSL.

I don't think I can trust either of the viable options to be stable though, according to people on this forum, Vodafone might go down during peak times here (site has B1+7+20+n78) and Three isn't the best either (I see it switching to another site quite a lot and I can't do anything on it).
 
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All great with Three here in North Somerset since starting 16 months ago. Now on a Scancom prepaid data SIM (£4.50pm for 500GB). All fine for my daughter near Bath with Three since December (£11.50pm unlimited data).

She has my ex-Thee MF286D 4G router. I used a secondhand Sercomm 4G router until I upgraded to a secondhand 5G NR5103E. All these routers have been totally reliable.

Both of us gave up conventional broadband and could have had fibre.

Trial First:

I did a free trial while still in contract with the old ISP so I was confident when jumping ship.

Daughter also works from home some days. I provided the router and a 30-day unlimited bundle from iD Mobile for her to trial.
 
Not terribly reliable on any network in my opinion, that’s in 2 locations, one rural one town centre.

Wildly varying latency and speeds, random short outages, sometimes long periods with very low speeds.

I wouldn’t do it personally.
 
Not terribly reliable on any network in my opinion, that’s in 2 locations, one rural one town centre.

Wildly varying latency and speeds, random short outages, sometimes long periods with very low speeds.

I wouldn’t do it personally.
I think it purely depends on area, as always. It's just a shame that the best thing that I can do in my scenario is threaten to go to a £16 Talkmobile SIM with Virgin (it's stupid since my next door neighbour can get M125 for £24, hoping that might help our case).

There's definitely some people who have a good network experience on 4G and 5G though
 
Evening folks,

I am currently with Virgin Media for broadband only (1Gb down/100Mbps up) and for its service I cannot complain as it has been super reliable for the 3 years I have been with them.

However, come May 2025 when it's time to renew or change.....I have been thinking about going Mobile as it is only £20 p/m with a smarty SIM card......compared to nearly £60 p/m currently.

The question I have is....on the whole, how reliable is mobile broadband in terms of maintaining a decent speed and also keeping the service up and running, do you lose signal a lot that needs the modem to be re-booted/re-started to get it going again?
Do most of the users here use mobile broadband because there is very little alternative for you?
I am lucky enough to have loads of ISP options available to me, and could easily swap to another provider come May next year.....so I am just really weighing up my options.

One thing I will mention is.....I DO NEED a super reliable connection....as I am the network guy of the household, but I am also out of the house 10-11 hours of the day working....so I cant have any issues arise when I am not in the house to sort it out.

Thanks
The question is flawed because there is no such thing as 'as a whole' when it comes to mobile broadband, the network diversity, and the physics and geographics alone...

But the simple answer is... 'don't try and replace fixed line fibre or coax with mobile broadband in your scenario'.
 
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Uptime is excellent, speed all over the place and heavily location dependent.
 
@insertfloppydiskhere Sure.....it is: KY4 9BU....I know there is a few masts in the area with a few networks, but not sure which network is considered the best....although I would probably go with Smarty.

I know the masts are less than 1 mile away, but I do not have clear line of site as there is houses in-between.....but if I did go down this route I would put the modem in the attic and have an external antennae connected to it, pointing towards the best signal.....hoping the elevated position in the attic would help.
 
if you want “super reliability”, stick with wired internet. If cost is a concern, a slower VM connection will still be superior to anything mobile. You may even find they’ll slap a good discount on if you threaten to leave anyway
 
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@insertfloppydiskhere Sure.....it is: KY4 9BU....I know there is a few masts in the area with a few networks, but not sure which network is considered the best....although I would probably go with Smarty.

I know the masts are less than 1 mile away, but I do not have clear line of site as there is houses in-between.....but if I did go down this route I would put the modem in the attic and have an external antennae connected to it, pointing towards the best signal.....hoping the elevated position in the attic would help.
Yeah, I wouldn't recommend O2 and Vodafone (given VF is B20 only and O2 is B1+20.

I think EE might be on B3 20MHz only too which might be fine (but you're not going to exceed 100mbps most likely). Three has B3 15MHz + B20 5MHz (probably slightly better than EE but not great).

eNB 7431 on Three is probably going to give you the best luck. If you have an Android phone, see whether you can connect to that site and see how the signal quality is like before committing to it.
 
@insertfloppydiskhere Thanks for that detailed info.

And to everyone else that answered......Thanks for such a speedy reply and for all your opinions.

I think in the end I will stick with a wired ISP as it will/should be far more reliable than any mobile offering......which is a pity as I was kinda looking forward to tinkering with something new (mobile internet and all related stuff to get it up n running)....but that is the issue....the internet is something the whole household needs and uses....and my life would be hell on earth if there was constant issues with connection or speed or anything else from the wife and teenage kids in the house.
 
It's not as good as fibre.

I used 5G as my main and then only connection for almost 1 year. I moved to a new place and it's was cheaper and faster than the only fixed option available (Openreach FTTC).

In my case, the only network with good signal and speeds is EE. 100-500Mbps.

Speeds would vary along the day. Reliable +500Mbps was only after mid night and Sunday mornings. During the day, it would be 100-300Mbps with 5G. It was still better than ~60Mbps from FTTC.

Latency... yeah, not as good. 20-30ms usually, but as you add load, it starts increasing... 25, 40, 30, 80ms, etc. It wouldn't cause any issues when browsing the web (unless I maxed out the upload which could bring everything to a stop - your router needs QoS to avoid this), but from time to time I play games online and you'll definitely notice it on games like Counter Strike where latency is very important. FTTC would be better for this, but it was a trade-off and I needed the speed.

Most problems that required a reboot or something like that went away when I moved from a phone to a dedicated router. It worked okay. I was manually selecting the bands the router would connect to though, so from time to time I'd try other pairings when I saw the speeds dropping.

2 or 3 times I noticed speeds dropping to sub 50Mbps when it was raining a lot. I think I actually noticed a similar number of reconnections. The only real problem was when the local mast went down for 4 or 5 days... I was getting sub 5Mbps speeds for most of that time and couldn't do anything.

I had fibre (openreach) installed in July. It's much better in terms of latency. 2-3 ms to servers in London, I rarely get less than 800-900Mbps, no data caps or throttling after reaching some "fair use" limit, etc. It's more expensive, but it's also much better.

If you want to try mobile broadband, then maybe try it first yourself and if it's stable, then maybe add everyone else for a while to see if they complain. It shouldn't be as good as fibre, but it's good enough for a lot of people.
 
Don't bother if you are doing anything that requires consistent latency or can't handle packetloss very well (E.g. gaming.etc)

If you just browse the web/ download stuff and watch streaming video it will probably be OK as long as the speeds are reasonable as usually the buffers are big enough to handle the variance.

It will also depend on very much what the networks are like in your area and how good the signal is.
 
One thing I will mention is.....I DO NEED a super reliable connection....
That's the killer point. Any landline connection will be overall more reliable that a wireless-based connection. Base stations can be switched off without notice, sometimes for weeks at a time, and you could be left on some distant tower with poor signal and/or heavily oversubscribed.

If you have "loads of ISP options" and that includes via Openreach FTTP, then I'd take that. Of course, if VM works well for you, then you can stay with that.

If you want the highest possible availability, then you could get a landline service *and* mobile, and a dual-WAN router that fails over between them. (Or buy a service like BT Halo which effectively supplies that bundled up for you)

Aside: Openreach FTTP doesn't use powered street cabinets (*), and is likely to stay up longer in the event of an extended power outage - as long as you have local UPS for your side, of course.

(*) Except in a tiny proportion of cases driven from "subtended head-ends"
 
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I used Three for 2 years in London, predominantly working from home and at the time there was no good home broadband company available. I had the ZTE router so I was able to tweak and lock cells. It worked fine for months on end then Three had severe issues which took a while to resolve.

I've since moved to Edinburgh and again it was working fine for 4 months until the last 2 weeks of August it went downhill.

I've since moved to TalkMobile and their unlimited sim and I'm having a much more stable 4G connection with speeds over 150Mbps which is enough for working and streaming. I don't game so don't require anything special. So far it's been rock stable but I find with mobile broadband things can change quite rapidly.

Through multiple tests of various providers I settled on TM/Vodafone, EE works just as well but unlimited data is very expensive and a FUP applies. I refuse to go with Virgin and the landlord doesn't want a normal fibre connection install.
 
I've been on 5G for a few months now and 4G for a year or so before that and generally found it very good, but only through testing. e.g. EE 4G was much better than O2 4G, and my new Teltonika 5G router (expensive) is much better than my older Mikrotik 4G router. As no one else is reliant on the connection it doesn't really matter if it doesn't work for some reason. If other people are dependent on it, a decent wired connection would probably be safer. Your experience may differ and the only real way to figure out what works is to try out some different SIM cards and see. (and hope that nothing randomly breaks one day).

There's also the issue of how much data you actually transfer. I pay for 200GB/month, but only use around 100GB/month. This is quite cheap, but if that connection were accommodating a whole family it could potentially get expensive.

As you say you have lots of ISP options, I'd suggest shopping around for a better price on a wired connection.
 
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