spielo
Casual Member
Hi all,
My mum lives in a rural hamlet in North Devon. For many years, she's had ADSL "Max" (8Mbps) with Plusnet. It used to be reasonably fast and stable, but recently she's been experiencing much slower speeds at peak times. I don't know if this is throttling, or the infrastructure being oversubscribed due to work from home/covid/increased Netflix/iPlayer use, but I'm trying to find a fix for her. She has tried contacting Plusnet, but can't even get through to their customer "service" and just waits on hold forever.
It is expected that she will be able to get fibre from Airband by May, so we just need a temporary solution to last until then (her house is not able to receive Airband's wireless service).
She wants to switch to a different ADSL provider, but I'm not convinced it will help. I'm worried that she'll change to a different supplier, and the speed problems will be the same, but she'll then be tied to an 18 month contract. There are no LLU providers in the area.
I wondered about an unlimited 4G dongle from Vodafone as a replacement for her ADSL service. She can get a reasonably good Vodafone signal, but I worry that the quality of this service might fluctuate even more (e.g. with the weather, especially being on the Atlantic coast in winter).
Any suggestions on the best course of action? I'm considering the following:
Any suggestions on which approach would be most likely to deliver a reliable service? (Happy to hear about other options too!)
Thanks in advance!
My mum lives in a rural hamlet in North Devon. For many years, she's had ADSL "Max" (8Mbps) with Plusnet. It used to be reasonably fast and stable, but recently she's been experiencing much slower speeds at peak times. I don't know if this is throttling, or the infrastructure being oversubscribed due to work from home/covid/increased Netflix/iPlayer use, but I'm trying to find a fix for her. She has tried contacting Plusnet, but can't even get through to their customer "service" and just waits on hold forever.
It is expected that she will be able to get fibre from Airband by May, so we just need a temporary solution to last until then (her house is not able to receive Airband's wireless service).
She wants to switch to a different ADSL provider, but I'm not convinced it will help. I'm worried that she'll change to a different supplier, and the speed problems will be the same, but she'll then be tied to an 18 month contract. There are no LLU providers in the area.
I wondered about an unlimited 4G dongle from Vodafone as a replacement for her ADSL service. She can get a reasonably good Vodafone signal, but I worry that the quality of this service might fluctuate even more (e.g. with the weather, especially being on the Atlantic coast in winter).
Any suggestions on the best course of action? I'm considering the following:
- Switch from Plusnet ADSL to Zen ADSL on a 1 Month contract
- Switch to a Vodafone 4G dongle and jerry-rig it to her router (Apple AirPort)
- Switch to an EE 4GEE router
- Stick with plusnet and try to get Openreach to change her VLAN or something!?
Any suggestions on which approach would be most likely to deliver a reliable service? (Happy to hear about other options too!)
Thanks in advance!