Broadband Internet & ISP Recommendations?

They were fantastic when I joined, but they've been 'upgrading' their network on loads of occasions since then, which means their service deteriorates. They've probably got more people using their 5G round here, so that will affect the speeds I suspect, but when I joined, I was regularly getting 400+Mbps download speeds. That dipped to regularly 100+ about a year ago, but this year it's been pisspoor. They were doing more mast upgrades at Christmas and the speeds were fluctuating between 6 and 30 Mbps, which has been the case since then. All over the shop, basically, and not reliable enough to WFH/do Teams calls.

On Wednesday this week, they were doing more upgrades. I was getting download speeds of 0.2Mbps. Annoyingly, my 5G mobile uses the same mast, so I couldn't use that as a backup. It's been like that until lunchtime today. Like you, I realised just how much we rely on good internet these days. I'm switching to fibre with my 5G mobile as backup now.

Main issue I can see you having is a SIM that has enough data for when your internet isn't working but is also cheap enough for the vast majority of time when you don't need it.

I get 160GB data from EE for £20/mo on my phone. (Current prices are roughly similar).

I generally only use ~15GB a month myself in normal use, and I gift 10GB to my daughter (since I got her the cheapest contract precisely because I could top up her data). So the rest easily covers occasional emergency work use (don't think I've ever used more than 80GB in a month).

But the main point is that I think £20/mo for my mobile contract is a bargain anyway.

But £240 a year is an expensive backup SIM for the odd time that your internet goes down.

Main issue I can see you having is a SIM that has enough data for when your internet isn't working but is also cheap enough for the vast majority of time when you don't need it.

Yep, that's it really. Your little box looks good though, I'll look into that more. If I can plug that into my router using an ethernet port and stick a Lebara SIM in that would be a good budget failover, if not perhaps enough for proper WFH.

Since I posted we have been flooded with Community Fibre engineers this afternoon. Apparently the wrong team were sent out, because five houses were out they should have sent the outages team who work 24hrs and have dongles to give out. Still, now they're here they're trying to fix it.

So we'll see, but the problem with Community Fibre seems to be that they have a good product and helpful engineers but their organisation and communication isn't great. We were all telling them it was an outage from the start!

But £240 a year is an expensive backup SIM for the odd time that your internet goes down.

Ha. Missed out an important detail.

I pay under £10/mo for daughter's SIM (with a whopping 250MB), and I can gift her data from mine. So it would be under £120/year for a backup SIM that gets topped up with data from main phone (assuming your plan allows that). With a bit more searching I reckon you could probably find a similar deal that brought it down to ~£5/mo.

If I can plug that into my router using an ethernet port and stick a Lebara SIM in that would be a good budget failover, if not perhaps enough for proper WFH.

You can't put a SIM in directly. You need to tether a phone to it (in my case I used an old Android phone I had, the USB cable provided enough power to keep it charged). I used that setup for three weeks or so and was fine for WFH and streaming 4k video.

Ah right, gotcha. It's cheap though and that would work. We don't have any old phones lying around but I'm sure I could get hold of one cheap enough.

We're back up and running now so no rush but I will try and figure something out. I'd prefer a router you can put a SIM in so this one @exteroceptive posted might be good:
https://www.mymemory.co.uk/strong-4g-lte-wi-fi-router-300.html

The crazy thing seems to be the price difference between a 4G router and a 5G one.

Finally got my RIPE Atlas set up last week https://atlas.ripe.net/probes/60329/#tab-network

Will be nice to have a citable "nope the internet was down" page to show my ISP in future.

I've got a nextdns issue...

Swapped out my modem today from a Virgin Hub 4 to a Virgin Hub 5 as part of a switch from Sky to virgin TV.
Everything else on the network is identical.

Running nextdns on both my Mac and my iPhone.

On the Mac, it works absolutely fine. On the iPhone, it's stopped working. Just never resolves an address and times out. I'm using the same configuration. Logs on nextdns show no traffic from my iPhone.

Tried restarting the phone, reinstalling the app, disabling / re-enabling it.

Lost. Help?

So i am fed up with Virgin and looking to switch to community fibre - but wonder where this leaves me with watching TV. Does everyone just rely on freeview + streaming? There don’t seem to be any TV only services available that i can add on to having just broadband… not helped by the fact i have grown used to the virgin TiVo box

Sky have a streaming only service now.

No idea if it's any good obvs.

Interesting - might have a look, cheers

Shameless Community Fibre referral link sharing: https://communityfibre.co.uk/friends?referral=isfW5L1151

£100 Amazon vouchers for you and for me

We've had CF for over a year, haven't had any problems with it at all. We have freeview and the usual streaming channels - but we've never had anything else, so it's fine for us. My only issue is that the kids grab the TV control, watch something on iPlayer that they've seen a million times before, and then bicker because they're bored. I think they watched the World Cup final again yesterday.

Just used this, cheers! Hopefully it all goes through quickly. Will probably use the voucher to buy a mesh extender.

I've got a load of wifi-5 kit that I meshed my house with. (Then upgraded it to wifi6 because I had a broken ankle and was bored).

Let me know if you want one of the units - should be the same one that they supply you with

I'm going to be renting a flat in Bristol but keeping my flat in London. Need to sort broadband in flat in Bristol. Does anyone know if internet providers offer deals for existing customers wanting broadband in another property? I'm with Virgin currently which seems OK.

Anyone got experience of what a Hyperoptic install comprises?

I own a first floor flat. In Scotland, so there is no freeholder - each flat is separately owned.

I'm not sure if by requesting the install I would be effectively giving permission for them to dig a trench through the downstairs neighbour's front garden, which is part of their property. Or perhaps it's irrelevant and the cable can reach my flat in the same way the old redundant telewest cable does.

Any experience would be interesting to hear, thanks.

Had a Community Fibre install done recently and they slung a new wire to my house from the closest phone pole on my street. That's FTTH so I imagine it could work similarly with Hyperoptic.

Yep my CF install was also the same

In to day two of this.

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Have got a Three 5G router while we wait for community fibre haven’t optimal placed it for the fastest speeds in line of sight to the transmitter but its way faster than Virgin and half the price.
will see how it fares but we might even end up keeping it.
router is not the greatest as it’s only got one usb and ideally we need 2 for tado and ikea smart lighting so we might get a better router or some kind of range extender as the blockwork and concrete mean the wifi signal drops in the furthest bedrooms. this might improve with moving the router which is easy as it’s not connected to a cable coming in by the front door.

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How much does that cost and is it on a monthly rolling contract? In September I want to fuck off all my Virgin kit so this kind of thing is tempting.

We went monthly rolling in anticipation of community fibre coming to the building as it’s already in the street.
There are 2 transmitters very close and we are 6 floors up so signal strength is not an issue but when looking to buy my flat postcode would only show a 4g router to buy, changing it to new flat gave me the 5G option.
It’s £24 a month for rolling and no charge for router.
I can see the flats from each other’s windows as they are about 300m apart??! So a bit odd that one is supposed to not be covered.

Does sound a bit odd. Price is good though.

I wonder how the networking differs compared to using a phone as a hotspot?

Looks like I only have 4G here anyway. Then again, if you use their coverage checker map it says that 5G is available so who knows. My phone is only showing 4G though.

Can you plug a 3rd party router into it?

I guess so? I’m not an IT guy.
It just has 2 Ethernet ports. 1 LAN and LAN/WAN (whatever that means)

So if we keep it long term I will want more ports for music streamer/TV/fire stick etc