4G

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At very short notice, in February 2020 my tooway satellite service closed. I decided to stop procrastinating and install a 4G service using three (what a silly name). My requirements were for genuinely unlimited data at a sensible speed.

Again Richard Dix of Rural Broadband in Heacham installed it. His technician, Chris, fitted the system and as always did an excellent job. I have a neat, high-gain Mikrotik external dish connected by cat5 cable to a small modem/wifi box. It was soon hooked up to my wired/wifi network and it worked. What more can you say? The latency is down from 800 ms to 35 or 40 ms. Speeds vary a bit but are usually about about 30 Mbit/s down and up. And I can update my TomTom maps during the day without worrying about my data limit. Deep joy!

Actually there is a kind of trigger point of 650 Gb per month. Regular breach of that limit might cause difficulty, but I am very unlikely to do that. At last I can hook up my satellite boxes and 'smart' TVs to my network and watch the occasional missed programme on iPlayer, ITV Hub etc. If I was interested in them Netflix and other streaming services would also be possible.

Apart from an occasional need to power cycle the modem I have had no problems whatsoever with it. At first the speed with which I connected and transferred data was astonishing, but of course you get used to it, and now it is normal to me. The router has very good output so I have been able to do away with one of my wifi access points. Despite some walls being thick the signal reaches all parts of the upper floor in my long and narrow old house.

Since the installation the covid-19 lockdown started so the service got more heavily used during the day. Download speeds were sometimes down to 20 but usually more than that. I joined social and business zoom meetings with several people at once and, unlike some of the others, my screens and sound worked smoothly and without dropping out. So I'd give my 4G ten out of ten.

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Last edit 21 November 2020