UKC

My daughter is in the process of buying a house in Warwickshire and one aspect that has come to light is the very poor broadband speed. As they depend a lot on internet access for work & leisure it could be a stopper. What are the options for receiving broadband in a way other than BT landline?

If they have good 4G coverage, hotspot through their phones and get a large data package? Probably not that practical.

I live in a rural location and we had gigaclear come through laying fibre optic cable. They specialise in rural communities so maybe check their website out and see if they have any plans to get to their area? from less than 1mb before to 100mb now...huge improvement

There’s satellite but it doesn’t have enough data allowance for regular movie streaming.  

I’m hoping to sign up for SpaceX’s “Starlink” satellite service in 2020 - cheap, gigabit, low latency, big data allowance.  I’ll have a little party to celebrate never doing business with BT again.   Uncertain if the service will really be in place by then - just two trial satellites and a lot of ground staff as of today.

I used to use a mobile broadband dongle plugged into a router. It was faster than my landline.  I think nowadays you can buy mifi routers all set up and ready to go.  Plenty of packages available to give you sufficient data.  Thats if there is a decent signal of course, but its easy to check that.

Virgin?

On a side note, something to bear in mind if it's for business is the Upload speed.

I'm in a very rural part of France and our broadband is less than 2mbps and both me and the wife work from home.

I've invested in satellite broadband but its very expensive but gives 30mbps download and 6mbps upload. The latency is a pain but not as bad you think. 

NetFlix and YouTube are surprisingly good over standard slow broadband - all of their content is cached at the servers of your ISP so you're only streaming it from somewhere fairly local rather than halfway across the world and that makes a difference. 

Spotify can be a pain but that might be because I've got the premium account and it insists on streaming higher quality - there should be an option to change it.

There is an option to change it, under 'settings'. Click the arrow to the right of your profile picture in the top right corner.

I use a mobile broadband package from 3 Mobile, for home stuff and work.

Its worked great so far (being using it for several years & recently upgraded the 'dongle'.

On my phone app yes. But I think when I throw it to my Bose speaker using Spotify Connect I think it uses higher bitrate because quite often I can stream on my phone from my home wifi, but if using Spotify Connect it is patchy.

Anyway, first world problems and all that.

I use a mobile Wifi dongle from Vodafone. Check coverage maps carefully before deciding though, its never quite as good as they claim, but works well enough for me to handle plenty of image uploading to things like Flickr, and watch iPlayer etc (though I don't do that much). The biggest issue may be cost of the package, you won't get unlimited cheap, and the fees for "over running" are pricey. If you're a general internet browser, its probably a viable and easy option. If you're a serial film/tv watcher, or work all day on the web including uploading big files, possibly not. Does me though.

We're in rural Shropshire and the best we get on the copper wire is about 0.25mb. 

We've subscribed to these guys 

https://www.userve.net/wireless/

I expect there will be a similar outfit down your way. 

we basically have a normal router, dish on the side of the house and a microwave link to a receiver about 5km away. It in turn pings it to the Wrekin and hardwired from there. 

I have a 30mb download 2 mb upload plan, which is fine, although it buffers if I am on Qobuz/ hi def audio, but there are other plans with higher download speeds - I'm just tight.

Much better than satellite and our flakey 4G  

She should check here to see the status of the roll out. She may get superfast soon. Our old village in Staffordshire got it the year we moved out and our new one got it the next year. 50+mbps down, 11mbps up. We're about as far from the exchange as they would run, the rest of the village connect to one in the other direction (they had to wait another year to get it).

https://www.cswbroadband.org.uk/

Thanks Philip that was particularly useful to her.

Virgin have an offer at the moment till 23rd April. 100gb a month for £20

I'm in two mind's whether to take this up myself because I'm not happy with the service I have been shown so far with the documentation provided to me. It's inaccurate and they keep referring me to a website. Websites can change, documents can not.

Also, in the news today Virgin Mobile one of the worst for customer service.

I may cancel before using service.

This is not the cheapest option, but is used quite widely in some specialist business areas including outside broadcast.

Once you've established the best provider for your area, to improve the stability of connection speeds, you could additionally try using a Vortex V4X intelligent antenna.  From memory, they are about £500 wish for the ruggedised outdoor version which can be mounted outside your property (like a TV aerial). Also need to run a cat 5 cable (with a PoE injectors power the device) into the address into a switch (like a Netgear GS105) to split the feed across several devices.

It can act as it's own wifi router as well.

The indoor version simply plugs into the wall power supply and a flat switch can be plugged in to split the feed to wired devices.

https://www.vtx.co.uk/product.aspx?id=192

Postcode checkers are useful tools but do double check the results before making any big decisions. The postcode checker for my last house says that superfast fibre is installed and available to order. There is indeed fibre running to the cabinet that serves my house but the line from the cabinet to the house is too long and too poor to deliver good ADSL speeds so superfast fibre isn't even an option. Those kinds of issues don't always show up online.

I wouldn't even completely trust statements from ISPs. Sometimes they're working from the same fallible info that's online. Before buying, I'd check what the closest neighbours are actually getting in practice.