UKC

Does anyone live in a remote area such as the country side or places that have general bad internet? if so who are you with and who would you recommend currently getting 3mbs down & 0.80mbs up not going to work for us at all so need a better solution any help would be great cheers.

In reply to vFoxyy:

I live in quite a large town population about 30,000 and get 1.8mbs on a good day. Total pants in this day and age.

(they should be paying me..grrr)

In reply to vFoxyy:

Yeah, we get about 3.5mbps. Not a problem though - fast enough to stream movies, surf the Internet, etc. - it’s just software updates that are a tad slow downloading. It was only a few years ago that 7 was the fastest you could expect on “new” ADSL!

In reply to vFoxyy:

Stop moaning, you can't have it all... I'd choose to live in the sticks any day and have crap broadband... you can come live in Rotherham and use my 40mbps fibre connection if you want....??

However do look into Satellite Broadband, you might get up to 20mbps if you're close to an mast!

 

 

In reply to vFoxyy:

The speed you get is mostly, though not entirely, independent of which ISP you're with. People's recommendations from different parts of the country (or even just down the road but connected to a different cabinet) won't have any relevance to you.

Sadly, I've been in your position and it's likely that what you're currently getting is the best you're going to get until OpenReach next make upgrades in your area. If you're truly desperate, you could look at options like getting a second line put in and using both simultaneously to, at best, just under double your speed. Only a few small, specialist ISPs even offer that as an option and it'll cost you a lot each month for speeds that are still fairly mediocre by modern standards.

You could also investigate satellite ISPs. They can offer decent download and upload speeds, probably significantly better than what you're currently getting. The trade-offs are cost, download limits and much higher latency (will feel slower loading websites than the download speeds would suggest and cause problems with real-time uses like Skype or gaming).

Finally, if you're truly dedicated to fixing the issue and have a reasonable number of neighbours in a similar boat, you could look at either setting up your own mini-ISP as some desperate villages have done or lobbying one of the smaller start-up ISPs to come in, run fibre and offer you all a bespoke service.

In reply to vFoxyy:

I'm about 200m from the exchange and I'm currently only getting 4Mb down and 0.3Mb up...

I'm having Words...

In reply to vFoxyy:

We were getting less than two with BT, changed to Sky, and it actually did make a difference. Just ran speedtest and getting 6.8 meg today. Our last house in Shef had Virgin Optical into the house and regularly hit 100mb. ;-(

it sometimes gets so bad here that i use my iPhone as a router as we do get 4g here. Prob the price you pay for being out in the sticks along with rubbish public transport.

In reply to vFoxyy:

I live in the sticks and have recently gone from 1 mbs download (we're at the end of about a mile of copper cable) to 25 mbs! We use 'mobile broadband' for home and it works really well:

http://www.three.co.uk/Store/Mobile_Broadband

In reply to vFoxyy:

Depends how far you are from a cabinet and whether you have fibre. Some places here have an unserviceable connection due to cabinet distance and copper. Others have fibre to house and 350Mb/s is available if you wish. They put 24 new poles up to carry fibre from Greystoke to Johnby, a hamlet of 20+ houses. This is 800 feet up in Lakes. Well done Rory Stewart I think.

You need fibre.

DC

In reply to vFoxyy:

Move House!!!

We live in a rural location.  Just done a speed test, we are currently getting 1.43 download and 0.55 upload, so where you are sounds pretty good really.  Neighbours either side are both on different networks and their speed is no better as far as I know.

The nearest superfast broadband is about a mile down the mountain side along with the nearest mains water supply and the nearest mains sewerage.  But we knew all this when we bought the place.  It's annoying but hardly the end of the world.

 

In reply to vFoxyy:

 

We get about 2.5 mbits down.  3G/4G is to expensive for us (we stream all our tv), and current sattelite internet has to-small a bandwidth cap for regular streaming.

We are entirely at the mercy of OpenReach who can’t be bothered.  We are already FTTC, it’s just that the cabinet is 3.5 miles away...

Tomorrow, SpaceX launch their first two test satellites for a low cost, gigabit speed global satellite internet service.  I’m pinning all my hopes on this - hopefully two years from now we will never have to deal with BT, their network or any other UK ADSL provider again.  House will look nicer with the scraggly old phone cable removed as well.

In reply to vFoxyy:

The Black Isle is as bad. 3mb up and .9 down. When Adobe split Lightroom and introduced a cloud version I gave it up. No way can I upload gigabytes of photos. I'd be there for days!

In reply to vFoxyy:

Yes!

Switched from BT to EE which made a difference, but still a bit ropey, buffers a lot.

FWIW no mobile reception where we are either.

In reply to vFoxyy:

We barely get at a meg on the landline.

 

The answer was to fit a dish and use a microwave uplink. Most rural areas have a supplier able to sort this. 

In reply to vFoxyy: We live on the border between the Dales and the Bowland Fells, the chance of getting any broadband via BTs failing infrastructure was less than zero. In desperation residents got together and put a fibre network together. We tapped into black fibre on the M6 corridor with linked in resilience to two major hubs, Manchester and Edinburgh. We now have 1gig with options for switching up to 10gig, arguably the fastest in the world, certainly in the UK. It works as a community project, you can contribute, with digging, shares, admin, or just providing cake for workers, nobody is left out, unless you’re a landowner who denies way-leave for infrastructure! The network started in rural north Lancashire and is spreading north and south parish by parish. Last time I checked it was heading into south Lakes and into the Dales. £30 per month, totally unlimited. Check out B4RN, it may be heading your way?

 

In reply to Removed UserJeremy Ashcroft:

It's certainly good by UK standards. Here in sweden mixed funding is standard. Every house that wants fibre puts in £2.5k regardless of how near or far the cabling will go. After that it is just a normal monthly subscription for fibre to your door. (Copper overhead wires removed a few years ago). About £17 for 1gig down/100meg up, are the offers at the moment by several providers. We will switch when our 4g contract ends, until then we'll cope with just 40 down. 

In reply to summo: It’s 1gig both ways minimum with cat6a eithernet, as long as you have the hardwear to handle it! Even off fairly basic routers I manage 100mg both ways on handhelds iPad etc

 

In reply to Removed UserJeremy Ashcroft:

For household use you can argue it is a little extreme, but for a local business that speed would be a life saver. I don't think most London based mps, civil servants and advisors have any idea how far behind the UK is in terms of coverage. The kind of speeds they talk of as aspirational would not have been considered acceptable ten years in many other countries. 

In reply to vFoxyy:

Hmmmm

saturday night. 2,8 meg download now. Switched off broadband and used my ipad via 4g and got 50 meg. Lucky the sim card is paid by work!

In reply to vFoxyy:

We live about 3 miles from our exchange, which was recently upgraded to fibre. We get about 6Mbits/sec. Particularly annoying as I did almost all the work in getting the funding that got our exchange enabled. No prospect of fibre ever getting as far as us, unless we pay for it.

You are probably eligible for a grant that pays the cost of satellite installation. However, beware the bandwidth cap. You won't get much more than 50GB per month. Our house with two teenagers currently uses about 300GB per month. If you live in an area with good mobile reception and don't need more than about 40GB per month, that's a viable option.

In reply to vFoxyy:

3Mbps is pretty good for a rural area. We have slow and unstable internet at work, we're capped at 0.8Mb/s down and like a lot of rural businesses it's pretty dire. Most countries don't call what we have fibre, it's just broadband and it's a shocking solution for rural areas because any more than 2.5-3 miles and it's useless - which is most of rural Scotland. South Korea have better internet than us and it's frustrating watching hundreds of thousands of pounds being ploughed into flashy business ventures by the council and no one funding basic infrastructure which is holding businesses back.

Popular options are:

bonded lines: pay two broadband fees for roughly double your speed

satelite: decent speeds, usually download limits and can be unstable depending on your location. Be careful who you go with and make sure you can adjust it yourself.

buy your own line as a community: we were quoted £100k and a £16k a year maintanance fee

beam internet from a friendly neigbour: most systems need line of sight and obviously relies on a third party

White space: this is quite popular in the US and uses the old unused analogue tv frequencies but not readily available here yet (we're currently trialing a system)

3g/4g - can be slow, intermittant and expensive usage. Just because you dont' get a phone signal doesn't mean you can't get it with a proper set up so you would have to get it tested

In reply to Dave Cumberland:

Hasn't reached Sebergham yet! Less than 1 mps download - grrrr!

In reply to Sharp:

We tried this with Avonline "The UK's No.1 Satellite Broadband Provider" - ha! It started as a great improvement but the service gradually got worse and worse. Ringing them produced no improvement, in fact often no answer and on one occasion I listened to "Your call is important to us..." for over 45 minutes before smashing the satellite dish to bits with a mell (well, that's what I felt like doing.). In the end, the only thing that produced any response out of them was cancelling the direct debit, which prompted a demand for payment - told them to get stuffed and never heard back (though I did send the satellite dish back - in pieces).

 

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In reply to Stephen Reid - Needle Sports:

It never will, you’re not posh enough for BT to care unlike all those swanky folks around Greystoke, us poor shitkickers down on the solway plain have to make do with a bandwidth somewhat akin to semaphore.

In reply to cander:

Solway communications do some form of either satellite or microwave broadband but it's expensive. Posh people in the metropolises of Mawbray and Allonby now have fibre so rumour has it.

Edit: At 5.30 am I can get 6mb download, but 12 hours later when everyone is online the copper cable has slowed to about 2mb.

In reply to vFoxyy:

That in the OP sounds pretty good to me

 

generally email after 3pm  is about as reliable as HF radio at night here

I had crappy broadband speeds through a copper cable with BT and got about 1.5Mbps at best, no fibre was available in our rural location but we can get a good 4G signal. If you can get a 4G signal try the following it transformed our internet and we're now able stream Netflix in 4k with zero buffering. Our average download speeds are now 15-30Mbps and upload speeds 30-40Mbps

If you can you get a 4G signal do the following:

1. Locate the best service provider by putting your postcode into the following link, look at where the transmitters are located and choose the service provider that offers the best coverage and ideally triangulates to your property with at least one transmitter in line of sight – for our location I found EE offered the best option.

 

https://www.mastdata.com/37/37_map_mobile_mast.aspx?Table=15&AdTyID=43&...

2. Find out what SIM only data deals are available from the service provider identified in Step 1. For example we have a contract with EE which gives us 200GB data per month. Also phone up the service provider to get the best deals as they are not always listed on the web!

3.

 Buy one of these:

 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/d/ce3/Huawei-Unlocked-E5186-Wireless-Mobile-Wi-Fi-...

They come with a 6GB EE Sim which is only useful if the EE coverage is strong in your area. If the service provider identified in Step 1 is different from EE then you may want to get the cheapest PAYG SIM from this service provider and then try it in the router to see if you get good connection speeds. If you do get good speeds then you can then sign up for the monthly plan if not you can send the router back to Amazon and all you’ve lost is the small cost for the PAYG SIM. The router will need to be positioned upstairs by a window to get good signal reception. If you get the 200GB deal with EE it comes with its own 4G router but the Huawei one is better. 

4. Download the Rootmetrics Cell Phone Coverage Map App onto your phone, this is an easy way to check your 4G download and upload speed

 

5. Because the Huawei router has to be positioned upstairs by a window it can mean the internal wifi coverage throughout your property is weak, to get around this problem I’ve got a couple of wifi boosters a TP-Link AV600 which works a treat. There are many brands out there that all do the same basic thing and you can pick them up from Argos, Curry’s etc or on-line for about £40

Feel free to ask any questions and good luck

Lee

 

 

In reply to Ridge:

Only if you’ve got line of sight - guess what ... man came round, sucked his teeth said “your f&@ked”

Emailed Connecting Cumbria ... they replied “you’re f&@ked”

Went see Rory Stewart, sucked his teeth and said ... 

Looks like we’re ...

In reply to vFoxyy:

Here in deepest Kernow I've just speed tested my new (vodaphone) internet connection. 5.7 down, 0.5 up. That's to my laptop, via wireless. Not great by any standard, but better than I was led to believe I would get. Watched an online video last night and that ran fine.