my little experiment

warning: this is a shameless plug for 3.

Back in Feb 2014 having got hacked off with my landline (BT), broadband (Zen) and mobile (Vodafone) never working or hobbling along at 8Meg on a good day (this is in London), crackly landline, 300 mins, some texts and no data a month and costing me about £70 a month all told, I binned the lot and took a 3 £28 a month contract which included a Nokia 925, 5000 texts, 5000 3to3 voice mins and 2000 other voice mins a month, unlimited data and no thou must not tether hoo-ha.

it's now June and blimey I'm sitting here on my tethered laptop getting 37Meg over 4G, no drop outs that involve me checking if my neighbours have bought new Xmas lights, DVD players or having to buy a new router, filters, cables and all that tosh to satisfy tech support and have only contacted 3 customer service twice at the beginning (who were brilliant), I finally feel I'm in the 21st century and apart from biling me, my interactions with 3 are zero which is how it should be.

I feel I can post this because the contract I'm on isn't available anymore (you now get nailed after 2Gb tethering a month AFAIK). but the way I see it, the gov could have just given some of the "superfast" cash to 3 to get more masts, given everyone in the country a smartphone, the finger to BT and built hospitals with the change.

Apologies for the plug but I'm impressed.

Three could have bid for the funding but either they didn't or they didn't get through the first rounds. Also, 4G didn't exist as a complete product when the original procurement was done so they had nothing that they could prove for solutions.

And the cost may be higher than the "affordability" level that was considered reasonable for superfast (can't remember what that was set at but 4G projected costs would have been higher - and in fact they will be now that the tethering has been lowered so it would cost a lot to do high throughput on a new contract).

The government can't just give money to a company without going through a proper procurement process to ensure they are being fair (although many would argue that the procurement process itself is flawed but that is a different discussion).

If 4G was to be expanded to be the primary connection method then a LOT more masts would be needed, and this is reflected by the operators dropping unlimited tethering as they've seen what early adopters can do with fast speeds.

Cost wise probably not that much different to doing a FTTC roll-out if the aims are the same.

I remember when 3G was new and it run smoothly, but now almost everyone has it the masts that have not had 4G capacity upgrades still struggle.

I was staying near Marble Arch last week on 3 3G MiFi. I had a 5 bar signal connecting mostly as HSDPA and the throughput I could manage was around 800Kb/s down. I can only attribute that to a lack of backhaul which is somewhat surprising in London just off Oxford Street.

I am currently getting by with a similar system on 3g. During the morning it works great, up to 16MBps down & 3Mmps up. Once the system gets busy on an evening, its now 1.39Mbps down & 1.6Mbps up.
Could they build a big enough network to cater for the demand?. I am really impressed by the Three network, but its designed for mobile usage not thousands of people using catch up tv, downloading torrents, etc

Edited by deleted (Wed 11-Jun-14 20:16:44)

To me there's 2 problems with mobile - the bandwidth from the mast is shared, and the backhaul is limited.