BT Mobile has a new plan.

30GB for £20 if you have BT at home - if not £25. Comes with the usual Unlimited Mins, SMS and Wifi. New and existing customers.

Just spotted it in my account and wanted to share

I'm also seeing 15GB + Extra Speed for £16 a month - so £3 a month off for the extra speed.

Do you have a link to this offer - all I can find for new customers is a 15GB deal for £21 pm.

Thanks

It was a promotion running and has expired now unfortunately.

Virgin are running 20gb for £15 though if you're keen, it says it is 4G and that would run on EEs network. That's the best deal I see for a service that uses EE but I only looked for 5 mins

https://www.uswitch.com/mobiles/sim_only_deal/d5808a...

Thanks ukh.

I am currently on a trial of the 40GB package from 3 (got about 10 days of the 14 left of the trial).

That's priced at £20 per month.

I am getting max signals for 4G on the router and it speedtests at between 18/23 Mb/s down and 8/10 Mb/s up.

I am getting this with the supplied free Huawei router positioned in the attic with no external antenna.

Next door have EE and they say they are getting about 50 Mb/s with an external antenna - but are paying £38 per month for 50Mb.

I am not sure if the 3 service will increase in speed if I fit an external antenna, or if I'm getting the best speed possible for my location, but if I found a similar price from EE with increased speed within the next week or so it might be worth considering.

The problem with the Virgin deal is lower data volume for not much of a saving, and I'm not sure that EE would give them the same speed for their customers.

Worth nothing BT mobile is speed capped, it runs on the EE network but you do not get the double speed data like EE customers.

If you want speed go direct to EE but at the price you're paying you won't beat it easily.

Thanks again ukh.

That's what I thought.

Not sure I need more than 20 mb/s anyway - don't play games (not at my age) and most of what I download (apart from Windows updates) is speed capped anyway.

It was always frustrating, with 0.6Mb/s on the landline, not being able to watch iPlayer to catch the odd missed program, but with anything over 5 Mb/s I could do that anyway.

When I told my neighbour I was looking at £20 per month for 40GB he said he now wished he'd asked me for input before committing to £500 installation (paid for by a Government scheme) and £38 per month for the extra 10GB / month from EE - he doesn't need 50Mb/s either.

Thanks again.

In terms of an external antenna I don't know from experience if it will make a huge difference, but certainly on EE I can get 60Mbps with just 2 bars of phone reception indoors (iPhone 7). This makes me think it's less about signal strength and more about utilisation on the cell site.

I am sure very weak signal greatly depreciates the speed though.

Edited by ukhardy07 (Sat 31-Dec-16 18:17:50)

I think we are right.

I went next door and connected my router to their outside antenna - and the results were slightly worse than I was getting in my attic.
I only got 2 bars and the speed was slightly down at about 15 Mb/s.

So I think I'll settle for what I'm getting - it's certainly a lot faster (40 times) than I get with my TalkTalk landline service.

In reply to a post by pewe:

I went next door and connected my router to their outside antenna - and the results were slightly worse than I was getting in my attic. I only got 2 bars and the speed was slightly down at about 15 Mb/s.

Three and EE may share the same mast, but their antenna panels can be at different heights which can give different effects - this may explain why using the antenna made things worse. Also the antenna may be slightly directional and pointing at a mast that only provides EE services (maybe with Voda or O2 as well).

Three has less spectrum capacity for 4G signals, which means if a lot of people in your area take up the service then they have less capacity to share. This is why you're getting slower speeds. EE has a lot of spectrum capacity (as does Vodafone) in comparison - which is why they can achieve 50 megabit/s and faster speeds in a lot of the country.

It is just frustrating that the networks no longer publish - and won't tell you - where their masts are so we can point antennas in the right direction rather than all the fiddling about to try and find the best signals.

what are three's 4g speeds like?

I get 60/30 pretty much 24/7 on my EE

Three 3g here gets approx 200-400kbit at 4am, and about 50-100 kbit in busier hours. Not tried 4g tho.
O2 gets about 1-2mbit/sec on 3G.
Giffgaff which I have tested 4g, gets about 6mbit/sec at night and about 1mbit in the day.

In reply to a post by pewe:

It is just frustrating that the networks no longer publish - and won't tell you - where their masts are so we can point antennas in the right direction rather than all the fiddling about to try and find the best signals.

You can look at third party maps such as http://cellmapper.net and you can install (on Android devices) the free Cellmapper app, and contribute to such third party maps. These maps are made by people driving around with the app running on their phone and it logs the cell signals and direction and computes where the actual mast is.

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

what are three's 4g speeds like?

Can vary dramatically, I've seen 5 to 10mbps upto 80 mbps in a quiet area. I no longer have a 3 SIM but I know others that do. Some parts of the country seem to be better on 3G for Three; due to so many people now on 4G capable phones, tablets, MiFi devices. Soon I suspect Three will have to move some of their 3G capacity over to 4G.

I get 60/30 pretty much 24/7 on my EE

I get 50/15 here at home, and in town I've seen 100/30. (Town centre mast has more capacity allocated).

Giffgaff is the poor cousin to O2, generally gets slower speeds than O2 users standing side by side. That is how they're cheaper.

Edited by jchamier (Sun 01-Jan-17 16:49:04)

In reply to a post by ukhardy07:

Worth nothing BT mobile is speed capped, it runs on the EE network but you do not get the double speed data like EE customers.

If you want speed go direct to EE but at the price you're paying you won't beat it easily.

I can see £16 for 15GB double speed on my account.

In reply to a post by pewe:

Do you have a link to this offer - all I can find for new customers is a 15GB deal for £21 pm.

Thanks

Sorry I saw it in my account, if I had known it was an offer I would have changed. I do keep checking though