General advice on changing to use Mobile Broadband.

Hi all,

As a long term user of wired broadband, I am wondering if it is viable to cancel our increasingly expensive Plusnet contract, and use mobile broadband instead. This would save about half the cost or more. I would really appreciate some advice.
How viable is this? We recently used a tethered phone in Spain (supporting laptop and another phone) and that went really well (very fast as well) but we didn't watch any streamed TV. How do people find watching iPlayer over a mobile connection?
We have a fairly complex gigabit wired home network, several computers, several mobiles, printers etc, so we would want a Router with an ethernet connection. Any recommendations? No need for a battery, we would want to just leave it plugged in. Is 5G necessary? (our phones are just 4G).
I don't get brilliant data speed at home on my 4G phone - Ooka speedtest says about 21Mbps down and 3.5 Mbps up, with a 33mS ping. Network is EE via 1p mobile. Would we see better performance with a carefully located mobile router? Here's hoping for some useful comments!

How much are you paying Plusnet? I pay about £20 pm for an FTTC 40/10 service.

It is possible to negotiate the price by ringing them and selecting the "I am thinking of leaving option". I would get a quote from Vodafone first and maybe get Plusnet to match that.

Plusnet use proper public IP addresses. Many mobile services use CGNat

Many thanks. We've been paying Plusnet about £29 per month including all UK calls for FTTC 40/10. But the contract is ending, and the "best offer" so far is £40/month for the same service. Then there will be yet another RPI+3% or so increase next March. We can get a data SIM with enough data for well under half that and then tweak our mobile service to get unlimited calls and abandon the wired line for very little.
This will save a substantial amount. But I will call and have another go to get a better quote.

But will the service be acceptable? See original post.

In reply to a post by WBJB:

Many thanks. We've been paying Plusnet about £29 per month including all UK calls for FTTC 40/10. But the contract is ending, and the "best offer" so far is £40/month for the same service. Then there will be yet another RPI+3% or so increase next March.

The problem is that you are paying for UK calls, so they think you want to keep the home phone service.

Plusnet's current broadband offerings are without any voice service at all (SOGEA line, and no digital voice offering). For new customers to that service it's £24.99 currently for 40/10, and they'd easily match that for an existing customer.

Vodafone is about the same price, but includes a digital voice service on the router (although a call package would be extra). Talktalk's offerings include analogue voice.

As you've discovered, you can get unlimited voice calls and texts on a mobile phone for under £5 per month, so if your mobile coverage is OK (or you operator supports wifi calling) then you're better off doing that.

It then remains what do you want to happen to your existing landline phone number for incoming calls. If you don't mind losing this, then obviously there's no problem. If you want to keep it, then either you need an ISP who provides digital voice, or you need to migrate it to a VOIP provider.

In reply to a post by WBJB:

We can get a data SIM with enough data for well under half that and then tweak our mobile service to get unlimited calls and abandon the wired line for very little.
...
But will the service be acceptable? See original post.

That very much depends on which network you go with and what their coverage is like in your area.

Even if you have very good coverage from a nearby mast, it's not uncommon for mobile operators to switch off a particular mast for weeks at a time for maintenance, at which point you could end up connecting to a very distant mast with very poor performance. Also, shared mobile spectrum is much more likely to become congested at busy times.

So if you don't mind suffering that for a few weeks a year, and saving money is more important than reliability, then it may be OK.

Personally I would take a stable wired connection over a potentially flaky mobile one any time. Having said that, faults in copper-based services are not uncommon either. Gross faults are generally fixable in a short period of time (and most ISPs offer compensation for longer outages), but slow degradation over time also occurs, due to crosstalk and other issues, and you have to live with that.

I left Plusnet (both phone and broadband) at the start of the year as their ADSL2+ (Openreach) service was c**p. Before cancelling, I got a 4G router (MF286D) and a Three PAYG SIM to try out first. All worked well.
Then signed up to a 12 month Three contract through fonehouse, costing me £7 pcm (after cashback) for 100GB. Moved the landline number to A&A (£1.44 pcm). Not looking back!
I am running the 4G router in bridge mode, so I still have exactly the same setup for my home network (including DECT/SIP) with a Fritzbox 7590. I get about 30/30Mb/s max now, enough for our requirements.
Needs a bit of fiddling with router in the attic, you dont get these speeds by just plonking the router anywhere.
Alweys worth a try, get a router for £50 (or less) on eBay and a PAYG SIM before committing to a contract.

Finally phoned Plusnet and negotiated as hard as possible.
I was offered £21.99 for FTTC 40/10 (2 year contract) which isn't bad, so have decided I agree with candlerb's comments about preferring wire to radio. We've had a very reliable service, better to stick with what you know! Also my wife wants to keep her landline calls for now - much of her social life is on the phone! She doesn't like the quality of mobile calls. So for now we will keep the calls package which is another £11.76 per month. It can be cancelled anytime. That's quite a bit better than the initial quote, but still a large increase over the price a year ago.

I remain very interested in the idea of mobile broadband. I would still like to hear more about speed and reliability from those who are using it, whether video streaming works well, which routers they are using etc. This forum seems mostly concerned with problems and fixes but maybe I haven't done a good enough job with the search tool. On the phone side, at the end of 2025 we are all supposed to be switched to Voice over IP anyway, which will introduce all sorts of challenges I suspect. Thanks for the replies.

When Three 5G first arrived in our area of the city I moved to mobile broadband for our house (their mobile broadband service as opposed to uskg a normal phone SIM)

It was rock solid and high speed for the for the first few months but I noticed performance start to drop off, after a while, presumably as more people got 5G handsets. There were the occasional dropouts/fall back to 4G - maybe one or two a month - but it was still an acceptable service until I replaced it with full fibre.

Streaming was fine , multiple streams along with SIP for voice, my work VPN, five people doing usual Internet stuff in the house.

Your mileage will vary depending on coverage, cell utilisation/congestion etc and will likely vary over time.

In reply to a post by candlerb:

Plusnet's current broadband offerings are without any voice service at all (SOGEA line, and no digital voice offering). For new customers to that service it's £24.99 currently for 40/10, and they'd easily match that for an existing customer.

I've just been discussing this with Plusnet today. I want to switch our Unlimited Fibre (i.e. FTTC/VDSL2 plus landline phone) to Fibre (i.e. SOGEA). The price on my Plusnet account page is £26.99, not the £24.99 shown everywhere else.

When I asked Plusnet to clarify this they told me that the £24.99/month price was not available to existing customers, and that if I wanted a cheaper service then I should look at changing to a different provider! The bottom line is that they won't budge on price, if I want to switch to Fibre (SOGEA) then I have to pay £2/month more than a new customer would.

This flies in the face of all I've heard about Plusnet being flexible when it comes to adjusting prices for existing customers. Not sure if it may be the start of a change in policy or just a one-off from the customer services person I was dealing with.

Needless to say I'm now looking at alternatives, one of which may be seeing if I can improve on the 4G broadband speed I'm getting with an experimental setup with a 4G gateway/router and external antennas.

Call again, ask to speak to disconnections / retentions, tell them that you're giving 30 days notice of termination unless they will match the advertised price.

It's very likely they'll match it. If they don't, then go ahead and change provider

In reply to a post by WBJB:

I remain very interested in the idea of mobile broadband. I would still like to hear more about speed and reliability from those who are using it, whether video streaming works well, which routers they are using etc.

Here is a typical speed result on 4G (Saturday morning is even better so not a fair example)



1.96Km from the mast, Line-of-site (except for a few trees)

So, advice?

I can only comment on Three. They let you trial for free for a few weeks. We did that while still in contract with our broadband supplier. All went well, I sent the router back as new, the lights still had the protective plastic over them. We weren't even charged for the data we used. When Shell broadband expired we got a 24 month contract with Three. That was May '22. It's averaging £13.65/month which includes a Quidco cashback (received).

It took a bit of time to find the best signal strength location in the house (not on a window sill as it happens).

We often stream Youtube for our 3yo grandson and there are no problems even if his dad is here working from (our) home. iPlayer is great too. We've had a few hours downtime/dog-slow on just two occasions.

I got a ZTE MF286D as that was what they sent as a trial - it's a compact router and energy efficient (we set a low wifi range) but Three also offer a Sercomm LTE2122GR. I bought one of these recently for £35 on eBay as I want to do more Cloud backups and the Three ZTE firmware doesn't do Carrier Aggregation (CA) on upload.

When our contract expires I'll pop in either an iD Mobile unlimited minute/text/data for £16/month or more likely a Scancom data-only Sim such as 500GB for £7.50/ month or unlimited data for a couple of quid more.

Has you wife tried forcing her mobile to 2G for calls? I think I read somewhere that 4G quality can be poor.

In reply to a post by ehteam:

Has you wife tried forcing her mobile to 2G for calls? I think I read somewhere that 4G quality can be poor.

Its usually the other way round... 2G calls sound like an old miles long landline from 1980s, and 3G or 4G calls sound crystal clear. EE has had some issues recently, and O2's 4G calling has been temperamental. When 3G goes in 2024 (this year for Vodafone) all calls on mobile will be over 4G.

If my brain remembers correctly 2g is completely unencrypted - not that 3g or 4g much better (weak encryption).

2G has something but it’s long broken.
4G uses AES I believe. Not sure if key is broken.

3G don’t know. It’s going.

Paul's results using Three are very impressive. The speeds are excellent, although the latency is higher than on a fixed line (ours is about 14mS).

Thanks for the information. When you think of the costs of the fixed line providers now, and then compare with the availability of SIMs for £16 per month or less including unlimited data and calls, it seems to be that more people will move to mobile broadband and the fixed line providers will lose business.
It seems to me there are many other advantages of a mobile router. You can take it with you when travelling, you don't have to have a long contract, so can swap to a better deal quickly. I was also interested to note there were a couple of occasions when you ran slowly or were down. But fixed lines go down as well and BT Openreach can be slow in fixing. It took 4 days to fix our last outage.