In reply to a post by Anonymous1337:

From my experience with Virgin their HFC network is massively oversubscribed anyway, upload sucks as well on DOCSIS.

That's not a national experience. VM is approx 30 separate areas, and I'm connected to the Guildford head-end, and whilst latency & jitter are poor, the download upload is good.

In reply to a post by Anonymous1337:

In reply to a post by Ewok:

Agree with this. I will never touch VM again as long as I live. I moved house, told them I was doing so, and they failed to cance

I have Virgin Media at my premises, but continue to battle on with Smarty as my only broadband. Fortunately I’m 100m from the tower and get a consistent 35-60mbps. I’ll take randomly changing IP addresses over dealing with Virgin Media any day. From my experience with Virgin their HFC network is massively oversubscribed anyway, upload sucks as well on DOCSIS.

Works spot on in my area. All HFC - with the majority from the Yorkshire Cable days. Peoples issues around here are from corroded tap points due to them leaving the cabinet doors open. My 350/35 gives that speed all day, every day. Network here is good, customer services.....well thats another matter.

In reply to a post by gary333:

Peoples issues around here are from corroded tap points due to them leaving the cabinet doors open.

I had that problem last summer, three call outs, and eventually it was resolved. A senior tech had to move me to a "very high power" (??) tap, and then attenuate at my end!

Just to follow up on this thread, we have been using Three as our broadband connection since the 27 January. I've had no complaints from my daughter, and I really haven't noticed any difference in use myself, apart from the IP address changing frequently.

The IP address has changed multiple times, I even forced some changes, but only once got an IP address that was externally accessible, and this was using the 3Internet APN. Not a major problem, but I prefer to have access to my network when away from home.

So today I made that phone call to VM, and was eventually offered M350 for £38.50 a month (a rise of £1.50), on an 18 month contract. Not particularly keen on an 18 month contract, but given the time of year it will be about 11 months until the next price increase get out option comes along, by then we may have FTTP or 5G available.

So I've accepted the above offer, yes I could have saved some money over the year by moving to Three (£10.60 a month after cashback), but in the grand scheme of things it wouldn't be much, and as others have mentioned our 4G could get a lot worse, or we could have 5G become available, but I've decided to play it safe, and it keeps the network tidier as well.

I do have an eBay special 100GB EE SIM to experiment with - we have line of sight to their tower as well, and it's closer than the Three tower, once I've tested that I'll post the results.

In reply to a post by R0NSKI:

The IP address has changed multiple times, I even forced some changes, but only once got an IP address that was externally accessible, and this was using the 3Internet APN. Not a major problem, but I prefer to have access to my network when away from home.

I'm not surprised, Three was the only consumer mobile ISP to even have a service without CGNAT, the others (Vodafone, O2 and EE) are all behind CGNAT. EE however do provide IPv6 if they detect compatible hardware, I haven't had a chance to see if this is inbound usable, as my other connections are not IPv6 enabled.

I do have an eBay special 100GB EE SIM to experiment with - we have line of sight to their tower as well, and it's closer than the Three tower, once I've tested that I'll post the results.

That will be interesting, given with 4G, EE has a lot more spectrum, but it depends what they have deployed on your local cell site.

Your decision is the one I would have gone with, and I have a Three & EE mast visible from my kitchen window, the Three speeds are 38-45 Mbps, and EE ranges from 80 to 190 Mbps. I prefer the stability of my VM coax connection

My experience of EE 4G for my broadband has been largely ok except for the following issues. Speed is good during the night and early morning but can be massively reduced in the day. the CGNAT stops me from hosting anything that i want to be able to get to from the outside unless they have a cloud service like plex or my smart doorbell etc. It also affects things like the xbox app so i need to use a vpn on the ipad to make that work. I had to go for Netgear Nighthawk cat 16 LTE router as it gave me the best possible speeds (100mb down, 20-40mb up at best) compared to my [censored] poor adsl at 15mb down/2mb up. Having looked into ways of getting around CGNAT they are all messy and complex and not worth it for me. Even IPv6 support does not give you (as far as i am led to believe) any advantage from a hosting point of view. Gaming is ok, latency can be an issues at busy times for games that really struggle like rocket league. Gaming lag is where i would say having a cabled connection would be the winner every time. If i could have FTTP 100mb+ service i would pay twice what i pay now for unlimited 4G but it is not an option in my area yet. My advice would be have the 4G as a backup rather thn your primary but it depends what is important to you.