I am no longer living in London. Hurray! We moved away from there about a year ago to a house in rural south-west Scotland.
I’m working from home on a permanent basis now, which is what has made this move possible. Therefore, a reasonably fast and most of all stable internet connection is a must otherwise I can’t do my job. The previous occupant of the house had satellite broadband installed and they were kind enough to leave that running until I could get my own internet connection provisioned. God almighty, that was awful. The bandwidth was OK (generally around 50mbps) but the latency was insane, 700ms at a minimum and often far higher. This makes VOIP calls interesting, to put it mildly and using Remote Desktop and/or Citrix was an exercise in frustration. Can you imagine clicking or typing something, then having to wait for a second for whatever you did to appear on the desktop? I don’t need to; I know exactly what that is like! Contention was an issue as well; speeds fell off a cliff in the evening as people started to come home and log on. Plus, it was expensive, in the region of £70 a month. As well as the satellite broadband there was a DSL line installed which got 3mbps with a following wind and DSL-like latency but was unreliable and was prone to going off during a thunderstorm which, in rural Scotland, isn’t exactly ideal!
My original plan to get a half decent internet connection was to have Starlink installed, which is a satellite broadband service owned by SpaceX. Their satellites live in low earth orbit as opposed to geostationary orbit, so their satellites are closer to the earth and latency is considerably lower than it would be with a traditional satellite provider, in the region of 100ms instead of closer to an entire second. However, their waiting list is insane (six months at least!) plus they’re not exactly cheap either, £89 a month plus £500 for their dish. As far as I could see it seemed like my best option so before we moved up here, I paid the £89 deposit and put myself on the waiting list. That said, I couldn’t put up with what was already at the house, and I still needed something to cover me while I waited for Starlink to provide me with some equipment and get us connected.
Once we got up here, I found that at certain times if I was in the right place in the house, I could get a very weak 4G signal on my phone. I use Plusnet, which is an MVNO using the EE mobile network. I looked at the EE 4G coverage maps and saw that we were right on the edge of their coverage area. I looked at the other major network providers as well (Three, O2 and Vodafone) and saw similar for at least two more of them. I decided to see if I could use a cellular broadband connection while we were waiting for Starlink to be installed. I bought myself a little Huawei 4G dongle and crawled Dumfries to find PAYG SIM cards from EE, O2, Three and Vodafone. I plugged the Huawei dongle into a laptop, attached a 4G antenna from Poynting to it and went wandering about outside with the antenna attached to a 3m long stick. I did this with each of the SIM cards from the networks and I tried it in different places in the property with the antenna pointing in different directions. This antenna is about the size of an old 15″ laptop and pretty sensitive so I was confident that if anything was going to picked up, this would do it. To my surprise, it worked a lot better than I thought it would. Even with it attached to a walking stick, almost at ground level it still picked up a 4G signal from EE and got about 10mbps of bandwidth. I tried with the other networks, but EE was the only one where I picked up anything other than a GPRS or EDGE signal. I felt that the 10Mbps from EE was good enough, so I contacted a local TV aerial company to enquire about attaching the antenna to the house’s roof mounted TV aerial pole, which they did for about £100. I paired it with a TPLink Archer MR400 Router, again about £100, and all was good.
The last piece of the puzzle was a data plan. What I didn’t want to do was to sign up for an entire year’s contract because I would (hopefully at that point!) only use it for a few months at most. Unfortunately for me, all of EE’s 30-day contracts were capped to less than 50GB a month and I wasn’t about to sign up to a 12-month contract to get unlimited data if I was only going to use two or three months of it. Using an MVNO wasn’t an option because most of them don’t seem to be using the EE network anymore, outside of other BT owned subsidiaries like BT Mobile and Plusnet who’s plans weren’t any better. I called EE to ask about unlimited data plans and bizarrely, the answer turned out to be EE’s Pay As You Go (PAYG) offerings; you could buy a £10 Subscription Pack then an Unlimited Data add-on for £40 which lasted for a month. Why they can’t do a 30-day contract with unlimited data for £50 a month, I don’t know but what the hey.
Anyway, with all of that in place, the performance we got out of it was surprisingly good. I generally got between 30 to 40mbps out of the setup which was good enough for both my partner and I to work from during the day, with both of us doing Teams and Zoom calls and me doing RDP sessions. Latency was in the region of 50ms which is obviously slower than a wired connection but generally otherwise unnoticeable. It was also usually good enough for video streaming from the major streaming services during the evening with only the occasional bit of buffering. When we had relatives stay with us over Christmas, it coped with the demands of nine people using it, including a TikTok mad teenager. It wasn’t perfect, there was one instance of there being a problem with the local mobile phone mast. That knocked speeds down to 3G levels which wasn’t helpful but luckily, we still had the DSL line in the house to fall back to. Overall, it was considerably better than both the Satellite and DSL connections that the house had before.
That’s not the end of the story though. While on that phone call to EE, they told me something that I was truly not expecting: That Fibre to the Property was available. To my amazement, I found out that OpenReach had run fibre along all of the little country lanes in the area sometime towards the end of 2021 and that we could get a full fibre connection to this house with speeds of up to 900mbps. This completely blew my mind, and if I’m honest I say it continues to blow my mind as well. I can get faster broadband in a house on a single-track country lane, five miles from the nearest shop and ten miles from the closest town than I could in a house less than ten miles from the centre of London. This seems to be thanks to Scottish Government funding so that’s pretty cool, it’s good to see that the extra money being taken as income tax up here is going somewhere. We ended up ordering a 500mbps down/100mbps up connection for less money than the PAYG plan. Thanks to some failings on the part of OpenReach, it took about three months for them to pull their fingers out of their backsides and get the line installed so we were using the 4G connection for all of that time, plus an additional 10 days or so when there was an outage with the fibre. It’s not something I’d want as my primary internet connection, but it worked quite well for the most part!
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