Question Switching home broadband to a 5g network carrier

[Dalehitchy]

I'm absolutely sick to death of virgin media for many reasons, but I cannot get fibre speeds from any other home provider. All other speeds are about 30mb.

I randomly looked on Three mobile sim deal that provides unlimited data, and I've searched recent reviews that states it is truly unlimited and they don't cap your speeds. They also allow you to use your phone as a hot-spot. They will offer 5G speeds free of charge once its upgraded.

I don't really game online anymore, but I do do a lot of streaming.

My question is, what's the feasibility of just using your phone data and hotspotting for your daily usage? Has anyone made the switch? The mobile data providers also offer a router with sim card slot..... So that's the other option, but it'd be great to have just one monthly bill. How well do 5g phones act as routers?

 

[bill001g]

5g is almost non existent. From what I have heard it runs on high frequencies which means it will have more trouble getting through walls etc. I am going to bet you are going to need rooftop antenna/radios.

We will see I guess as this gets rolled out by many providers.

I am surprised you found unlimited plans be very careful that they are unlimited when you run tethered. I have looked for quite some time and have found zero in the USA.

In general if have very strong signals AND you are not on high congested towers like near highways it works very well. LTE speeds can easily exceed 50mbps and have very good latency.

This unfortunately is one of those you need to test yourself. You should be able to get coverage information for each provider and many times you can figure what towers they are using near you. Best would be to try to get 1 months service from each and test.

It is very very strange at times. Some vendors I get no signal at all in some rooms but just walking say upstairs I get maximum signal levels.

 

[Dalehitchy]

5g is almost non existent. From what I have heard it runs on high frequencies which means it will have more trouble getting through walls etc. I am going to bet you are going to need rooftop antenna/radios.

We will see I guess as this gets rolled out by many providers.

I am surprised you found unlimited plans be very careful that they are unlimited when you run tethered. I have looked for quite some time and have found zero in the USA.

In general if have very strong signals AND you are not on high congested towers like near highways it works very well. LTE speeds can easily exceed 50mbps and have very good latency.

This unfortunately is one of those you need to test yourself. You should be able to get coverage information for each provider and many times you can figure what towers they are using near you. Best would be to try to get 1 months service from each and test.

It is very very strange at times. Some vendors I get no signal at all in some rooms but just walking say upstairs I get maximum signal levels.

Three are well known in the UK with their unlimited data plans. From what I've read just now, they stopped capping / throttling speeds in 2018 and so are genuinely unlimited and do offer unlimited hotspotting.

https://kenstechtips.com/index.php/three-all-you-can-eat-data-reviewed

Whether this will carry over to their 5G service I don't know but if it does, I'd certainly be interested.

I'd be more interested in ditching home broadband completely and just using my phone as a hot-spot when needed for things like Netflix. If that isn't feasible, three do offer 4g (and soon to be 5g) broadband with a sim slot in a router that is at half the monthly price of my current home fiber broadband provider. I don't online game anymore so a low ping doesn't bother me.

 

[bill001g]

I am very surprised they stopped the cap. The main reason for the caps was not the people streaming video it is the idiot teens running bit torrent 24x7. With the ability to use pre paid phones to hide you identify it is the perfect platform to steal movies and games.

Again there is no way to say for sure you will have to test this all yourself. As long as you get LTE when they call it 4g it will be more than enough to run things like netflix. What some vendors are going to do is run the newer 5g protocol on their 4g radio bands in addition to the 4g. These bands are way to narrow to get the high data rates they promise. So it will be very much the lies we already have where they call many things 4g when only LTE runs fast.