Recommend a Sim Router

You could do what I used to, bag a Mi Mix 3 5g and hotspot off it. I did that for a good while.

CEX have some from £110

The upside is you have a good phone with a pretty good camera and can take your hotspot/internet with you if you go travelling.

I just hotspot of my S21 Ultra now, the Mi Mix 35g is in the legion processing card payments via SumUp.

Ed P wrote:

BT is trying to get rid of its wired network within the next year or so to meet a 2025 objective (i.e. broadband/mobile only).

Just looked into this for the first time – it was news to me. A lot of that info relates to Business, very little data about private customers. My problem is that the myths have been true for me. I have a solid 75Meg connection and yet, whenever I have Skype’d it stutters and twitches and freezes.

With the PSTN hard line service, the worst that has happened is that I’ve come across an HR connection that has popped and crackled – solution – hang up and dial again!!  Problem solved ( unless it’s a copper wiring problem between my home and the cabinet/exchange ). Try that on Skype and it’s rinse and repeat time.

I’ve looked on Sky to see what they will offer to replace the landline, but cannot see anything at the moment. I’ll look on the Sky Community to see if there is any info on there.

Ed, my broadband is FTTC ( cabinet ) – from there it’s overhead wiring. I still get a solid u/d load speed.

https://www.speedtest.net/my-result/d/2e5d9301-5dc7-4927-8585-131ff5e4c702

Ultrafast BB isn’t available in my area yet and I wonder/doubt whether they’ll be able to double that and still keep the o/h wiring. They certainly won’t be digging up our front drive to run fibre into the house – that’s one reason we aren’t on Virgin!!

Mobile-wise, my signal is usually 2-3 bars, but quality is sporadic, cave-echoes and 2 or 3 second delays so you hear your own words repeated back at you!!

I’ve just remembered my iPhone XS does wifi calling, so I’ve set that up and will see if that improves things.

There’s very little information on the PSTN closure for the private customer, it all seems to be about business – it’s where they’ll make money of course, but all the bad publicity will come from the ( older ) individuals with just a landline, poor mobile signal and lack of a digital interface for whatever equipment they have, medical alert, alarm, etc. They will then be in deep sh1t if they need an emergency service and have no mobile signal.

I’ve not long renewed my BB contract ( negotiating a better deal ) and I don’t recall them mentioning this, also, I just checked the hub router they sent me – it’s the ‘old’ variant that only has two lan ports and no voip socket. The latest one has 4 lan ports and a socket for a VOIP phone. It seems little preparation has been done by the ISP’s. We’ll just have to wait and see.

As with Cameron’s broadband to rural communities and Johnson’s gigabit for all ( and 5g to some extent ) it’s not the 85 -90% coverage that will haunt them, it’s that last 10-15%!!

I used VOIP as a catchall. My guess is that for private customers with wired broadband all that all it will need is a minor change to the WiFi router to add a phone hub, and then to swap line-line phones to ones that can connect to this new phone hub.

Ed P wrote:

I used VOIP as a catchall. My guess is that for private customers with wired broadband all that all it will need is a minor change to the WiFi router to add a phone hub, and then to swap line-line phones to ones that can connect to this new phone hub.

THIS is the latest Sky Broadband Hub, as opposed to the Sky Q hub that I have, I’ll see if I can upgrade if I tell them I want to try VOIP, although I’ll need to buy a VOIP phone.

I wonder how VOIP billing will work regarding line rental and call charges?? Currently line rental is included free with my £28 landline provided Superfast Broadband bill and my call charges are catered for in my £10 Sky Talk package.  I’ll still need my landline after 2025, or at least the section from the cabinet, even if they upgrade my speed and go fully VOIP. Confusing and interesting times ahead when they start putting the packages together.

Lots of buildings in prime locations will become available after the old equipment has been de-commissioned and stripped out –  in London and all round the country.

I have two, both TP-Link, and have used the one that comes with Three.

If you are going to use a Three sim get the bundle, it’s a nice piece of kit. Or if you want to stay independent, the HUAWEI B311 2020 (same as the previous Three hub and very good too) £63 Amazon or the TP-Link TL-MR6400 £75 Amazon or TP-Link AC1200 4G £99 Amazon

I have the MR6400, the antenna are for 4G, not the WiFi, but the WiFi still has a very good range. The key to this is location, location, location. My 4G signal varies greatly throughout the house, and due to roof clutter the best signal isn’t where you’d expect it. But of course the beauty is you can move it about.

The way mobile broadband deals with IP addressing (rapid changes of shared addresses can play havoc with PC based online banking, although phone apps don’t mind. Solved with a VPN, the free one with Kaspersky does fine.

The downside is the same as always with mobile, variation in speeds and latency. At times my Smart TV would just give up if other people were using the internet heavily too. As usual it’s the evenings that are the worst.

So before committing I recommend you do some proper testing using your phone and speed test in different locations and different times of day. Also you’ll need the sim flavour you intend to use, no good testing on GiffGaff and going to Three.

Put it this way, I have not ditched my fibre and am seriously considering going to a 300mbps Voom cable line. I will be waiting for 5G before looking again, but keep the Three Sim going for emergencies for myself and my customers. It kept a mate going for the 3 months he had to wait for BT  and it worked just fine for them and their BT TV.

Ed P wrote:

JCD, they may offer you a wired broadband connection to replace your telephone wire as they are really moving towards a VOIP replacement for copper. I can see this being a helluva challenge for rural locations however. Even in Southern England we often drive for miles without any usable phone signal. Wales must have that problem in most areas as we had to drive for tens of miles to get a phone signal south-west of Hay on Wye.

I have moved to a small place called Pistyll on the Llyn peninsula I’m on three and only get a 3g connection it is actually faster than the broadband speed available from BT last week there where sub contractors for open reach fitting new  really wide cables to the old telegraph poles so I stopped and asked them what they were doing apparently we are getting fibre to the house and we are in the sticks so to speak

I back up Dave’s advice.

We were with Three when we first moved to the hosue and the Three router and SIM card deal did the job, until around lockdown hit and then we ended up going for a landline connection, as it worked better. Not sure if everyone staying at home  caused slowdowns but we never used it after that.

I also purchased one the TP-Link ones he linked to for my cadet unit when I was in Manchester and teamed that up with an unlimited SIM card from Smarty and that worked perfectly fine for what we needed to do on squadron in the evening (paperwork etc on the MOD/cadet information systems). Can’t say we streamed video, but it coped with Spotify streams for the office and downloads for the Flight Sim.