Very impressed with 'Three' 3G mobile broadband - anyone else use it at home?

[autopilot]

I've have been suffering with an unstable ADSL connection for years; max i get is 0.5mbps and i pay £40 a month for it via a special ISP that specialises in rural/long line connection (BT could not even get it working). Even then i get frequent outages.

I never even considered 3G as i thought it would not work in such a rural country location and i thought only O2 worked here (not great and no 3G). I also assumed speeds were poor and pings (latency) made it not much fun as a full-time connection. But i took a punt and got a Three 3G USB dongle on monday. To my utter amazement, it not only works, it works far better than i could have hoped...



I'm using the dongle with a Zoom wireless 3G router so i can connect all my devices and have it in a window upstairs for best signal.

So i am thinking of ditching my crappy ADSL. Only thing i'm worried about is data caps and running up a huge bill. Three's 15GB's for £15 seem like an ok deal, but not sure if thats enough. I dont think they do better bundles and as far as i can tell if i do use more then i would have to by a second dongle/contract.

So does anyone else use 3G as their main home broadband and who do people find it? Anything to watch out for? Any tips?

[scaryjim]

I used to use 3G for my primary broadband as I hate giving money to the copper cable monopoly that is BT. However, how good it is is very dependant on where you live. When I lived in Salford, the local base stations were obviously very heavily contented and I got very poor speeds - so bad that I ended up going back to ADSL. When I moved to Longsight, there's far less contention and I got the kind of speeds you're looking at. But since I'd already signed up to Plusnet for a year I transferred the broadband, and I'm glad I did because I tend to use between 10GB and 15GB in a normal month's browsing.

As long as you don't watch much streaming video or use steam you should be OK with a 15GB limit, but be warned that several hours of iplayer can consume GBs of bandwidth: my step-daughter got through about 7GB in two days last month! I'm not sure how reliable a 3G link would be for gaming either if that's your bag, and obviously steam can easily chew through 15GB with a single game download.

Have you checked whether any more ISPs have moved into your area since you signed up? If it was a while ago you might find that you've got a better choice now, and there's the possibility to switch provider. Although since you're getting such good performance form your 3G dongle, it may be better just to watch your bandwidth usage carefully and stick with that

[Unique]

i dont' use it at home apart from if my main broadband isn't working, but i'd recommend you ask three to put a limit on your account so you don't go over your bandwidth and run up a massive bill. the limit only works in the uk, it doesn't work if you go abroad. of course then you're internet will be cut off when you reach the limit, but better than a large shock bill

have a look on the three website and give them a call as they might have an option for you, such as a business account

i did find the three speeds very good on the dongle, and i recently got the mifi, which is also great, but i haven't had much chance to use it as i've not been out and about since getting it

[autopilot]

No gaming, well very very little on the odd occasional Wii game. We dont watch much video either, just the odd youtube clips.

Other than a few hours per night browsing. Mostly BBC iPlayer radio and Spotify.

[McWilloughby]

Blimey. Would not have expected that from a 3G dongle. Any way you could call them up and arrange a less limited contract if you needed one?

[autopilot]

Blimey. Would not have expected that from a 3G dongle. Any way you could call them up and arrange a less limited contract if you needed one?

Me neither, it's been testing at the same speeds consistently over the last few days. Will occasionally drop to 3.5 at peak times. Solid connection too, listened to iPlayer on my Squeezebox all day without a hickup and my ADSL would have dropped out atleast a couple of times. And that's just with the dongle, would be even better with a panel antenna on the wall. If it still performing like this after a week the ADSL is going. I know it depends on location, but i never realised 'mobile' broadband was this good these days.

The 15GB for £15 per month seems to be the best they do, which should be enough (averaging 500MB per day). I could get a second dongle to double up to 30GB (with a credit limit on each account to avoid any extra charges) and still save money on my ADSL.

One other benefit in having 2 dongles is that there are some routers that take two dongles auto switch between the two but allow you to 'bond' the two dongles, giving 8-10mbps

(I have been told by my ISP there will be routers out soon that will bond 4 dongles for ~20mbps, but that would be overkill for me).

[Terbinator]

You have double the upload speed of my VM 20Mb connection

[nibbler]

Three are very good about putting a limit on the account so you don't spend money by accident.
Less good about constantly calling you trying to sell you more contracts...

[autopilot]

Oh nice, just found out the £15 24 month contract gives £80 cashback via Quidco. That's the first 5 months and a couple of ales on Three then

[autopilot]

I'm loving this after 4 years of 0.5mbps ADSL

[razer121]

Your getting better than my connection and im on o2 be!

[Terbinator]

The ping is awful, though not surprising - i guess it only effects games and video streaming anyway.

[autopilot]

It's still pretty good, anything sub 100 is Ok for gaming, but I would not have the edge in many FPS. Actually I don't game online anymore, but I had similar pings when I played a lot of TF2 and still did very well.

Not sure what you mean about video. Been watching a good bit of iplayer HD and youtube (720p) today and it was flawless.

[autopilot]

Just when I thought I could not get any better, I realised my wifi router and range extending AP were on the same channel. Now with one on 1 and the other on 11, I'm consistantly testing at 5.5mbps down, 1.5 up with a ping of ~75

[caliston]

A couple of tips:

Assuming this is PAYG, don't topup more than necessary. Then, when your credit runs out, it just stops working. If you have any credit that isn't converted to mobile broadband addon and you exceed your allowance, it'll get used at £1/MB. Ouch! Doesn't take long to disppear.

Also, if you get a phone SIM (eg 99p from ebay) rather than your mobile broadband SIM, you also get 2G fallback on Orange. You get exactly the same tariffs (and you get some others, like free 150MB data with every topup), but it'll work (slowly) in areas where Three don't have signal.

[BigNiko]

I've been using "Three" as my only ISP for nearly 3 years. It has come on a lot since the early days to the extent that it is now actually usable. A recent E1550 dongle acquisition is an improvement too.

What do I have to do to get a 3 phone sim to work data connections? An albeit slow connection via Orange would be very handy when I'm on walkabout. A step by step Idiots Guide would be perfect, not that I am a complete Idiot, some parts are missing.

A hint in return. I find that the 3Connect app will crash if I try to close it with an instance of Firefox or Thunderbird still running.

Nik