They will wait until it has taken a lot more business

Think my contract has auto renewed, or can I do the same ?

New Three router and SIM arrived, very easy to setup. The new Sercomm router dwarfs the old Huawei.

I expected possibly a small improvement, but my word, this is amazing!

Having read this I've checked options and as a Three customer I can get a very cheap deal on 5g. Would just need to work out what to do about the landline ...

My neighbour rang Woking shop.
Maybe only certain shops have them to offer

Is that speed just the router or do you have aerial and or antenna ?

It's not clear in the photo but the router came with two 'rabbit ear' aerials in the box.  So the speed is with the router as provided, in exactly the same position by the window as we had the Huawei.  The latter gave us 2-4 bars of signal depending on the weather and the Sercomm gives us an amber signal strength LED, so about the same.

On 4G, the Huawei gave us an average 60Mbps whereas the Sercomm on 4G+ is always reading over 100Mbps.

This is exactly what I'm trying to decide John - I would happily do without the cost of it. I think the only issue is whether our family abroad are comfortable / able to call us via wi-fi as they have many more broadband reliability issues than us - I can't remember the last time we had an outage.

I think my Sky contract still has a way to go but will be very interested to see how reliable the new Three broadband is for you.

Dear All,

Firstly, *in theory* I think the wired broadband providers allowing themselves to to be trumped by mobile providers is just plain wrong. But it is what it is. Too little too late and too expensive.

When I returned to the UK in the summer, there was no broadband at the house and it is a blackspot for my otherwise great mobile sim (smarty on three). I needed a solution for the next day. Moreover, since I now own a campervan, I was looking for something that could also bring internet to the van in the future. Hence I turned, to the van life community for inspiration. I settled on one of these which was a cheap way to test the waters.

www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07TZ3BCVV/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

It worked straight out of the box and can function either as a standalone primitive wifi router or it can plug in to the back of my existing Asus router. day to day I use it via my router. My previous home FTTC connection would never go faster than about 38Mbit since I am at the point from the cabinet where the bandwidth starts to drop rapidly. My primitive mobile solution always easily exceeds this which is nuts since I live in the middle of "silicon valley UK".

in theory I wanted a smarty (three) unlimited SIM since they offer really, really good monthly deals. However, inside my house I have about 0.1% coverage for three since they built new houses where the the mast used to be. In fact, it is more annoying than that... I only need to go a few metres in any direction and get 5g from three. So I needed a different underlying network. I currently use an unlimited monthly SIM from lebara which resides on the Vodaphone network. It costs me £25 per month. Currently what I get is a solid 4g class of signal. Neither the local masts or the mobile router support anything better at this time. But that is fine since this is an interim solution and easily wired broadand.

I have forgotten most of what I learnt in the summer, but the "CAT" supported by the kit effectively defines how many parallel channels to/from the mast are supported. Also from memory each connection to the mast needs more antenna. This youTube Channel (ExploreVanUK) has a whole playlist devoted to mobile internet HW including external antennas

youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHOEQx7dQbeUmrE2GUZ7ZbDSHqK28DxwS

This guy seems to favour solutions from Teltonika who seem to offer a range of "industrial" solutions. There are a range of products available which start off at a reasonable price and increase as the "CAT" and hence potential throughput increases. Teltonika's New RUT241 4G Router is one such example.

I found the videos in this playlist a great place to start and swiftly got me to the point where I was beginning to understand which questions to ask.

My old ASUS router allows either a mobile dongle or a mobile phone to be plugged in via a USB socket. Potentially, this offered a neat cheap solution. Using your existing phone, assuming you have an unlimited plan would effectively be free. Similarly an old spare phone could do the same. I avoided this since I wanted a solution which could have an external aerial outside of the van when it is redeployed.

Cheers

Sean