Son just moved into private shared house in Manchester. Internet is rubbish, 12M down and next to nothing up. Complained via agent. If this is fruitless does an unlimited 4g data sim exist even if expensive for a year?

The three sim has a 30g cap when tethered, not sure if it was inserted into a 4g dongle whether it would know if it was a phone or dongle.

Cor when I was a student 12M down would have literally been an order of magnitude more than I’d ever have dreamed of getting. Obviously I’m getting old…

That’s actually a reasonable rate for ADSL (which maxes out around 20M down/1M up), presumably you’ve been spoilt by fibre? I can see the cabinet from my bedroom and get 18M down/900K up over ADSL.

Assuming it’s on ADSL the agent can’t do much: if the ADSL into the properly gives 12 down/0.5 up then that’s what ADSL gives. There’s the option of FTTC but that depends on the local cabinet and expect to see the installation cost and increased monthly charge passed on.

Anyway, back the point. Most operators have dedicated dongle plans, eg Three has http://store.three.co.uk/view/searchTariff?priceplan=&deviceType=SIM_ONLY_MBB&greatForServices=&intid=3store_mbb_paym_sim.

Internet is rubbish, 12M down

Half the rural population of the UK would think this an amazing speed.

Clearly your son needs to stop viewing so many videos.

yeah, they probably need to sort out a pron rota or something to make sure they get enough bandwidth but probably one to file under #FWP and get on with it for a year

Yeah, were on cable, but my Mum in a farm house with FTTC gets 37down and I think about 5up.

He can get FTTC so its just a question of if the agent or landlord wont upgrade then he needs options.

Given all lectures are made available online as is cousework, decent internet is essential.

I saw an advert for a Three 100gb monthly sim for £25 this morning – not sure if you could bung it in a mifi dongle, but suspect you could.

Given all lectures are made available online as is cousework, decent internet is essential.

Is there stuff that isn’t working? Used to happily stream etc. with less than that, any decent online content will cope with speeds like that either by going in lower quality or buffering. Plenty of people do online courses with much lower speeds.

Given all lectures are made available online as is cousework, decent internet is essential

I’m pretty sure 12Mb would be plenty for the online course material.

How much do you want to pay for his music, gaming and porn habit?

Given all lectures are made available online as is cousework, decent internet is essential.

12 Mb is decent.

More than enough to stream lectures and download course notes.

I’ve regularly used less than 12 Mb connections for streaming TV/Netflix/Amazon Prime etc (which I suspect is what he’s more concerned about) And it works perfectly.

Andyg – are you referring to speed of connection or capped amount of gb download?

I work in IT and also work from home a fair bit and manage perfectly okay with 10Mb

12Mb is more than reasonable IMO. Granted not a patch on fibre so your son will just have to wait a little bit longer for the “movies” to download… 😉

12mb is decent, but in a student house, with two of his mates on Youtube, the other one torrenting Game of Thrones, the buffering will be a PITA. So he either has to organise his housemates so that there is some bandwidth available occasionally, or get his own supply.

Still a bit of a First World Problem. I used to worry about the rats that lived in the sofa of my first student house, but I guess modern students have moved on a bit from that. There will be plenty of wifi available around the campus as well for academic downloading.

If it’s a shared house there could be six or eight people all trying to watch coursework or Netflix. And if the upload speed is only 0.5 this could be maxed out as downloading and streaming stuff also uses some upload capacity.

12mbps would be plenty for one person but it’s a shared house.

http://www.three.co.uk/Store/Mobile_Broadband

Available from £24 a month for 40GB. Not unlimited but 40Gb is quite a lot.

6 in a shared house, hes first to arrive so its only going to get worse.

Whether 12M / nada up is workable is moot, the question was what was the best 4G option which may have just been answered!

A house which is expected to have lots of simultaneous use really needs to have a router configured as such – a bit of quality-of-service configured so that no single connection can steal the entire line.

I’ve noticed a definite improvement after telling my router to turn on smart queue and what the upload rate is so it can throttle connections. Even with a maximum rate upload (photos backup to Amazon storage, took all week) it now load-balances correctly and nobody else noticed.

We have a house with 3 teenage girls (obsessed with Netflix, etc) and two adults…. We use about 240gb/month.
I run a document imaging business that involves lots of uploading.

We get 10mbps down and not much up…. We never have a problem.

Maybe your son should actually go to the lectures?

Is he in the middle of a heavily student populated area? It will most likely be that every property is full of 4+ students all wanting to stream everything.

We paid for (and in theory received) 100mb Virgin in a 8 bed house in the centre of Hyde Park in Leeds (dense student population). We got less than 1 Mb it was unusable most of the time, continuous time outs despite a high sync speed a 100Mb sync speed on the router. Neighbour’s did better on the ADSL – Virgin Media was very popular with students, but didn’t have the infrastructure to deal with it.

What network has good coverage where he’s likely to use it? Then come 4pm when all the kids come home from school watch your throughput drop thru the floor.

How many people are sharing that connection, 2-4Mb is a good hefty video stream so 12Mb should be plenty for a number of people unless there’s some serious Torrenting going on.

What is the experience like physically connected to the router rather than using Wifi? Could be in a student area that the WiFi channel on the router is in use by a lot of other people nearby too.

Ps…just ran a report for the past 30days here and its at 536GB

Problem at the moment is upload speed which is virtually no existant. Its a very old Sky router (was white now murky brown), direct ethernet cable connection does not work at all despite the link coming up.

Suspect the box is knackered and on a very old agreement.

Hence the original Q, if he can’t get it solved whats the best 4G option.

P.S. hes on course for a 1st so I don’t think hes slacking in lecture attending, but he is an avid (and first class) gamer hence the need for good upload and low ping.

Buy a new router and give it a try? They’re not expensive.

Given all lectures are made available online as is cousework, decent internet is essential.

Or he could get out of bed and go to lectures.

12mb is decent, but in a student house, with two of his mates on Youtube, the other one torrenting Game of Thrones, the buffering will be a PITA. So he either has to organise his housemates so that there is some bandwidth available occasionally, or get his own supply.

At a time when 8 m/sec was all ADSL could deliver, our student house of four clubbed together to buy an old PC that acted as a server and any downloads were cued up on that via remote desktop / vnc. It also connected to the only TV in the house, so with a few USB HDDs hanging off the back of it became quite a good set-up in the early 2000s. I suppose the limitation now is that most legitimate stuff is streamed. Back then there wasn’t much in the way of legitimate options, so limewire/mule/utorrent were easy enough to manage through the one node.

The only other way round it is to get a router that has decent LAN/WLAN management options and get everyone to agree to divide bandwidth by users. 2 m/sec should still be fine for streaming in SD, but I guess the upstream will always be a bottleneck.

Order a second line direct to his room? If it’s a really popular student area, go with a more expensive provider as they are likely to have a better contention ratio.

Is the property served by VM? They offer 9 month student contacts. If so, get their fibre installed for his room.

Don’t tell the landlord and just rip it out and fill the holes when he leaves.

Your not going to get 4g unlimited any where!

We have just got Three Mifi home 4g wifi router thing.

Sold as 40gb for I think it was £28. Rung them up and now got 100gb for £35

That 100gb sim only deal only allows 30gb of tethering….

Max download for us is about 15mbps which is fine for watching iplayer etc.

Are you sure the router isn’t knackered at sons house ?

Guessing the landlord would have to make the phone call, but when I realised my nan was in a similar situation, I phoned them up with her on hand for security questions, and calmly explained that her contract was out of date by several years.
They sent out a new more up to date router and put her on a more up to date cheaper contract for free. (standard ADSL+ as that’s all she can get)
That reset the contract length back to 12 months though but wasn’t an issue in our situation.

That said if the lines only good for about 12mbps, that would be ok for one person but sharing that between 6 to 8 streaming mad students, it’s gonna be stretched a bit thin to put it lightly.

New router and persuade all the others to get mobile plans 😉