I’m not too au fait with how t’internet works. It doesn’t interest me. So help me out here.

Mrs Thurman and I are struggling to find a house to buy. Think we’ve viewed 45+ properties to date.

The last one we saw was oh-so-close to being ‘the one’ but frustratingly Mrs Thurman ruled it out mainly because it didn’t have good broadband (sub 11mb), and the street it was on wouldn’t be getting decent broadband installed for at least four years. Seems to be a bit of an anomaly in the area as it isn’t particularly rural (outskirts of a Gloucestershire town).

I’m sure there are alternatives available like 4 or 5G broadbands or those satellite thingies.

Are they prohibitively expensive to run? Are they reliable? Any experience?

If you have 5G coverage then you can get some really good speeds.

Not expensive, Smarty do data sim only, unlimited, for £20 a month.

Think we’ve viewed 45+ properties to date.

…I’d try an alternative wife! 🙂

Seriously – we have decent broadband but a lot of villages around me don’t. A local company called w3z use their own network to supply broadband. There may be something similar around you?

Not too pricey…

Superfast reliable broadband for home

Looks like these people offer similar in your area…
https://www.airband.co.uk/technology/fixed-wireless-broadband/

I’m sure there are alternatives available like 4 or 5G broadbands or those satellite thingies.

If there’s no decent internet via traditional methods then you’ve got 5g as an option (but unless you’re in a decent sized town you’re unlikely to have coverage) or starlink as a last resort.

If I ever bought somewhere in a nice countryside area I think I’d just budget starlink into the bills. It’s £75 a month Vs £20-30 for all other broadband but if it meant the difference between a perfect house with 5mbps or starlink at 100-200mbps it’d be a no brainer.

We use 4G broadband at home can stream / wfh video call at same time no problem, it’s better than our landline used to be even though I can see the exchange from our window. A lot of remote AirBnBs I’ve stayed at recently also have had 4G broadband. Most places have coverage with one network or another these days.

Also… Call an ISP such as plusnet or AN other..
I was in a similar situation and online searches were saying the boardband was basically limited to ADSL.. In other words, not good.

Something didn’t add up as a friend of mine who literally lives about 2 streets away has the option of fibre or Fibre to the cabinet.

I called plusnet and they said yes you can have 39mbps or 70 something mbps.

And it’s fine.

Call an ISP provider.. They’ll do a line check on the house number /post code and then you’ll know.

Think we’ve viewed 45+ properties to date.

TBF, the sale of our place fell-through several times over the course of 2.5 years and we only looked at properties when we had offers on our place.

Call an ISP provider.. They’ll do a line check on the house number /post code and then you’ll know.

Thanks, chap. Will do.

We only get 11mbps, but it’s enough for two of us to WFH with regular video calls and 15 other devices connected. It was rubbish until we got a decent WiFi network.

What domtastic said. We get about 11 at best, and we both work from home and it’s fine for streaming iPlayer etc.

If you want to do online gaming and stuff then I’m sure it’s not good enough, but for general use it’s fine.

I have 12mb at the office – albeit a symmetrical connection (as fast up as down).
We regularly have 5-6 people working on it.
Very occasionally we see a slow down when all 8 of us are in and someone starts a Teams meeting on the big telly in th e meeting room….

Gotta love the broadband threads, how fast is a very personal thing – yeah I could survive on under 10mbps broadband but I’d rather not. Fast broadband is a basic requirement for me, like running water, or a roof.

I’ve maybe been spoilt by having very fast broadband currently but there’s no way I’d be going back to 11mbps. It’s 2022! A 4k HDR Netflix stream is 15mbps so that wouldn’t work, to start.

If that slow works for you and your needs, that’s great – but for a lot of people that’s just far too slow to be of any use.

We get 12mpbs at home and it is fine for wfh, but it can’t do gaming very well or 4K YouTube/Netflix at all.

Downloads and uploads are painfully slow too

the only thing I would say about 4g routers is that ours really slowed at the weekend as obviously more people were using their mobile phones in their homes

Had to use an external aerial and 4G router for a year at our last place in the Highlands – even outside, you could barely get 1 bar of phone reception. Even then, we’d get 35Mbps sometimes which was fine for streaming etc. Lots of mobile telcos offer unlimited data SIMs – just select the one that uses the nearest mast/strongest signal. There’s a website where you can search for mobile coverage by postcode.