So we’ve been on fibre at home for 12 months but our speed is a measly 11Mb down as we’re quite a way from the cabinet.
Seeing as 4g could give us 3 x the download speed I wonder how long it will be until you can get a > 80gb data only 4g contract?

Theoretical question really as I know it’s going to be a long time but it would be a good solution for many people. For all those with caravans/chalets it would be great and those with holiday homes wouldn’t have to pay for broadband while they’re not there.

It could replace it now. It’s good enough to stream any media. A lot of the offices of the company I work for have already ditched hard lines for 4G and they work fine – can download large docs in comparable times, run all our on-line based company tools and systems, run and participate in webex’s. No apparent detriment over hard lines, cheaper and in some cases where the hard line performance wasn’t good, they’ve seen a significant improvement.

Reliability and price are the main issues. I often switch to 4G at home as it’s faster than my overloaded wifi.

26 quid for only 8gb on Vodafone, price will have to come down a lot.

My phone seems to constantly be trying to trick me into munching through all it’s 2gb data allowance by pretending to be on wifi but sneakily switching to 4g.

It’d be nice if they stopped bullshitting everyone and sorted 3G out first. It’s a joke that you can’t even get 3G in a lot of major towns and (especially frustrating when using your phone (not while driving) as sat nav) major transport routes.

The price will have to come down a lot and availability across the whole country will have to increase significantly too, so my guess will be somewhere between 5 years & never.

I seem to get 4G most places now, certainly almost all major towns, and it’s great.

I have a 20gb a month allowance and pay £35 on EE.

I have used it as broadband too and always works fine, never any issues with speed etc…

I don’t even get 3G where I am and the local router gives me 4MBps, so it’s all relative!

Tends to be fast in mid-sized towns, but non-existent out in the burbs and countryside where I am.

It’d be nice if they stopped bullshitting everyone and sorted 3G out first. It’s a joke that you can’t even get 3G in a lot of major towns and (especially frustrating when using your phone (not while driving) as sat nav) major transport routes.

It’s not like they have to progress through 3G to get 4G, or that it’s (much) more expensive to deploy. 4G should allow more people to connect at the same time, with lower latency, at high physical speeds (3G doesn’t work very well if you’re traveling fast) and at high download rates. There is no reason to roll out any more 3G – it’s better just to go to 4G.

As for when it replaces broadband, probably not for a long time. 4G (and 3g for that matter) capacity (how many people can connect at the same time at a resonable download rate) is limited mainly by the backhaul (how the data gets from the mast to ‘the internet’) at the mast. Typically this isn’t going to be much over 100MB/s at most so that needs to be shared between all the people on that mast – updating lots of masts to be 1GBs would be a complete PITA and in many cases impossible (lots of masts use line of sight microwave links rather than fibre).

(The above applies to a wholesale move to 4G instead of BB – it may be that individual companies do unlimited deals that could be used like this – but they’ll be assuming that only a small subset of customers will pay for it, meaning that they don’t run out of capacity)

4G (and 3g for that matter) capacity (how many people can connect at the same time at a resonable download rate) is limited mainly by the backhaul (how the data gets from the mast to ‘the internet’) at the mast

it is limited by the capacity of the air interface

only got GPRS from my house and I live in a small city. In town I’m lucky to get HSDPA.

What Ewan says.. would seem to be why 4G is still capped by download limit – enough to stop you really going to down on downloads and streaming.

My Three Mobile 4G is great, really fast and from time to time better than house BT Broadband. However, the capacity isn’t there to replace wired broadband, certainly not at the moment

The rural ‘holiday house’ type issue is a toss up between 2mbps ‘broadband’ and non existant phone signal in a lot of places, so at the moment there still is no solution.
Where I live, in the middle of the Mendips (not a holiday home) I have to have an EE 3G booster box that runs through my astonishingly slow broadband, so really it’s a case of utter crap either way. To give you an idea of my (#firstworldissues), just after I moved from the centre of bath with BT infinity and 4G, I though I’d get Frozen on apple TV for microbits, I sat her down, hit the buy button and away we went. Only to be told that the movie would be ready in 8hrs, 47mins….. Do you know what that does to a 4 year old!?!
I’d be very happy with decent broadband and an actual phone signal. 4G will replaced with 8G before it gets to me!

It’s just not as trustworthy as a wired connection. And offices who have ditched wired for 4g may well find themselves going back to wire when the network gets more crowded with more data hungry users, which is the way of the world.

4G is only marginally more efficient than 3G, and only super fast as very few users are on it. As more and more people migrate, it will get congested and the throughput will fall just as they did when 3G became popular.

A long way off for some of us poor buggers. 4G? 1G would be nice. I have to go 6 miles for any mobile signal. When you live and work (outdoors) at home this is a bit 3rd world for the UK in 2015. But never mind, at least we can bet 1.1 Mbs BB on the phone line 🙁

At least we get our rates reduced because of it. Oh sorry, of course we don’t, we pay the same as everyone else ……

If I have a very good signal on the phone and use it to tether to the laptop the performance is about as good as my home (none fiber) internet, which itself is ok.

No idea if it’s 3g, 4g or whatever but if my phone said H+ in more areas it could defo be used instead of a hard wired system.

It’d be nice if they stopped bullshitting everyone and sorted 3G out first. It’s a joke that you can’t even get 3G in a lot of major towns and (especially frustrating when using your phone (not while driving) as sat nav) major transport routes.

Won’t happen. All the investment is in 4G infrastructure now, as it has better coverage for the investment (put simply). I used to work for a company putting said infrastructure in, Google the Mobile Infrastructure Project.

4G is also much better in upload speeds (though thats not such an issue in mobile use generally). Not sure how much impact contention will have, but with more to go around it’s going to less impactful than on 3G.

Home 4G routers with bigger / better aerial arrays might catch on if the limts are removed. I’d consider it myself, as fibre isn’t coming to me anytime soon.

If only we had a nationalised telecoms industry, then this stuff could be planned out based on need rather than profit.

I drove and rode through France earlier this year – Calais to Monaco – the whole way there and even in fairly remote parts I got an excellent data signal and had no issues browsing Google Maps etc at anytime. Given how much larger France is and sparsely populated in places I was very surprised. Not to mention grateful when the Gpx files turned out to be shit..

In my experience of chasing car rallies through various remote parts of Kenya, they have much better phone & data signal than we get in the UK.

I seem to get 4G most places now, certainly almost all major towns, and it’s great.

I live in a pretty large town that sits on most of the major N,S, E & W trunk routes through north Wilts, and 4G is very patchy, 3G can be pretty hit-or-miss as far as speed is concerned. I had a message from O2 a couple of weeks or so ago telling me my connection might be compromised while essential upgrade work was carried out. Having got all excited, I still only have 3G, while there’s 4G all around, although not in the centre of town. Still, at least there I can use Natwest’s free wifi when I sit in the coffee shop on the opposite side of the road.

In my experience of chasing car rallies through various remote parts of Kenya, they have much better phone & data signal than we get in the UK

This is very common in a lot of newly developing countries because they never really had much in the way of old wired telephony so are in a position where it’s simpler to go straight to mobile.

Blimey. Just tested 4g v wifi. 83mbs for 4g & only 6mbs for wifi when we get 95mbs on the Cable.
Might be better downstairs nearer to the router.

50mg down AND up with 4G here, nothing can touch that upload speed near us, even our super fancy leased fibre line in work can’t do that. At home the best we can get via ISDN is 4.5 down and 0.5 up – no cable or fibre here.

It’s the cost though, what’s the point of downloading a film in minutes if it costs you more than a DVD to do it?

We’ve got a 4G EE dongle in work, we lend it to clients when their internet goes down for any reason, even on the most cost effective plan, a small office of say 4-6 people sending emails and surfing or whatever else will burn through £10-£20 a day on it.

Disclaimer I work for a mobile phone company so have unlimited 4G, but here’s my own experience with it to date and and hopefully a non biased view on the UK 4G market.

I’m mobile/homeworker and the nearest cell site to my home was upgraded to 4G about six months ago, since then I’ve used my mobile phone for tethering quite a lot and its more than good enough to support audio conf/video conf on MS Lync. Also for some customer presentations from remote webex speakers/presenters where it’s been excellent.

Whilst you have those big headline upload and download speeds the largest improvement is the fact that 4G is a data network from the outset rather than data tacked on top of a voice network, which means a huge reduction in latency so you will see a general reduced response time, things just feel more nippy.

What still has to be done is sorting out voice at the moment if you make or receive a call the phone will drop back to 3G to make the call thereby screwing up your wonderful 4G connection. It won’t be that long until there is some sort of rough consensus and VoLTE or similar comes out which sort that issue out and most likely improve battery life a bit too.

As for the question to replace broadband my own personal view is if you look at anything new to market it goes thru a number of phases, early adopter, mid adopter and so on, each with their own price points, so I’d expect that during the mature phase of 4G that there will start to be packages appearing with some hefty download limits built in.

11mb. My heart bleeds.

I switch between our (crap) ADSL and a 4G modem when there’s stuff I really need to get done. I’ve also used it with an access point to support the stage and workshop rooms at events I’ve run. Price per GB is the only thing keeping me from using it all the time.

11mb. My heart bleeds.

Cheers wysi …. I knew you’d understand my pain 😉

The trouble is, the only reason its nice and fast at the moment when you use it is that its so expensive that most people don’t use much BW on average. If it became cheap enough to make it a more feasible solution for downloading lots of data then you might find the speed isn’t so good any more.

Mate of mine runs a small software house in Leeds. They moved their office 100 yards down the street. No broadband and as it was a listed building lots of problems getting fibre installed. They lived off PAYG 4G for 3 months – it worked for 8 people using Skype and deploying code to AWS but he was soo happy when he finally got the fibre installed.

Wouldn’t work for me – no mobile signal without a SureSignal.

The difference between 11/25/50mb for normal use is hard to spot. It doesn’t get much faster but what you can do is more things at once.

as for mobile it’s all possible just price is the difference, 4g is a good alternative for places like rural Australia as running fibre all the way out there is far too expensive.

EE mobile wireless router.

£20 a month with 15gb and works for my office with 4 people.

Going down this rout has saved me around £50 a month.

Parts of Germany use 4G exclusively.
My Dad lives out in the countryside, about 10 miles from Frankfurt, and the 4G dongle powers everything. It’s fantastic. The download/upload speed is much better than what I can get where I currently live.

On a good day with a stiff SW breeze I hit 1.2mb. I can’t wait till 4G becomes viable.