Broadband Internet & ISP Recommendations?

Has anybody heard of a company called 4thUtility? I have been submitting my interest for Hyperoptic and Community Fibre but now those guys are upgrading the building here.
The offers don't look as good as the others but still better than Virgin and with symetrical
up/down.
Just worried they might be a total shitshow.

Very tempted to dump virgin myself for similar reasons - what do those of you who've done it do for TV? I reckon I'd miss the TiVo box...

They’ll prob have v similar service quality.

Backhaul bandwidth and hardware is so (relatively) cheap these days, and customer volume so comparatively low, that all these alt-net FttP providers will give you an effectively uncontended symmetrical gigabit+ line for peanuts.

Sounds good, I will switch once they finished the upgrade.

That's one of the reasons I stuck with Virgin. The Freeview boxes I've tried are just a bit shite (and a couple of hundred quid) and IPTV that I've tried isn't really there for just flicking through channels.

That wasn’t the answer i was hoping for! But yeah - that part does seem difficult, doesn’t it…

We've been hit with a price increase mid contract from Virgin. Anyone hit with the same and had much joy questioning it and getting them to drop/lower it?

Classic rip-off scam technique from Virgin, and perversely within the law.

Get rid asap.

Ensure you have marketing preferences set to allow. Call up to cancel and you will get a call back a few days later with a better price.

Loads of useful stuff in here re price increases.

https://www.uswitch.com/broadband/guides/mid-contract-price-rises/#what-are-mid-contract-price-rises

Plus how the wider market looks. (predominantly shit)

We're moving house in the next two weeks, and were in a contract for another 13 months with Plusnet. The service available from Plusnet in our new place is very, very poor.

They said they needed two weeks notice and £190 in early termination fees to get away. I was all pleased with myself because I got politely grumpy with them and they waived the termination fees, and cancelled our contract.

Anticipating the required two week notice period, I absent-mindedly started Googling alternative options at our new place (we don't have a move date yet, but it will be less than two weeks) ... then our internet connection disappeared 20 minutes later.

The story was for fun. But the question I had was: Does anyone have any cheap way to patch a 5G connection into a router that doesn't support USB modems? There seems to be plenty of options, all of which cost about £190.

So far I've thought of:

• Old Android phone, USB-OTG to Ethernet cable. Problem: Can't charge the phone and provide internet.
  
• 5G SIM-based router/modem. Problem: Expensive. Used for £150-190 or so. But maybe I could re-sell for the same in a few weeks.
  
• New router that does support USB modems, then use the old Android phone. Problem. Expensive, but maybe I need a new router anyway.
  
  

Any good ideas?

Would 4G be sufficient?

https://www.mymemory.co.uk/strong-4g-lte-wi-fi-router-300.html

If you have a powered (or with USB-C PD) USB hub you may be able to provide power and USB-OTG to ethernet. Never tried it though.

I used one of these when I had this issue.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/GL-iNet-GL-MT300N-V2-Converter-Pre-installed-Performance/dp/B073TSK26W

Android phone with USB tethering plugged into it and ethernet cable into my main router. The USB cable providing the tethering was also enough to keep it charged via the pocket router's power supply.

Yeah I thought of this too, I had a similar problem recently when trying to find a decent DAC for a phone. And I do actually have just that sort of hub (although no idea which box it's in).

But all my old Android fodder is Micro-USB. I wonder if an adapter will work. I think I also have one of those. Probably only for chargin though.

Good find. It may need to be. In fact, 4G options seem very cheap by comparison to 5G.

Windows user question. Can I USB-tether my android device to a Windows laptop then share the connection over ethernet?

Answer: This appears to be the solution.

So Three's formerly excellent 5G home broadband is now totally useless and Community Fibre haven't yet arrived in my neighbourhood. Any decent short-term deals out there worth following up or are they all at least a year contract?

In the same predicament, the cable is in the street but not the building and was thinking of Three 5G as a stopgap but if it’s rubbish then maybe EE 5G?

Where are you at? I'm central-ish London and I've been with Three when they were Relish. Moved to the Three and I've been quite happy to be honest. At peak time, I will sit at 150mbps, but for example, right now, I'm at 435/6.3 mbps down and up respectively. Ping is at 24.
I have a rolling monthly contract, which is about to go up to £24.

Our Community Fibre went down early Monday morning and still isn't back up.

The problem is a fibre box on our telegraph pole so it affected four other neighbours. Engineer came out today and could only reconnect two on the other side of the street, so there are three of us still waiting to be reconnected. The engineer had to pass it to another team and with the weekend it's looking like it will be Tuesday earliest and probably Wednesday. Hopefully. Not great.

I had to WFH yesterday as it was my first day back from holiday and there were no desks left in our office. Had to do some Teams calls and got through 6Gb of data using my phone as a 4/5G hotspot. Had to WFH again today to collar the engineer as neighbours had visits booked today but ours wasn't due to be until Monday, but I've got no meetings and am managing to do mostly offline work so I should be using quite a bit less data.

Our next door but one neighbour has Vodafone over Openreach as a failover and we've been trying to pick up his WiFi with no joy so far.

The whole thing has made me realise we rely on the internet for so many things (especially as we've done the smart home thing, although I'm trying to make it less cloud dependent) that we really need some sort of failover too.

We've got Unifi everything, including a USG which has a second WAN port and does failover/load balancing, so their U-LTE-Pro would make sense, but it's only 4G and I don't think it makes sense to invest in anything which isn't 5G capable in 2023.

I basically want something I can put a SIM in and connect to the USG, but at this point if it was a fair bit cheaper I'd consider a quick fix too.

Any ideas? Next door but one neighbour would be happy to split the cost of a 4/5G failover if we can work out how to bridge our two networks as he'd prefer over the air to cabled as a backup.

Three's formerly excellent 5G home broadband is now totally useless

How come? Both their 4 and 5G hubs have ethernet ports so I presume could work for me, although I don't know what Three signal is like round here. This isn't available in our area so no good for me anyway.

Something like this would work.

Cheap ADSL line?

Thanks, that's not too bad at all price wise. But part of me thinks if I'm going to spend £120 on a 4G box I might as well spend the extra and get the Unifi kit which comes with a proper aerial (would plan to hide it in our disused chimney pot and run the cable down into the eaves where all my tech is).

Part of the problem is knowing if 4G would be enough, right now with Lebara/Vodafone the 4G with the phone indoors is quite slow, but if I stick it out of the skylight window in the loft I get 5G which is much better. Nearby I can get up to about 200Mbps with 5G.

It depends how often you're looking I guess. As I said upthread, I just plugged one of these
https://www.amazon.co.uk/GL-iNet-GL-MT300N-V2-Converter-Pre-installed-Performance/dp/B073TSK26W
into my router and that into a phone with USB tethering. 30 seconds of a job but obviously not automatic.

Main issue I can see you having is a SIM that has enough data for when your internet isn't working but is also cheap enough for the vast majority of time when you don't need it.