4G Broadband?

[RossJK1]

Hi guys! Wasn't sure where to put this topic so sorry in advance if its not meant to be in the "networking" category.

 

I live in a rural area and for all my life have suffered from terrible internet I just done a wired speedtest on my desktop and got around 1.5mbps down and 0.7 Up, not very good

However I have started looking into 4g broadband deals, the one im looking at is from three (I live in the UK) which is a Huawei HomeFi B311 with unlimited data for 12 months or 24 months. I have also looked into getting an external antena to get the best possible reception/speed possible. I was wondering if anyone here uses this form of internet, has any experience in this area or has a better option for me. I'm all ears!

Thanks.

[Origami Cactus]

I use 4g for home internet, it is fine. Don't expect 100mbit/s all the time, most of the time it is 20-30mbit, which is still fast enough to be fair. Ping is good for games.

I have heard that people have connected the big boy atennas to their huawei 4g routers and get 90mbit all the time with it, and i have to say, the router built in atennas are a bit weaker than a phones atennas. So as i said, instead of 150mbit you would get 50.

[Jarsky]

Well if you have an LTE phone, essentially the speed you get on your phone is what you can expect from the modem (doing a single connection test)

I had LTE with a Huawei B315 (same as the B311 but has 4 integrated ethernet ports). I was getting ~80-100Mbps to my local tower and about 25-30ms latency; made it fine for gaming and it was a perfectly acceptable solution until i was able to get Fiber, 3-4x faster than the VDSL2 that was available where my home is. 

[Alex Atkin UK]

Some people have great results, some have awful (Three in all the places I've used it has been all over the place on speed and latency).  It really depends on how busy your local cell tower is and how much capacity it has.

Speed wise I'd say its likely to be much better than what you have now, but unlikely to be over 50Mbit.  Then again the average for all 4G providers is quite similar, around 20-30Mbit, as they all have good and bad areas which averages out in the statistics.   O2 for example in my area performs exceptionally well, but its also one of the most expensive as they do not offer unlimited packages.

The good thing with Three is they do a FREE 200MB/month SIM you can trial first.  You'd need a spare phone or 4G router to try it with though.