To buy a house without fibre broadband

[Covert19]

We’re considering a move out to the countryside. Pre lockdown, husband worked from home one day a week, using video conferencing a lot. Obviously the children are using internet for homeschool at the moment and I occasionally need to use FaceTime or Skype for my job (WFH).

The new house we have fallen for doesn’t have fibre broadband available. I can’t remember what the internet was like Pre-broadband. Are we mad to consider this move? Can you get fibre installed if you ask for it? Can you get non-fibre broadband and how? Who else lives with internet speeds of under 10mb and what is it like? Can you still watch Netflix and Iplayer if you don’t have fibre broadband?

Basically I am looking for reassurance that we will be able to manage in this amazing house despite its crap internet connection.

And I need things explained to me as if I'm your Nan- I have no technical understanding at all. I think a question like “can the internet come out of this socket on the wall?”, is a perfectly intelligent question. Please help me Mumsnetters! TIA

There’s some info on the of com site that will help you. checker.ofcom.org.uk/

www.which.co.uk/reviews/broadband-deals/article/what-broadband-speed-do-i-need Shows you what broadband you need.

As your kids grow up they’ll want more and faster internet access. You’ll be unlikely to be able to work from home reliably. Certainly not if anyone else wants to use it.

You need to find out what the broadband plan in the area is.

You can get satellite broadband for several hundred a year - beamed in rather than fibre’d in so presumably a little patchy depending on Wharfe the satellites are? But you’ll never get video conferencing to work in dial up. I fell in love with a house where this was an issue - the village was effectively locked out of broadband provision by one landowner who refused to allow digging on his land for the fibre. Wish we’d have gone for it with the satellite but working from home now / school from home with four computers running video reliably at once would have been impossible (there are very few parts of the country where there isn’t a plan in place for connection to fibre - so unless it’s very remote or like this village in the not massively rural area outside Winchester, you could look up plans and find its only a temporary issue anyway)

We live in an area without BT fibre broadband, just normal broadband (but neighbours have five through different providers).

We hover around 4mb and have not had any problems during lockdown - 2 adults, 2 teens, video calls & tv/music streaming throughout the day and night.

Our only issue is the wifi signal reaching all parts of the house, but that's taken care of with router amplifiers.

Are you sure fibre broadband can't be put in the new house? Have you checked all providers?

We don't have fibre and get about 18 mbs, or whatever they're called.
Seems fine. Can zoom, Netflix etc.

Any chance you can do a speed test at the place?

No don’t do it. Up until recently my parents had broadband like this, and their speed when I tested it was 1.5mbps (where I live we get 300mbps and now they have been upgraded they get 60mbps to give you an indication of what you can get) they couldn’t even use online banking reliability. No Netflix, FaceTime, Skype etc.

There are other options like 3G and 4G dongles or satellite broadband if you really love the house. So maybe investigate those?

I don't think we are fibre. I've moved from a city with ridiculously high speeds and I haven't noticed much difference for what the DC and I do.
When we moved in, there was no internet at all so had to have it set up. Is that what you mean? But I could clearly tell on different sites that it would be available.

I'll be honest, internet speed was a massive factor when I moved. I actually rejected houses because if it. Satellite broadband is v expensive and apparently not that reliable. But that's all secondhand.

Definitely don’t do it OP. Our last cottage in the countryside had no fibre just standard broadband. There was around 5 houses down our lane and the internet was appalling, couldn’t play games online and be watching YouTube etc, would take days to download anything etc. The fastest we got was 4mbps. Really annoyed me as the houses across the field had fibre and they had no plans to install it down our road. Since moved and back to fibre and it is fantastic would never go back to slow again

We don’t have fibre and until lockdown it has been fine. Now we’re signing up to fibre because even with no one else using it (kick kids off devices) I still can’t reliably do video calls. Last week I used my phone as a WiFi hotspot and it was better quality than the broadband. We’re getting speeds of about 14mbps.

Unfortunately we’ve only got one fibre provider in our town, so I imagine the cost will creep up over the years.

In your circumstances I don’t think non-fibre would work, sorry.

There’s an app called Speedtest you can download to your phone and test the speed of the broadband going to the house. Estate Agents have given me some funny looks but we both work in tech from home and a slow speed would be problematic for us. Just connect up to their broadband and check the speed.

I’ve lived in several places in London where you couldn’t get fibre - it’s definitely less good and I don’t think you could rely on it for wfh full time, but you can still watch Netflix etc (most of the time and sometimes with a lot of buffering).

We don’t have fibre, just standard slow broadband with speeds of 2-6mbps.

It’s a bit shit, having come from a house with fibre. I can stream Netflix and iplayer etc but it’s a bit slow to load sometimes, especially in the evenings. It will stall and say “please wait for more to download before watching”.

Our internet use isn’t too bad, we can all use our devices (me and two teens) but pages can take a moment to load and I’ve needed to buy a signal booster for the back of the house and my house isn’t very big!

It’s bonkers as it’s a newish estate, only 6 or 7 years old yet they didn’t install fibre for whatever reason... I really hope we get it soon.

Can you get fibre installed if you ask for it?

For free? Only if they are going to put it in anyway. Otherwise you can pay for it to go in yourself which may be simple or hard depending on how far away you are from the nearest fibre connection. It involves mole ploughing the cables in Lots of rural areas are starting to club together to get it installed between them but it requires cooperation of landowners to allow 'wayleave' for the cables to pass through.

Can you get non-fibre broadband and how? Of course you can.

Who else lives with internet speeds of under 10mb and what is it like We get 1-2mbs on good days and on those days we can stream Netflix etc. Currently got a speed of 0.6mbs I can mumsnet but can't skype call or stream TV.

Almost as important to this question that you have missed is what is the 4G data signal like at the property. Many providers are now boosting poor broadband connections with 4G and that seems to work well for a lot of people.

Not an option for me sadly as we don't even get G let alone 4G.

We lived in a house with 1.5 mbps and it was hideous. Couldn’t watch any iPlayer at all and if we needed to do a video call we had to kick everyone else off the internet and even then it was slow and couldn’t cope. Definitely check the speed before you buy! Here we don’t have fibre to house but do have fibre to the junction box so get about 70mpbs and that’s fine. Ask the sellers for the WiFi password and do a Speedtest or get them to show you one on their phone (connected to WiFi not 3G/4G

Don't do it!

My in-laws bought a house on a new-build estate - it's in the suburbs of a city, and I was flabbergasted to learn that new estates don't come with fibre as standard! They only have copper, and their internet is dire - it can barely cope with their (very light) usage, so I can't imagine it would cope at all for family use (work, homework, gaming, streaming) at all.

You need satellite broadband, we have it and get an average speed of 50mgps. We have a business package that costs about £100 + VAT. I think the set-up was about £500.

Even without fibre you'll still get broadband, just a smaller bandwidth.

As PP have said, I would see if you can do a speedtest, or ask a neighbour to do one to see what speed you are likely to get. Ithink Rightmove may also offer this service if you check the listing for the new property. Then check out what the plans are for fibre in the future. If no fibre for the foreseeable future I wouldn't do it personally. I have fibre and two teenagers, plus work from home a lot and the teens still complain about the speed sometimes.

Do a speedtest as others have said. Having said that we live in the countryside with awful copper broadband (2 down 0.5 up) and have now had great success with EE 4G and a '4GEE Home Antenna' cost about £100 and costs us £30ish a month for unlimited data. I've been working from home with it since March fine and regularly have 2 or 3 Netflix/Disney+ streams on the go at once during the evening. Not great from gaming as the ping is quite high but speeds are consistently around 20 down / 10 up.

1. Non-fibre broadband varies a LOT. Especially in rural areas where the property may be a long way from the cabinet. Until a couple of months ago I had non-fibre and I was getting 1.5-2mbps download speed and about 0.5mbps upload speed. On a good day.

1. If fibre broadband does become available in your area, it will be fibre to the cabinet and not fibre to the property. Mine recently became available. I now get about 15mbps download and 2mbps upload. That's approximately what urban non-fibre users might expect to get.

1. You can get satellite broadband but it's (a) expensive and (b) doesn't necessarily improve your internet speed.

So, I would talk to the owners and ask them to check their internet speed (speedtest.net) or similar. I would also check the openreach site to see if fibre is available there or coming soon. And then I would think long and hard about your internet needs. Mine is perfectly fine for e.g. watching Netflix, but it's slow for uploading 30 minute videos to Youtube. I can do Zoom without any problem, but there's only one of me in the house - what it would be like with 3 or 4 people all trying to stream at once I don't know.

The other option is to use a 4/5G router. There does have to be a decent data signal in the area though.

Check out Three HomeFi. The cost is comparable landline broadband.

Oh, and I see people suggesting 4G and similar as an option. Again, check. In my house I get zero mobile reception. Zero. I have to go outside to send a text message. So there's no way that would work for me here. Rural mobile reception is as patchy as rural internet.

I wouldn't buy a house where I couldn't get good internet. I survived on measured 15mbs per second for download when I had ADSL, so that would be the minimum I would consider. (But I currently have a measured 73, so it would be a huge downgrade.) I'm not sure what I need for upload, as never did videoconferencing or replicated my data to the cloud back then, but I'd think about 5 is the minimum.

I would look into 4g and 5g connections if the wired broadband was slow, but I'd also try using one for a while to see if they really live up to their advertised speeds. Although you'd need to use it at the target location, as the speed might be different there.

Are you sure fibre broadband can't be put in the new house? Have you checked all providers?

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!

Have you SEEN Virgin's fibre network? It's literally just cherrypicking off the most densely populated areas. They aren't laying fibre through fields and down country lanes. You can get your contract with anyone you want, but if Openreach haven't got fibre connected to the cabinet in your area, no one will be able to provide you with the service.

The people talking about rural cell reception have a point. The person I know who gets 2mbs from their rural ADSL can also barely get a phone signal in their house. (Are cellphone signal boosters a thing in the UK? I've heard there are such things but not sure if they used here.)

Weve never had fibre, we use internet from 3 that comes with a router that acts like Wii but isn't. We've found it to be fantastic, no problems streaming several things and being online for work/studying etc. Its also luch cheaper for us! I think nowadays there tends to be a lot of options available.

Oh, and I see people suggesting 4G and similar as an option. Again, check. In my house I get zero mobile reception. Zero..

We can't get a phone signal at our place. Not even outside. We can get 4G data though using a dedicated router.