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

We're rural and no fibre (it comes just up the road by 500m but so far not to our stretch- there was a local scheme designated by the council who cherry picked certain areas to get it and not others, but Gigaclear who installed the cable so far don't seem to have connected ANY properties up, so we're all in the same boat).

We have tried various and have settled on a Vodafone dongle with unlimited 4G @£30/month (which is handy when we go camping, just take that and all hook up to it saves our phone data) but our neighbour's EE similar product just doesn't work at our house & vice versa at his with our Vodafone. Speed isn't as dire as BT broadband (lucky to get 2.5mb/s), we can get 30-40mb/s, which is perfectly adequate for watching catch up TV or zoom meetings. I suggest you ask to see bb speed when viewing.

There's no fibre broadband where I am and my internet is fine, I don't do videoconferencing so can't comment on that but streaming Tv, games console, internet no problem.

This issue isn't non fibre in general it's what it's like in the specific house you are interested in so unless it's mine my experience is useless

Lots of good suggestions above, it would be a deal breaker for me.

Argh, wouldnt be a deal breaker of course is what I meant

Those saying you can watch netflix etc. With speeds of less than 5mbps, you can but only on low quality or it will buffer for ages and if you want to watch netflix, one kid wants to watch youtube and the other wants to play a game online (for example) you wont be able to.

I wouldn't move to house without fibre personally but fast internet is important to me.

Also I live very rurally so just because its rural doesnt mean there wont be fibre, you could look in a slightly different area?

Satellite broadband is an option that is meant to be good but it is more expensive and I dont know much about it.

Don’t do it

We live in the countryside
We don’t have fibre
We do video conference
We have 2 x dc doing school work at home
We have 2 x adults wfh on remote logins/VPN to our work networks

We had rubbish broadband via EE which promised18 Mg but delivered no more than 5 on a good day!! We have just upgraded to BT who provide 50 Mg. a new estate in the village has Fast Fibre to the door 300-500Mg (I am told) depending on what you want to pay!

We don't have fibre as it's not available in our area (Medium sized NW town) and we manage fine, we average about 6mb and can have 2 people streaming Netflix etc at once as well as a third person using the internet.
However I think non fibre broadband can be hit and miss in more rural areas so we might just be lucky.

But you’ll never get video conferencing to work in dial up Is anyone still using dial-up? BT shut down its dial up service in 2013

My lesson learnt the hard way is to check with local FB groups etc what broadband provision is like, don’t rely on promises from ISPs.

Rural living and superfast bb may not always be compatible.

We live in SW2 London. There is no fibre. The universality of fibre availability is a myth....

@janinlondon I must admit I'm laughing at all the people saying don't settle for non fibre broadband! It's a luxury unavailable to lots of us even in urban areas!!
And to the poster thinking no fibre = dial up

You need to find out what the actual speeds are in the local area, non-fibre broadband could be very good or it could be very bad. Also find out how far away the network is, it could be that it is already installed in the street and you just need it bringing into the house. labs.thinkbroadband.com/local/broadband-map#6/51.414/-0.641/

Just because an area is rural, doesn't mean that it is doomed to be a technology backwater. There are villages in the middle of Wales with speeds twice as good as most cities.

We were getting non-fibre broadband at a steady 18 Mbps, which is quite reasonable. We switched to fibre because the upload speed was faster.

We live in an area with no fibre.
We have Vodafone mobile broadband.
My son has regular teams meetings for school no problem.
Occasionally, maybe twice a week? The tv will buffer but we just pause it for a minute or two and then it's fine.
Occasionally, we might knock our phones off the wifi if something else is running slowly but on the whole, it works fine!

We have standard broadband and it is fine to do video conferencing if no one else is streaming. So it can't cope with a zoom call and YouTube at the same time but can cope with a zoom call and mumsnet 😊

I wouldn't. Even if the speed is just about OK for netflix what happens when the kids are older and one wants to atch netflix, one wants to game online, you want to watch netflix and your dh has a conference call? Would it be OK for 4 people to use intensive stuff at the same time? Because that level of use is standard in our house.

We have fibre to the cabinet and then use the old wires. We have BT infinity and get speeds of about 50mbps download, which is no problem. We also use a mesh network to improve transmission through the house, as the stone walls can be a problem. We use Google's. However, we live down the street from the cabinet so probably not comparable with a rural area and a long distance on copper wire.

You need to ask vendors for a speed test from the property. We are on VDSL ( in another country) have Apple TV, 6 connected machines and a NAS box for streaming media content and it works fine. We did ask the vendor to show speeds from the property, not what the ISP’s were saying.

We now have fibre in the village but we are staying with VDSL, everyone is jumping to fibre leaving extra capacity for those of us who refuse to pay the extra.

My mum doesn't have fibre and yet her internet connection (Plusnet/Openreach) seems pretty decent. Whether it's good enough to WFH I don't know but she has never complained about it and DS has watched things on it whereas when she had Talktalk it was rubbish, they kept telling her she was too far away from the cabinet - but now she has a functioning reliable connection.

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We have non-fibre here in deepest darkest rural Somerset and it's absolutely fine. The uploads take no time at all and it supports all our devices. I don't have any t.v packages as I don't watch enough t'v to warrant the extra cost. We're paying £23 pm for what we have and can't see any justification to pay more for something we don't want or need.

Don’t do it! We get over 200mb and I love it. With us both WFH, DS gaming and is all watching Netflix etc it would be awful without.

I get over 800 mbps - which is ridiculous. DS thinks it improves his gaming but I am not convinced.

I don't know if I could ever go back to what we had before. It's interesting to hear what others have to say.

We live rurally and both work from home permanently, speeds were much slower then we were used to 2.05Mbps download today, sometimes creeps up to about 5, we bought a 4g router which can hit up to 50mbps and above. But we've rarely had to use it, we zoom, teams call at the same time ok, play video games online, watch Netflix. The only pain is how long it takes to download games off steam.

I get over 800 mbps - which is ridiculous. DS thinks it improves his gaming but I am not convinced.

We have had over 1000 at work for several years. I don't notice the difference between using the internet there and at home at 45 Mbps.

Thanks everyone. I now have some vocabulary with which to ask the right questions. In our case I think we’d cope if it was a bit ropey. Hurrah if online gaming is limited as far as I’m concerned - but we will need to explore options such as satellite or dongles (that word sounds rude to me). The house is on a lane (not a street as such), surrounded by paddocks, farmland and golf, about 1mile as the crow flies from the nearest housing estates. There are only three other dwellings along the lane which is about 1/2 mile long. I suspect it will be copper wires for quite some distance and I doubt there are plans to run fibre that way this century. Will see what we can find out.

However, whilst waiting for Killing Eve to buffer, we could enjoy the lovely views!