To think you shouldn’t switch off 3G until there is 4G working?

[MrsBobtonTrent]

So frustrated with this. I live in a town with really poor mobile signal. I can only get 3G in my house. I can only get patchy 4G at the end of my garden. The whole road is like this. DC’s secondary school only has 3G. The local hospital is the same. I could use my phone on WiFi, but we have really shitty internet too!

The fastest service we can get here is TalkTalk Fibre 65 which actually gives us about 15mbps (just over the 13 minimum). When all of us are home it just grinds to a halt!

I am astonished at how poorly connected a town is (about 30,000 people). The outlying villages are all getting fancy high speed connections, and we are crawling along on 3G which is about to be switched off. AIBU to think that they should leave the 3G on until we have 4/5G and/or fast broadband?

Trouble is, the policy makers live in places where having 5G or Fibre boardband is just the standard. They can't comprehend that this isn't the case in other parts of the country.

One of Labour's manifesto pledges in 2019 was to upgrade UK wide WiFi infrastructure to "superfast" to bring it in line with the rest of the world and address these rural blackspots.
It was laughed at by the press and they lost the election by a huge margin.
We get what we vote for.

Labour’s thing was free broadband for all though. Not a guarantee of quality. And no such thing as “free”.

Both parties make noise about rural connectivity. But we are not rural! Rural connectivity projects (centrally funded) have brought gigaclear to local villages and hamlets. But our decent sized town (several secondary schools, a university, a hospital and lots of businesses) has super-slow broadband, no 5G, very little 4G and is about to lose its 3G coverage.

Much as I dislike throwing cash Musk's way, if you really care about a decent connection then move house or get Starlink.

I didn’t realise Starlink was available here. It’s a lot of money, but could interesting. Do you use it? Is it as great as the website claims? I’m not sure it’s a great idea (Kessler syndrome etc), but if it’s up there anyway I wouldn’t be averse to using it while it functions.

I don't use it but a friend does and the connection is rock solid

After years of Telecom Italia and various other companies “upgrading” our area our internet slowed to drunk slug pace.

Got Starlink. It’s really fast.

It doesn’t help any with the crappy signal out and about, but at least at home things are zippy. I tend to download any podcasts or programmes I might want to watch in downtime before I leave, because my tolerance for slow connections has dropped like a stone.

But be careful where you plop it in the garden if aren’t installing it on a roof (I’m not climbing up a ladder to our roof, there is no chance I won’t fall off). My friend ran hers over the second day they had it, because she wasn’t used to it being in the garden. It might be quite sturdy, but no match for a 4 wheel drive hitting it head on.