Vodafone is UK's mobile ping king Vodafone is the mobile network with the best ping rate, according to network performance sleuth Tutela. Tutela doesn't measure call reliability or SMS failures, unlike GWS or RootMetrics. But it does do something very useful for evaluating real world network performance: giving us the jitter, packet loss and ping rates for …
And people keep trying to tell me that you can't game over 4G (22ms ping) when most home broadband wifi (especially the old 2.4Ghz channel-flooded stuff) can't even manage that across most people's connections to most European gaming servers.
Literally I have seen more ping problems attributable to flooded-wifi-channels (rebroadcasting all the time because of interference), overloaded wifi (i.e. too many local devices on the same AP), poor QoS (basically non-existent despite the fact that small UDP packets should always be prioritised over long TCP connections, and uploads should be prioritised over downloads so your TCP connections assemble themselves quicker over heavy-traffic connections) and just shoddy computers (loaded to the hilt with 4 antivirus programs and junk) than anything to do with the transmission media themselves.
I now only have 4G at home, no broadband at all. I can get better pings gaming over it than I used to in the town down the road. Of course you can't "guarantee" them, but you never could anyway.
I have always wanted to experiement with it but I simply can't get a decent 3G or 4G connection to try it. They are ok for voice calls and simple browsing but found useless when moving when using a simple vpn (For fareness this was a usb dongle and inside).
Do you have to place your router in a specific place (I.e place on a window sill)?
How much do you pay compared to a bog standard "fibre" to the cabinet package (As this is one thing that put me off as I freeview is fine for me)?
I have bog standard Huawei thing. Mini battery-powered (USB charging) box which internally just is Android with a miniature display (that shows battery and connection status and not much else).
Huawei E5577Cs-321.
It literally serves all my local devices (Chromecast, Steam Link, laptop, tablet, phone, plus guest's items) at decent speeds for local network access and does more-than-good-enough over 4G including low-ping. It is the router for all the wireless network devices, and the gateway to the Internet.
Though I did buy an antenna for it (literally a cheap £20 thing on Amazon), it makes almost no difference whatsoever. In fact, I often walk around with the thing in my pocket if my mobile data runs out or if I need wifi in the car or at a friend's house.
I have it on a window-sill, because that's where I put the aerial and it's also out of sight. But it works fine indoors and covers the house.
I can't get FTTC. I can't even get ADSL/VDSL over 10Mb. BT literally don't serve my street at anything higher and nobody else covers it. As such I have little choice.
But I have a 40Gb package for £30 a month, (50Gb for £25 is available on other carriers, or if you don't mind signing 12-month contracts but they ponced me about and I prefer month-to-month, and they often have "add-ons" where you pay a little extra and all traffic to Netflix, Amazon, YouTube, etc. isn't counted). The cheapest total I can get for anything BT including line-rental etc. is more than that for even basic ADSL.
Yes, the offers disappeared and the prices went up directly after the end of the January sales and clearance in early February...
But I've just visited the third-party resellers and they seem to have reintroduced a few offers, so maybe there will be some discounting for Easter...
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