on 19-05-2020 16:58
All,
background is I live in the countryside with a wet piece of string for a landline that when is working only gives 2.5 Mbps (though seems to have an intermittent fault resulting in it sometimes only connecting at 384 Kbps !). Due to the house location being near the top of a hill but in a dip, I can only seem to get O2 4G signal. I have been surviving using an O2 PAYG 4G dongle connected to the home router, which while gives up to 30Mbps, with the lock down and being a family of five we are rocketing through data, which at £30 per 20GB (works out at £1.50 per GB) is adding up very quickly.
Looking at O2's offerings on "mobile broadband" I see they do a 30 day contract of 50GB for £32 which would be half my usual but still not great (64p per GB). I have seen O2 now do an "unlimited" of up to 650GB per month for £35 with a 12 month contract (much better working out at just over 5p per GB). The issue here is it is sold under a sim only phone contract, and I have read in the T&C, 1) you can only tether up to 12 devices, and 2) must be in a device that does not required to be plugged in to operate.
While the number of devices poses an issue, can anyone think of a reason the unlimited sim could not be put in one of the O2 mobile 4g routers as these do have a battery so can operate without being plugged in?
I'm just trying to check for problems before taking out a contract that is obviously not being sold for what I'd like to use it for.
thanks in advance
on 19-05-2020 17:06
O2 will know what device it's being used in so if it's mains powered you'll likely be cut off.
on 21-05-2020 14:51
on 21-05-2020 14:51
Thanks for the reply. As mentioned the device I was looking at from O2 can operate on its own internal battery. This said the number of devices that can be tethered and the fact I'd in reality be needing to run this plugged in sounds like it is too much of a risk.
Real shame BT do not offer a true home 4g internet package - I'd be willing to pay up to triple. Anyway I'll look at the giffgaff options or aother provider that rides the O2 network as I cant afford to be paying £30 for 20GB every couple of days (with the family all being at home its really only lasting a day)
many thanks
on 31-01-2021 10:00
on 31-01-2021 10:00
In case you are not aware there is 150GB package, in January 2021 is going for £28pm on a monthly broadband contract on O2. We are in the same situation as yourselves, we live in a country park where the fixed line broadband barely reaches 2mbps. So we use instead a 4G router with an O2 broadband SIM yielding 30 to 70 mbps depending on the time of day.
We are hoping for 5G to come to our area with an uplift in the data allowance that will accomodate for the growing demand on bandwidth.
Hope it helps