From Simon Tydeman:
With the recent news that the village are unlikely to get any upgraded internet in the short term, a number of villagers have been looking at using the 4G network to get faster internet. Simon Tydeman has recently switched over to 4G and has reported back some positive results. The Network provider is a company called Smarty who use the Three mobile network. They have a £25 per month unlimited data plan with no reductions in speed over a certain data limit There is no fixed contract so can be cancelled any time.
If they sign up using the below link they can get a free month. A £10 donation will also be made to the Parish Council for every new customer.
You could potentially use the sim card in a mobile phone as a ‘wifi hotspot’ but, for a like for like replacement of an existing land line router, you will need to purchase a 4G router. Mr Tydeman is using a Huawei B315 which was £99 from Amazon (other options are available). You simply put the sim card in the router, plug it in and you’re away.
Speed tests have shown consistent download speeds in excess of 10Mb per second and upload speeds of around 4Mb per second. These have peaked at 20 Mbps and 6Mbps respectively. A vast improvement on the current landline speeds.
Whilst this has worked well with a strong signal in the centre of the village, anyone interested must satisfy themselves that it would work for them also. If anyone has any additional queries, please add them in the comments below and we can try to assist.
Kirkby on Bain 
As the editor of this website (and others), I find that reliability is more important than speed, because the kind of work I do does not normally require high speeds. Looking back over the last 18 years, my main problem has been the unreliability of the exisiting BT landline connection. Recently Openreach have re-routed the copper wires in Wharf Lane, (without informing residents) and since then the connection has been fairly stable, touch wood. From time to time I have used 4G to get a faster connection, for instance to upoad YouTube videos, using my smartphone as a mobile hotspot, but the 4G speeds in Wharf Lane are not as fast as I had expected. The 4G option does make sense, but much depends on which network you go for, so it is important to do your homework before you commit. I looked at Smarty’s coverage map yesterday, and it reported no 4G at all for our postcode, and it is noticable that coverage in KoB is very patchy. Looking at EE coverage, it reports “You’ll get excellent coverage indoors and outdoors on 4G-enabled devices.” My smartphone uses a BT mobile SIM, which uses the EE network, but despite the coverage report the actual speeds I get indoors can hardlly justify the word “excellent”. Tempting though – It would be so nice to kick BT into touch after all the lies about fibre we have been fed up to now.
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