I have now been running my new mobile router for a week and I can see my real-world data usage.

I was quite careful and I set my phone and PC to treat the router’s connection as a “metered network” and when I did a 3 hour video conference I turned the video off and just had sound.

I found that my video conferencing software used 3GB/hr even with the camera turned off. I expect that better software such as Microsoft Teams or Zoom will be similar with the camera turned on.

My wife and I don’t watch any internet video but the children do when they are in the house.

• My total usage over 1 week was 20GB

Expected usage

I expect that my monthly usage would be about ~80GB if I was being thrifty. If the kids are home and watching videos and I am using video conferencing for work this could easily go up to 600GB/month.

Reliability

The connection usually has less latency than my PlusNet connection but occasionally a web browser will glitch and a refresh will be required.

During this time we lost our connection for 2 hours when Three had a national outage which is an unusual event.

FTP is unreliable

Developers need to know that FTP over mobile is unreliable. I switched my connections to SFTP and they worked fine.

Next Step

I have bought a Smarty SIM with unlimited data for £15 per month. Tethering (i.e. using in a router) is permitted and there is no contract and I can cancel my automatic monthly renewal when I get my Virgin Media connection.

SMARTY uses Three network and so far I have identical performance to the official Three data SIM I was using previously.

I activated the SIM online put it in phone to check it worked. It worked immediately and I then put it in the router. In future I would put it the router directly. The router can receive SMS messages and so it will be easy to diagnose activation messages.

Summary

Switching from fixed broadband services such as PlusNet and Virgin Media to 4G is quick and easy. If you know that you are going to be using the 4G service for a year or more then dedicated data sims (see previous post) are cheaper but if you only need a month or two’s unlimited data then SMARTY is an excellent choice.