If you only ever use your phone then there's no point in paying for broadband. I think a lot of people have been taking a look at their subscriptions and cancelling things which they seldom use. Do you really need a sub for a 500mbit connection when you use you phone? You can always cancel it and switch to a much cheaper slower connection or just use you allowance.
I had a Disney+ sub which I hardly used so I cancelled it along with several others I kept out of sheer inertia.
I'm surprised more people aren't doing the opposite. There are pay as you go phone plans that cost hardly anything. Meanwhile there is free WiFi almost everywhere, including at home. If you have broadband. So pay the cable company for fast internet and pay half that or less for mobile service, then connect your mobile to WiFi 97% of the time so you hardly use any mobile data.
The math gets even more dramatic if you have multiple people living in the same place. Broadband price gets divided by however many people you have there, higher cost of an unlimited phone plan get multiplied by the same number.
I can't remember the last time I used free WiFi and it actually worked as intended. It's always some combination of slow, broken, intermittent, and needs you to agree to terms and conditions too long to read.
I have. Most establishments have decent WiFi which is easy enough to connect to because they want you to sit there all day and keep buying $5 lattes. Once in a while you get stuck somewhere the WiFi sucks, but that only matters if you're transferring enough data to care, and those two things rarely overlap. So a couple times a year you have to pay $3 to transfer a lot of data over cellular, which is way less than what you're saving by having a cheaper plan.
Although I will say that WiFi terms of service are a blight that should be prohibited by law. Nobody reads them the same as nobody reads the Facebook terms of service, and all 99% of them say is a hundred paragraphs of "don't break the law" which is already implied. All the terms of service do is interfere with what should be a protocol where an access point intended to be public announces itself as such and then any device in range which is still on cellular automatically switches to it with no configuration required.
BT works just fine. Have used it for at least 8 years without any fuss. I don't even know that I've connected to it unless I checked, it just does it. As such, I use very little cellular data.
In the context of the comment I'm responding to that mentions "the opposite", that consists of paying for a home internet connection.
If I'm paying for a home BT internet connection, I get free BT WiFi, which hugely off-sets my cellular data usage. As a result, I pay just £9.50 per month for my phone plan on a rolling contract with Virgin.
Exactly. I used it for a few days before my BT modem arrived at my previous address. It's OK-ish if you're lucky but it's certainly not free in any sense of the word.
More than most in the UK. I pay £45/month with https://www.aa.net.uk/ for a more professional service than you'd get with the big providers. Comes with a /29, a /48, the ability to get real-time tech support from actual techies via IRC. I work from home so need a reliable connection.
Three's own MVNO (Smarty) gives you unlimited for £18 without long term contracts. It's £16 if you get it via uSwitch.
The problem with Three's network is that their 4G can be really bad in some areas (eg: parts London). I can't use them inside my flat because it's almost unusable during peak hours. On the other hand, if their 5G is available, speeds can be really good. It's common for me to get 100-900Mbps when near one of their cell towers.
I guess the point is for the average person an unlimited data sim is cheaper than a landline, let alone a landline and a limited data sim, so what's the point in a landline connection
It all depends on price details. In Norway one needs to pay about 20 Euro/month for a phone subscription with amount of data that allows, for example, watch YouTube or do video calls occasionally outside WiFi. Yet for 35 Euro/month one can get a mobile subscription with 1 TB of traffic with 10 MBit/s speed. That is enough to watch movies and do many kinds of remote work.
Yet the fiber costs at least 50 Euro/month. So it only makes sense to get broadband if it is shared by 4 people.
You still want a cheap mobile plan, so it's not technically cheaper until you have 4 people.
But that's comparing fiber to 10Mbps cellular, and even with 2 people the fiber is dramatically faster and only €20 more expensive. If you can live with 10Mbps then there is presumably some broadband option at no worse than that speed for less than €30 and then you're already ahead with 2 people.
And most people aren't going to be happy with speeds that low, but then you'd be paying more for each cellular plan.
In Norway there is no realistic option to have fiber cheaper than 45-50 Euro per month.
Based on personal experience 10 MBit/s is enough for video including full HD options. In fact it worked better than 100 MBit/s that was shared with several users and when somebody was downloading big gaming files.
Unless you're one of those people who don't need internet to survive, then this is nonsense. Wifi is far from everywhere and I'm not going to manually connect to wifi just to check if my date is running late. Is this the 90s?
But you still have a cellular connection, it's just metered. Which doesn't matter because checking if your date is running late uses a trivial amount of cellular data. Whereas if it turns out that they are late and now you've got an hour to kill and want to watch Netflix on your phone, you connect to the local WiFi.
Which it will have done automatically at home and at work and anywhere else that you actually frequent, so having to do that is rare.
I pay €13 a month for my phone plan with Gomo and if I needed to I could get by fine just tethering off of that for everything. I pay for 500Mb fibre broadband (€30 a month) as a luxury and because I wfh.
OTOH the article cited as an example an old guy who go to the library to have internet access. It is very likely he can't even afford a mobile plan with data. I have known a number of people who rely on prepaid and only pay for it when they can. They will send you an email or ask someone to send you an sms so you can call them back.
Exactly, are these people entirely cut off from the internet or do they just use their ridiculously cheap mobile data? Imagine this article 10 years ago talking about UK people ditching their land line and surmising those people are being left behind.
The reality is mobile data can cover your minimal internet requirements in the UK.
I'm on 'mobile broadband' in a city of 1 million in the UK midlands. That's where you pay a monthly fee and get a mains powered router pod that connects itself to the vendor's G4 mobile network. Several companies offer this.
I ditched my landline phone and pay just under £15 a month. Works fine. Easily saturates the wifi card on my old Thinkpad at the same time as her indoors is watching Emmerdale over the same connection.
Happy customer (at the moment, mergers in the pipeline).
It should be illegal to restrict tethering or charging differently for tethering. There are really no technical reasons for a phone to even convey whether it is using the data or sharing data using a hotspot. It is purely for price gouging. I also hate that even unlocked phones don’t have a way to stop the provider from knowing whether tethering is being used or not.
On the other hand, before moving abroad I used to live in a sleepy quaint village a few miles north of Cambridge, and was already able to switch from wired broadband to mobile broadband back in 2017 — just a few percent of UK households is sufficient for "a million".
It isn't necessary for everyone to be able to do this to get headlines, and logic, like this.
I had a Disney+ sub which I hardly used so I cancelled it along with several others I kept out of sheer inertia.