Looking for your views I have found a house I really like and negotiated a really good deal. However, when I checked the broadband speeds the best I can get is max 15 Mb/s download and 1.1 Mb/s upload. This is about a third of the speed of the neighbours who, after doing some investigating, are hooked up to a different cabinet. There is no fibre availability in the area. Currently I have the same download speed but 5 Mb/s upload. I have two kids who obviously beast the net and I will be continuing to work from home once lockdown lifts (using zoom / teams etc). I'm worried that the upload speed is going to knacker video calls - so I am debating whether to pull out. What do you think? Am I just being stupid? Is that upload speed enough?
If it was me, I would skip it at that upload rate. It will likely be more of a nuisance for your colleagues who have to deal with you're poor upload. There's also the fact that there might be other people working from home going to the same cabinet increasing contention on the line.
With one kid and two of us working from home, our 2-3mb upload was seriously problematic. What about 4/5G networks in the area? https://forums.bit-tech.net/index.p...nd-tribulations-of-wireless-broadband.341972/
Have you tried tslking to Openreach, to see if they can connect the house to the other green cabinet? I don't know if it is something they will do but, may be worth a try.
Thanks all for your responses, and thanks Mister_Tad for the link I've just read all your posts and trying to get my head round it! Yeah, I hadn't really considered 4G networks (which are pretty good), no 5g unfortunately. After a bit of google-fu I did find quite a few other people who have asked the question about changing cabinet but no-one has been successful in doing so. Seems so stupid that two houses next to each other have hugely different speeds.
A decent internet connection, in this day and age, is akin to expecting reliable/stable water and electricity. If no outlook for improvement in the near future, I'd have to seriously consider passing. You would likely struggle if working from home, I have around 20Mb upload and even that can be a pain saving down larger files on the network.
I always had a rule when renting that I had to be able to get Virign cable because of the shocking state of ADSL at the time. When I bought our current house we couldn't get Virgin but I was able to get 80Mb so only a bit of downgrade really (highly recommend Zen btw). I personally wouldn't move anywhere with crummy internet. I use it for a good chunk of the day everyday so any flakey or slow speeds would drive me mad eventually.
Agreed. We are with Sky currently getting 60/20 and that is more than sufficient. I do miss my old 200/50 virgin connection (mainly due to ePeen) but in reality it doesn't make much difference in my use case of gaming, streaming and working from home. Wiring the house with Cat6 is the best thing I have done. Only phones, a single xbox and sky use the wifi range so its relatively uncongested.
There are other options for internet - 4G, fixed wireless, satellite, negotiating with your neighbour to install another line and use that. All with caveats, but all temporary at the end of the day. So think of it this way: how do you feel about the other options for houses? It's a lot easier to work around a solution for internet than it is moving to somewhere you didn't really want to move to just because it has better internet. So IMO, and bluntly, yes. Of course internet is a consideration, but it's one of a thousand when moving house and throwing something that's otherwise "right" out the window for something that has so many ways to work around is daft.
Normally I would agree, but if he relies on internet to bring home the bacon, then surely it has to go way up the list of priorities. If there's a backup where its possible to return to the office if the internet turns out to not be usable, star link or some other alternative is in place then by all means go for the house. One suggestion would be to look into setting a QoS policy on your current internet to give you a similar bandwidth and see how it goes for a few days doing actual work on it, then you will actually see how it is. Maybe it'll be fine
