News Virgin unveils plans for mobile masts at home

Exactly what is needed. Some people have slight signal problems, and crank the wifi power to the max, and then their neighbours do the same, and so on...

Very good point.

 

Surely a better solution would be to allow the use of the "A" wifi variant over here so we can expand out of the very small wifi band.

Here in a not densely populated part of town every wifi channel (1,6,11) has at least 3 APs on it plus the one person helpfully straddling 1 & 6 by using channel 3. At least using the A band would give us a greater number of channels.

 

Indeed, I've got the same problem. The wifi signal was terrible and it randomly overheats. We've got our "Super" hub set to modem only mode, with a separate wifi router and gigabit switch..

I don't see how HSPA could help anyone if you've already got 50Mbit cable and wifi.

 

Guess me and my friends must be lucky, none of us have ever had any bother with ours and are a huge improvement over the old wireless router that constantly needed resetting.

 

What do you mean "allow" the use of the "A" wifi variant? If by "over here" you mean in the UK, then the use of 802.11a wifi (which is what I guess you mean by the "A" wifi variant), which runs in the 5 GHz band rather than the 2.4 GHz of 802.11b/g is permitted and not unusual. 802.11n specifies both 2.4 and 5 GHz and can run in either band or, using a simultaneous dual band router, in both.

 

Why would people want this. WIFI is better. Just to note that in areas that have a lot of wifirouters there is a lot of devices on the same channel. In my case I changed the router to channel 8 as it was not used so much around the area.

 

Things must run different enough over there that this could work, but over here, my monthly internet bill would run me into the tens of thousands on a plan like that.

Here you pay per device and most providers only give you 2gigs per month of bandwidth (overages can be as high as $100 per gig!). Even if I wasn't charged per device, I still need a way to connect my devices, being 4G that means a wwan card in everything. Most run about $100, so one for each laptop and desktop, and if you set them down wrong or they fall, they can easily be broken.

Just browsing the web doesn't require a 100Mbit connection, a large part of the internet's servers cannot flow that, and that is before you count other traffic. As for the wifi, you have the 5k band which from what I have seen is nearly empty, as are the oddball 2.4 channels.

Another (major!) problem here is that every carrier uses a different, non-compatible spectrum, so you can't buy a generic card or phone like you can over there. If you switch carriers here, you typically need a new cell phone/wwan card. In other words, if you try building it into laptops, the laptop will only work on one or two carriers.

 

This is true, I got bitten by a radioactive wireless home mast and turned into a Wi - Fly

 

I don't get the point of all this when you can just plug in your own Wi-Fi router to your cable and have perfectly fast wi-fi for no additional costs other than what the router costs you.

 

apparently the issue is people are using all their smartphones, tablets, laptops and desktops simultaneously saturating the 50mbps connection, so an extra wifi router won't help. The chances of a household using that many devices at once all requiring high bandwidth is minimal. In Australia were lucky to get around 10-15mbps and I've not once heard of connection saturation issues due to the increase of wifi devices in the home..

 

Virgin isn't claiming the broadband connection is saturated, they are saying wifi is saturated, Too many devices on the same channels.

Another problem Virgin's solution ignores is home servers.
I know "The Cloud!". F the cloud, it's nothing but an over hyped server.

 

Exactly, which is less likely to be a problem in less densely populated areas like many parts of Australia - even in the major cities, residential areas are largely in sprawling suburbs. Wifi congestion is a major problem in densely populated areas like city centre tower blocks, which is why building engineers and wifi device manufacturers need to improve matters. Just by putting a layer of foil between floors in a building (likely to be different dwellings on different wifi networks) it is possible hugely to reduce the penetration of wifi signals up and downwards through the building. And wifi routers that automatically and dynamically adjust their power output to provide just enough signal strength to ensure a reliable connection for connected devices without unnecessarily polluting nearby airspace would go a long way to helping the situation.

 

Can't you put the superhub into Bride Mode these days and then patch whatever router you want into it?

 

Yeah, it's called "modem mode", pretty easy to find and it seems to work fine.

 

I don't get it.
I use the far cheaper WLAN at home, and Wifi outside...
So installing wifi at home wouldn't be for me, just for passers-by.

 

normal g is 54mb (25mb usable bandwith some times higher with Turbo wifi routers and wifi supported devices),
N is 65-150-300 speeds (affective speeds of 30-70-90to130 this is best case, normaly you get higher when standing 2-3 meters away from the router and both devices are working correctly with the Dual N standard)

 

Throw in cell network congestion, internet traffic, server congestion and server connection and odds are you won't see 100mb on 4g either most of the time.



It's an answer to a problem that doesn't really exist in large amounts, and where it does exist, there are better and cheaper solutions.

 

wifi in house seems ok most mobile devices do not need more then 2mb/s (200-300KB/s) for most stuff and norm only used in short bursts, media streaming uses more bandwith in my house then any thing els (PS3)

 

This is a good point. Homebuilders could help matters a lot by running CAT5 to each room in the house so that equipment other than mobile devices (desktop PCs, laptop base stations or laptops that are rarely moved, HTPCs, consoles, network streaming boxes, "smart" TVs, network connected home cinema amps, internet radios, etc.) can be connected by wired ethernet where appropriate, freeing up the limited wireless bandwidth for mobile devices. So many people I know run things wirelessly just because there is no available cable connection. Heck some people just run everything wirelessly anyway - case in point, I have a friend whose PS3 sits next to his router and was connected wirelessly just because he couldn't be bothered with a cable. We switched to wired networking and bam! his latency dropped and bandwidth rose markedly.

 

I put an network cable under the floor from my room to the main room where the tv is so its ready for when we go broadband only for tv (legal or not)