ISP Reviews by Bitster

I live in a good Three signal area and have always preferred the flexibility of Mobile Broadband (MBB) over wired landline installations like ADSL.

I have a £12 a month 3G Three Mifi, capped at 20GB a month, but this soon gets eaten up with Netflix and the Amazon FireStick chomping through my allowance.

Three have been offering their Unlimited HomeFi for £22 a month, so I took the plunge and phoned for an upgrade.

Homefi (Huawei B311 Lite) arrived two days later, installation consisted of taking the SIM out of the MiFi and sticking it in the HomeFi.

Result is between 40-50 Mb/s down, and 25 Mb/s up.

The Homefi B311 router has only one Ethernet port, though it's Gigabit. A £15 ethernet switch extends this if needed.

There's also a phone jack on the back which is not operative, as mentioned on the Three web page.

Wifi is 2.5Ghz only.

One complication is my Sipgate Basic VOIP phone package. The handset is a Grandstream GXP1400 with two lines (SIP accounts). This works very well with the HomeFi router, the proviso being that the SIP ALG feature has to be disabled in the Homefi. No other configuration is needed.

So far, so good. I haven't need Three's support but others are reporting billing errors for the first month, so it's wise to check your Three account when you're up and running.

I switch suppliers if they increase in contract prices, my broadband and line rental started out at £12 a month in 2010, it's now twice that.

So I migrated from my last provider and got an affiliate deal with the Post Office 'Unlimited Broadband' for £17 a month.

As my line had been ceased, the first order was cancelled by OpenReach, but a quick phone call to PO broadband got a new order placed. The line went live on the expected date. Phone service was quick and painless. There are order status updates on the web account page which seemd to update in real time.

There were no connection charges.

The PO broadband comes with 'SafeGuard' which can be tweaked from the account page. Parental controls seem to be good.

The PO router is currently a Zyxel AMG1302-T11C, which is easy to configure and has more accesible features than the ones from my last three providers. It's actually very good, but your own router can be used. Zyxel has 10/100 ethernet ports, and runs cool. It has no problems with VOIP phone services or my Amazon Fire TV stick.

My package is 'up to' 11 Mb/s. The line started at 10, and after a week, self-improved to 11.06 Mb/s. *

So far, the service is good, customer support were prompt, polite and very helpful on the phone, and I have no complaints. The contract is 12 months.

* Update. Now at 12.6 MB/s. :-)