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Comment by NicoJuicy | Hacker News Reader

> unreliable Internet across many parts of the country including all over large cities.

How unreliable is it?

It varies widely, but plenty of people have WiFi that disconnects every half hour or so and is generally glitchy and slow enough you couldn't have a video call over it.

Most of that is caused by cheap ISP routers, WiFi interference, and DSL lines which have 30 second gaps when the SNR margin goes negative and they resync.

Most people just struggle on using it anyway - hit refresh whenever a web page gives an error, say "hello, hello, can you hear me?" over phone calls, etc. They've never used internet that works 100% reliably, so they don't even know anything's wrong.

There are often problems at the ISP end too. Those who buy ‘super fast’ lines find that they’re super slow, glitchy or down during peak periods - the times they actually want to use them.

There are a few ISPs who concentrate much more on stable connections - Zen and AA, for example. Selling a high theoretical speed has been much easier than selling reliability. Hopefully this changes are more people need their video meetings to happen without interruption.

Can you believe that most homes in Manchester City Centre have no fiber or cable connection, for historical reasons? Most of the suburbs are cabled, but not the central district! Basically ISPs make so much money providing custom “pipes” to businesses, nobody can be bothered to connect residential dwellings. And this is the 2nd or 3rd largest city in England.

Over the past three weeks, it happened at least 3 or 4 times that all our employees on Virgin Media in London would loose access to the internet for at least half a day. That’s easily about 10-20 people all around London so you would expect them to be somehow separated in sub networks.

Wow, that's really nuts.

I'm already pretty mad that internet access wouldn't work for 5 minutes ( I think it happened a week a year ago between 01:00 and 01:02 at night).

( Belgium fyi)

I lived in a borough of London and was unable to get anything more than 1.7MB/s down and 100KB/s up without paying for FTTP...this was in an apartment block with ~20 apartments, sort of a new build

Soon you should be able to use one of the newer 5g offerings that work over the air. It might be worth checking this is not already an option for you in fact.

We're using 3s new 5g service and it's £25/month (2 year contract) for what they claim is 400mb/s download speed, although in practice it fluctuates a lot but is always > 100mb/s.

This 5g offerings (like three) are completely unreliable, we tested one in the office in the City as a backup connection and it will go down when it was raining heavily

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