I had a Disney+ sub which I hardly used so I cancelled it along with several others I kept out of sheer inertia.
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.
Yet the fiber costs at least 50 Euro/month. So it only makes sense to get broadband if it is shared by 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.
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.
Between line rental and dsl costs you'd struggle to get it that cheap through a landline, even ignoring the fact you still need mobile data.
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.
Have you actually tried to use this?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
The reality is mobile data can cover your minimal internet requirements in the UK.
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).
This also assumes that people don't need to transfer significant quantities of data on a regular basis for whatever reason.
This article is about people living UK, which a much smaller country that has much better mobile coverage.
Um, I live 2km from the Google headquarters and I have zero cell reception in my apartment. That's the state of technology in 2023 for you.
Yes, I need broadband and Wi-Fi to do anything at home.
It isn't necessary for everyone to be able to do this to get headlines, and logic, like this.