Janet’s mum is 91 and I would like her to be able to Apple-Facetime Janet somehow. She is ~450 miles away and we never get to see her because of my health.
She is possibly never going to use the web because she won’t know how. She is very intelligent.
The options are: put in some ADSL for her or use 3G or 4G, give her an iPad or an iPhone.
I think the iPhone thing would be a bit rubbish because it is a small screen and fiddly for fingers, plus janet has got an old one but it is pretty knackered, difficult to turn on because I think the Apple button on it is semi-knackered. So not helpful for someone who is 91. Plus the fact that it has a piddly small screen is not great for Facetime.
I have a spare iPad 5 which unfortunately has no 3G NIC in it.
As for internet connectivity, I am sure the 3G and 4G is a disaster in her flat, on the evidence of multiple coverage maps. The large village / small town of Eccleshall in Staffordshire is in a coverage black spot with Three and EE, especially as the southern half is concerned. According to maps there is precious little 3G or 4G outdoor coverage on her road, so no chance indoors.
So let’s say I put in a wireless LAN inside her flat:
* I can feed the LAN from a DSL line. FTTC is available delivering >62 Mbps downstream but could be rather more if lucky. Her flat is right in the village anyway, not rural.
Can anyone remind me what the typical upstream cap / speed split is on a BT Wholesale FTTC line that is capped at 40Mbps downstream? Is that how it works, cap at 40 Mbps or BTW charge the ISP more?
Magenta codelook telecom-tariffs.co.uk says 343 m to Cabinet P2 (from what?). I can't imagine for the life of me how it can be that far, because according to their map, the cab is in the same street and the whole street is really small.
I have no idea how to find the page that shows a map with FTTC cabs on it. I found it by accident in the end after no end of attempts and I don't know how I did it. I followed a link from a page in a kitz post that took me to totally the wrong town of course but then somehow managed to overwrite various fields with the correct details.
Perhaps someone could help and tell me how to use the stupid site properly, tell me exactly what I should have been doing in the first place?
This is all well and good, but then I have the cost of a DSL line every month. I am not sure I can afford this as I am not working due to ill-health.
* The second option I thought of might be a bit dodgy but could be incredibly cheap. Feed the wireless LAN by 3G or 4G.
I already have a 4G firewall-router that has 2.4 GHz wireless access point built into it, made by Solwise. It has a SIM in it for the AA + AQL service on the Three network. It only gets 3G on that service, for god only knows what reason. I got it with an upgrade antenna on a long-ish cable. It routes packets between 3G/4G and the wireless LAN that it publishes. I have tested it and it works ucely, but I have not got round to using it much.
So that would mean no setup costs and no monthly costs as the AA SIM costs next to nothing apart from a per byte charge for traffic. Now if I can get any signal from a window somewhere then I might be onto a winner.
I would also have to make my iPad 5 easy to use for her so she can fire up Facetime simply and possibly use the web too if she could learn. That would mean she could get deliveries and benefit from internet shopping for things she cannot get at the Coop supermarket down the street. However, the added benefit of this is relatively somewhat limited since she can already get anything she wants from the web by just asking Janet to buy it on the web for her, but she of course cannot see what is available on the web with her own eyes.
A problem: I have a big problem with upstream bandwidth at both ends, but particularly at this end. I can only manage 1.2 Mbps total upstream over my triple ADSL2 pipe here and so that limits the quality of the entire thing when using something symmetrical such as Facetime.
However, at this end Janet could alternatively use 3G in the house here (very good 4G is available here, but on EE, not on AA + Three) so that would remove a bottleneck at the cost of doubling the per-byte costs because it would be over a mobile network at both ends and AA charges per byte for 3G.
At Janet’s mum’s end an ADSL2+ connection would be a waste of time because the upstream is so awful, so it would have to be FTTC at slightly higher cost.
Regarding DSL, I think there are three prices: ADSL2+, FTTC capped at 40Mbps and FTTC with no cap. I am not sure what the upstream would be for the middle option, does anyone know? I suspect that these are maybe BT deals passed on to the ISP?
I also need to get someone to visit, firstly someone to install a router, and secondly someone else to do some iPad training.
Could I get some local professional to do the physical installation of a router? For the DSL plan, it means someone plugging in a wireless modem-router of some sort. That will be pre-configured so nothing to do apart from park the kit somewhere.
Does anyone have any helpful suggestions in general?