Now we have an EE WiFi Hotspot

Fibre
Image by Joshua Kimsey from Pixabay

The UK telecommunications giant, BT acquired EE for £12.5bn in 2016. Last year BT said the BT brand will take a back seat as it will make EE its flagship brand in the consumer market.

A change in the way we take our brands to market. We have to be more focused and more efficient. We are evolving from today’s approach in the consumer market where BT and EE both take centre stage, to one where a flagship brand will lead our approach to future innovation, convergence, and services beyond connectivity.

When I was in London last week I noted that a BT WiFi hotspot I had used before was now an EE WiFi hotspot. I could still log in using my BT Broadband credentials.

When I got home I noticed that BT have reconfigured our router so that it is now broadcasting the EE WiFi SSID.

Not sure what difference this makes.

Roaming in Amsterdam

I was off to Amsterdam for a few days for a conference at the RAI conference centre.

Following some issues with roaming in Spain in 2022 I have been a little concerned about travelling abroad and if I would have connectivity issues. After Spain though, I had travelled to Ireland and Germany and both times everything just worked. However the last time I went abroad, in the summer to Portugal, I had a few issues when roaming with excessive data usage on my iPhone.

have a Three contract with unlimited calls, unlimited texts, and unlimited data. As this is a pre-October 2021 contract I am able to use all those allowances when roaming, but there is a 12GB fair use limit. On all my previous visits abroad, before Portugal, I have never come close to reaching that limit.

In Portugal I reached 80% of my 12GB limit within the first twenty four hours. Back then, I turned off mobile data and then I went into Settings -> Mobile Data and turned off all the apps which could use mobile data. There were a lot of apps.

So when I flew to Amsterdam last week, whilst I was on the plane went into Settings -> Mobile Data and turned off virtually all the apps which could use mobile data. Took me a while as there were a fair few. I turned off mobile data for virtually all my apps and also specifically iCloud Drive and iCloud Backup. I am pretty sure they were the culprits for my excessive data usage whilst in Spain.

I then reset the mobile data usage statistics. So when I came back to the UK I could check how much data I had used.

Schiphol Airport had free WiFi, so I could use that in the airport whilst I had a ninety minute wait to get through passport control.

Now I was lucky that the hotel and conference venue had good WiFi, and even Schiphol Airport’s WiFi was good. So there was less reliance on using my mobile data. 

When I was walking around Amsterdam away from the hotel and the conference venue, I did turn on mobile data for specific apps that I wanted to use, finance and travel apps for example.

After arriving back in the UK I checked the mobile data usage statistics I had used whilst roaming in the Netherlands from Tuesday to Friday.

It was 1.4GB and 1.4GB is a lot less than the 12GB fair use allowance I have.  So was pleased with that. I never felt I was limited in how I used mobile data abroad, as when I did need to use an app, I just turned on mobile data for it. I was lucky in having decent WiFi, so that did make a difference.

Uninstalling Wireless NIC on the iMac

Back in November 2020 following the installation of FTTP I did buy a TP-Link Archer T3U AC1300 mini wireless adapter for my iMac which was too far away to be cabled to the router. 

This though was no faster than the built in Airport card, however I could use it on my MacBook which had a slower card and I have managed to achieve speeds in excess of 400Mbps, but not quite the 800Mbps I was hoping for.

In the menu bar though on the iMac was the remnants of the Wireless NIC installation. I never really worried about it, and clicking it just told me the TP-Link Archer T3U AC1300 mini wireless NIC wasn’t installed. I knew that.

However I did recently decide to see if I could remove it from the menu bar.

What you need to do is hold the Option key when clicking the icon in the menu bar, and then you get the following menu item.

So I clicked Uninstall USB-WiFi.

I was presented with a confirmation screen.

I clicked Yes.

I now no longer have the wireless NIC icon in my menu bar and the driver is no longer installed as well.

WiFi on the trains, no more

Elizabeth Line train

It is looking like that, as part of a plan to save money, train operating companies will be getting rid of the wifi. I have blogged about train wifi quite a bit in the past, I wrote this blog post in 2010.

I did wonder why CrossCountry Trains didn’t put in wifi as you find on the East Coast Main Line services and Virgin Trains Pendolino. Well it appears that providing wifi was part of their Franchise agreement with the Department of Transport. CrossCountry Trains was suppose to have wifi in place by November 11th 2009. They failed to meet this deadline!

I also asked about the lack of train wifi on First Great Western (now GWR).

My question though is much more, why isn’t there wifi on First Great Western services from the West Country to London and why wasn’t it in their franchise agreement? I travel with First Great Western much more than I do CrossCountry and would really like it if they had wifi.

Eventually both companies put wifi on their trains. I did use the train wifi, but the constant disconnections, or failed attempts to connect authenticate, often meant, either no internet, or falling back on my phone’s data connection.

Of course, though I didn’t always use the wifi, others did. However, the BBC published an article recently that said train wi-fi at risk as part of cost-cutting move.

Rail users could lose access to wi-fi on trains in England as part of cost cuts after the government said it was a low priority for passengers. The Department for Transport says cost pressures mean it will review whether the current wi-fi service “delivers the best possible value for money”.

Most times I travel by train these days I am more likely to use my own 4G or 5G connection as I still find train wifi unreliable. However I still think it should be on trains for those that don’t have their mobile connectivity.

I had forgotten…

Having spent virtually all of the last eighteen months working from home, I have had the luxury of my FTTP connection, with 1Gb/s download speed and an upload speed of 100Mb/s.

However for a few weeks now I have been venturing to the office in Bristol. The connection in the office is usually fine, however I had forgotten what the experience was like using internet and 4G in a coffee shop was like. Having ventured to Coffee #1 near Queen’s Square in Bristol I was struggling with my 4G personal hotspot, so much so I had to switch to The Cloud free wifi.

I had forgotten how bad and unreliable 4G can be in an urban environment. I had been spoilt with my home broadband reliability and speed.

Having said that, the coffee was great and it was really nice to have a change of scenery and routine.

Okay, let’s test the speed…

I’ve had my FTTP connection for over a month now, and I am chuffed with the reliability as well as the speed.

However though some of my devices directly connected to the router by cable can benefit from the 1Gb speed, most of the devices in my house are constrained by the speed of the wifi.

I did buy a TP-Link Archer T3U AC1300 mini wireless adapter for my iMac which is too far away to be cabled to the router.

This though was no faster than the built in Airport card, however I could use it on my MacBook which had a slower card and I have managed to achieve speeds in excess of 400Mbps, but not quite the 800Mbps I was hoping for.

My MacBook does not have an ethernet port so I have been unable to test a wired speed for the fibre connection. I bought an USB Network Adapter Syncwire USB 3.0 to RJ45 Gigabit Ethernet.

I did look for a Thunderbolt 2 to Ethernet adapter which I had used before with my MacBook but they were a lot more expensive.

It was plug and play (which I like and wasn’t the case with the TP-Link adapter) and connected my MacBook to the router via cable and tested the speed.

I was very impressed to get in excess of 800Mb/s via the wired connection.

I never thought I would see the day when my home internet access was constrained by the speed of my wireless network, how things change.

Weak French Connection

Having recently gone on holiday I wasn’t that surprised to find, as I did the previous year, poor 4G speeds whilst on the campsite in France.

Over the last few months we thought we wouldn’t be going on holiday at all because of Covid-19 and the lockdown. We had thought about going away in the UK, we looked at York but it was proving expensive and things we wanted to do weren’t open. At the end of July we checked a few sites and found that we could book a Eurocamp holiday relatively cheaply, especially compared to the UK holidays we had been looking at. We did wonder about the impact of Covid-19, but the story in France appeared to be less risky than in the UK! So we booked the holiday and five days we were driving down to Folkestone to catch the Eurotunnel.

As we entered France, thank you EU roaming legislation as my Three account easily connected to a French network. I recovered the obligatory SMS from Three which stated that I could use my allowances in France as though I was in the UK. I have an unlmited calls, text and data plan, however I was limited to a 20GB limit on data. We were only in France for six days so I thought that should be okay.

We were staying at the La Croix Du Vieux Pont campsite and though the phone said I had a good 4G signal, alas the speeds were nothing to text home about.

In the morning the connection wasn’t too bad, but by early evening the connection was not just poor, but intermittent as well. I did an (unscientific) speed test and you can see I was struggling to get more than 3Mbps download speeds on 4G.

I am guessing partly that the issue was, we were in a somewhat rural location. When we visited Paris, though I didn’t use my phone much, I think the connection was much better (which was to be expected).

The campsite, in theory, had wifi, but this wasn’t very good either by our caravan. In the first half of the week we could connect to the wifi for free, but this was “fixed” by the second half, where we would have to pay. So we became dependent on the 4G connection.

This was critical towards the end of the holiday as we had to fill in an online UK government form before we got back to the UK. We did manage this, but using the connection for anything apart from e-mail or basic web browsing was out of the question.

It was interesting to see that we could get 4G in the Eurotunnel, I had assumed that this wouldn’t be possible, but it worked, partly because we had already switched and connected to the French mobile phone network, so we remained on that as we went through the tunnel.

Top Ten Blog Posts 2018

Over the last twelve months I have published 19 posts.

The post at number ten was from ten years ago, and contained a (now deleted) YouTube video on the new Skyfire browser for your Windows smartphone or PDA. Skyfire discontinued its Skyfire Web Browser in 2014.

The post at nine was now a rather dated post from ten years ago about how Scrabble’s owners were going to sue Scrabulous.

The eight most popular post was another ten year old post which was about when Apple was offering some free TV shows on iTunes.

The seventh post was from 2012 when my HP Photosmart printer died. My printer is dead! was a sorry tale about how replacing the ink cartridges on the HP B110a resulted it in destroying the print head.

The post at number six was Comic Book Fonts which was about the amazing comic book fonts from Comic Book Fonts.

The post at number five was wondering Where are my Comic Life Styles? I found them.

The fourth most popular post was about the free wifi (or lack of) on my holiday, Haven no wifi.

Polaroid Pogo printer

The post at three was about Dusting off the Pogo my old Polaroid Bluetooth pocket printer. Still going strong.

The second post was about when my iMac Fusion Drive Failed and had to have it replaced.

So the most popular post on the blog was my post about QR codes on chocolate bars, Cadbury QR Coding and Twirling was published in 2015 and was one of many posts I published on the use of QR codes back then.

Cadbury Twirl Bites QR Code

Where did my hotspot allowance go?

checking my e-mail

When I got my iPhone 6S Plus in 2015, I got a new phone contract and moved providers. The SIM only contract was with Three and came with unlimited data. However this was unlimited on the phone only, there was an allowance for hotspot, which was only 4GB. This was initially problematic as at home we had a very poor ADSL connection, so I would use the hotspot quite often when I was frustrated with my poor connectivity. As a result I would need to keep an eye on my usage. Quite often I would run out. 4GB was generally fine for simple browsing or e-mail, but would quickly run out if I was streaming video.

I did think about increasing the allowance, but the packages available weren’t cheap. Today Three’s unlimited data contract has a 30GB hotspot allowance. Why don’t I upgrade? Well my contract is just £17 a month, the current unlimited data contract is now £30 a month. However since my home broadband was upgraded to fibre I’ve stopped using the hotspot feature at home, reserving it for trips and visits, again mainly for browsing and e-mail. The 4GB allowance has been fine for this kind of internet activity.

A recent trip away to Glasgow made me aware to still carefully check my usage. I was away staying at the Premier Inn which came with free wifi. According to the blurb the free version of the wifi was for browsing and e-mail and the Ultimate version of the wifi was for streaming. Testing the free wifi, I found it worked fine for streaming Netflix. So there I was watching my favourite TV shows on the iPad and though the free wifi wasn’t brilliant, it was working. As I watched the next episode I found the quality had improved, this is alright I thought. Then another episode…

Then I got a SMS from Three saying I had nearly used my hotspot allowance. I was confused, it was only five days since it had reset. Where had my allowance gone? I then noticed that my iPad wasn’t connected to the hotel wifi it was now connected to my iPhone’s hotspot.

What happened was that previously at the Airport I had connected my laptop to the hotspot, but hadn’t turned it off. My iPad was connected to the hotel wifi, however that connection must have stopped or dropped and then the iPad found and connected to the hotspot network automatically. So when the hotel wifi came back it didn’t re-connect. So the quality of the Netflix stream had improved because of the new connection… the downside was that it sucked up all of my hotspot allowance.

Will I upgrade, no, because it was an error and though it may happen again, I am quite content with a 4GB limit.

Tech Stuff: Top Ten Blog Posts of 2017

Over the last twelve months I have published 26 posts, many of these were about my return to fibre. So it is nice to see that the tenth most popular post on the blog this year was from nearly a year ago.  We will have fibre in “12 months”!  I said back then that according to BT Openreach we would have fibre within twelve months, I was slightly sceptical, but nine months after publishing that post I did get fibre.

new fibre cabinet 25

The ninth post was about when my iMac Fusion Drive Failed and had to have it replaced.

The post at number eight was another post about my fibre journey, Still checking… was when the cabinet was activated, but alas wasn’t accepting orders.

The seventh post was from 2012 when my HP Photosmart printer died. My printer is dead! was a sorry tale about how replacing the ink cartridges on the HP B110a resulted it in destroying the print head.

The post at six was about  Dusting off the Pogo my old Polaroid Bluetooth pocket printer. Still going strong.

Polaroid Pogo printer

The fifth post was how I don’t like BT FON which was originally published in 2011.

The post at number four was wondering Where are my Comic Life Styles? I found them.

The third most popular post was about the free wifi (or lack of) on my holiday, Haven no wifi

The post at number two was Comic Book Fonts which was about the amazing comic book fonts from Comic Book Fonts.

So the most popular post on the blog was my post about QR codes on chocolate bars,  Cadbury QR Coding and Twirling was published in 2015 and was one of many posts I published on the use of QR codes back then.

Cadbury Twirl Bites QR Code