Without Internet

[Marvo]

I was looking at a thread about how many devices people have connected to their WiFi and got to wondering. Firstly how reliable are your internet connections ie how often do they go down and generally how long for? Secondly what is the impact on your life if your internet at home fails. Are the devices that are connected to your WiFi important or are they trivial distractions you can easily live without and are they still working fine if there's no internet connection?

Where I am internet reliability isn't great we have maybe an outage every few months and usually it's for a day, sometimes more. The most inconvenient thing in my life is lack of banking login which i only access using a laptop at home. It's a relatively minor inconvenience because I just hotspot with my phone and use mobile data instead. We don't have any IoT devices, no smart home gadgets and our TV works with an old fashioned roof antenna and coax connection as well as an offline PC next to it that's set up as a media server with 10TB storage so even that still works as normal. I guess the kids are affected more with no games and no social media but I'm not losing sleep.

 

[littlespark]

I think the UK, even in rural community’s, the internet is very reliable. Most of it is now fibre, buried under the ground. Very few overhead phone lines now with a risk of coming down in strong winds.

We particularly don’t have anything that is fully reliant on an internet connection. It may be an option, such as cctv, smart switches etc…. But they can still operate without the internet.

Even if our main house internet goes down for whatever reason, all our phones have 4G.

An individual device might lose Wi-Fi every now and again, but I think that’s down to conflict between IP addresses
I’ve got 170 odd historical devices trying to share 253 possible addresses.

My kids aren’t big gamers, so I don’t know how they would react if the internet died mid-game… but I think they would be sensible enough to not be distraught over it.
Anything else online will still be there tomorrow, or next week.

 

[snowhead]

My broadband is via BT overhead fibre,with EE Smart hub and TV etc.
If my incoming fibre connection fails then the EE Smart hub connects to 5G until the fibre reconnects.
The nearest 5G mast is 50mtrs from my house..

I don't have anything dependent on an internet connection

 

[ferg]

Mobile signal is very weak where I am and ADSL was <2 meg
Fiber was going to be >£50K to get to the house.
The sky dish was always acting up when the weather was rubbish.
No 4G back up on phones.
Managed to get a hit and miss connection using a 4G router with an external antennae.
I'm a PC gamer and the wife streams T.V.
The ADSL and 4G would drop out every few months sometimes for weeks.

No access to online software, banking gaming or reliable T.V.

Now use Starlink, it's bombproof fast and reliable.
Ditched the ADSL, landline and 4G contract.
No access to online software and banking, inability to get phone calls at home etc was a real PITA.
Also Grumpiness when no tv or gaming available

 

[brianmoooore]

500Mbps via overhead fibre to the middle of nowhere. Normally 100% reliable, apart from about two years ago when an over height vehicle snagged the cable where it crossed a main road about a mile away, cutting off me and six other properties. No damage to the poles - just needed a couple of hundred metres of new fibre spliced in, but it took Openreach over a month to get it done.
Got through about £30 of 'emergency' data on my phone, using it as a hotspot, the first weekend, streaming Grand Prix, but then received a free BT 4G hotspot device for the rest of the outage. This satisfied my personal needs, but there was no way (that I know of) to connect it to my LAN and serve the IAPs around the place.
The £400 compensation made up for it though.