I switched my home connection from a fixed line to a cellular home broadband service for eight months, partly because the fixed line was poor and partly out of curiosity.
The results were clearly better in some respects and worse in ways that took a while to become apparent.
What was better
Raw download speed, substantially. Considerably faster than the copper line it replaced, and available immediately with no installation.
Setup, which took ten minutes and involved plugging in a device and finding the best position for it.
Cost, which was comparable and included no line rental.
And portability, which turned out to be genuinely useful. The device works anywhere with coverage, which meant it came with me for a month working elsewhere.
What was worse
Consistency, which is the thing that actually determines whether a connection feels good.
Speeds varied enormously by time of day. Evening performance was a fraction of morning performance, because radio capacity is shared and everybody is online at once.
A fixed line degrades far less at peak, because the contention happens further upstream and there is more capacity to share.
Latency was higher and more variable, which affected video calls noticeably and anything interactive more than anything else.
And weather had a perceptible effect, which I had not expected and which is real at higher frequencies.
The upload asymmetry
The specific limitation that mattered most for my work.
Cellular networks are heavily optimised for download, because that is what most consumer traffic is.
Upload speeds were a small fraction of download and were the first thing to degrade under contention.
For anybody doing video calls, uploading large files, running anything hosted at home, or backing up to the cloud, this is the constraint that matters, and it is rarely prominent in the marketing.
The technical details that determine the experience
Things I learned that would have helped at the start.
Device placement matters enormously. Moving the receiver to a window on the correct side of the building roughly doubled my throughput. An external antenna would have improved it further.
Band selection matters, and some devices allow locking to a specific band, which can produce a slower but far more stable connection.
Network address translation on carrier networks means you generally do not have a public address, which prevents hosting anything or connecting in from outside without a relay service.
And data policies vary. Some plans are genuinely unlimited, some have fair use thresholds after which speeds are reduced, and the threshold is frequently not prominently stated.
Who it suits
Having done it, I have a reasonably clear view.
It suits anybody whose fixed line options are poor, which is a large population and the group it was designed for. A cellular connection that averages moderate speeds beats a copper line that manages very little.
It suits people who move, or who need a connection quickly, or who want a backup line that fails independently of the fixed infrastructure.
It suits light to moderate use — browsing, streaming, ordinary work.
Who it does not
Households with heavy simultaneous use, where the evening contention becomes the defining experience.
Anybody dependent on upload capacity.
Anybody who needs consistent low latency, including competitive gaming and a lot of professional video work.
And anybody who needs to host something or connect in remotely, which the addressing arrangement makes awkward.
What I did in the end
Went back to a fixed connection when fibre became available in the street, which resolved the comparison decisively.
Kept the cellular device as a backup, which has been used twice during fixed line outages and has justified itself on those two occasions.
That combination — fibre primary, cellular failover — is what I would recommend to anybody who works from home, and it costs considerably less than the disruption of a day without a connection.
Data caps and the small print
The detail worth checking before switching, since terms vary considerably.
Plans described as unlimited frequently include a fair use threshold beyond which speeds are reduced, and the threshold is not always stated prominently.
Some prioritise fixed wireless traffic below mobile traffic during congestion, which is a reasonable engineering decision and explains evening performance.
And some restrict use to a registered address, with the device ceasing to work elsewhere, which matters if portability was part of the appeal.
All three are in the terms and none is usually in the advertising.
Using it as a failover
The arrangement I ended up with, and the one I would recommend to anybody working from home.
A cellular device kept as a secondary connection, either plugged in permanently to a router that supports automatic failover, or kept ready to tether.
Fixed line outages are not rare and tend to last hours rather than minutes, and for anybody whose work stops without a connection the cost of one outage exceeds a year of a cheap data plan.
The key requirement is that the failover path is genuinely independent — a different physical infrastructure — which cellular is and a second fixed line frequently is not.
Testing it
A failover that has never been tested is a hope. Unplugging the primary connection once a quarter takes two minutes and establishes whether it actually works.