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DevonBloke

28-03-2014

It's not "including 3G".
All home signal boxes ONLY broadcast 3G. They don't do 2G at all. In fact that would be completely pointless on the Three network anyway now.
Going back to your initial confusion of how they "send texts", as someone said, when you are outside on the main network, you send texts over 3G as well.
3G is still (currently) the most versatile technology out of 2G, 3G and 4G.
2G is pretty much voice and text only (please, no pedantic replies to this : )
4G is currently data only.
But 3G can do voice, text and data AND all at the same time.

As far as I can remember a voice call over 3G only uses about 64Kbps so your 4Mbps broadband won't even notice!

DevonBloke

28-03-2014

Originally Posted by Gari P:
“I have a Three homesignal (the black NEC variety)

Although it is better than the 0-1 bars of unreliable 2100 signal from the nearest 3 mast, it does have its own issues, in my experience.

There is a slight, but noticeable delay on voice calls and I often find I end up talking over the other person and vice versa. I suspect this is because of it using consumer grade ADSL as backhaul to Three's core network as opposed to low latency fibre links / leased lines.

The other thing is that data through the homesignal box is very ropey. Often it doesn't work and when it does you get timeouts. Only when I leave the homesignal coverage and onto real coverage I start to get e-mail push notifications from Outlook and so on.

Before someone asks why would I want to use data through it, well the answer is ... believe it or not, not everyone has wi-fi. My network and router is wired.”

You may find this useful.
I had the delay problem but I also had calls breaking up if my broadband was being used heavily as well. This is because I only have a 1.8 Meg connection.
On some advice on this forum I changed my router for a Zyxel model that has QOS (quality of service) settings.
I set up a couple of QOS queues, one with high priority for the EE Signal Box and one with low priority for everything else.
The result is no broken calls (even if I max out the download and upload simultaneously) AND the delay has disappeared!
Result!

qasdfdsaq

28-03-2014

Originally Posted by DevonBloke:
“As far as I can remember a voice call over 3G only uses about 64Kbps so your 4Mbps broadband won't even notice!”

Actually it's closer to 16Kbps (including overheads). The actual codec uses about ~12Kbps even in HD mode.

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