No, I’d never heard of Hebron before writing this either. It’s in Northumberland and there’s less than a couple of hundred houses in the entire parish.
However, despite BT digging stuff up and putting a nice green street cabinet for “Superfast Broadband”, residents are still stuck in the slow lane due to their location and BT’s general inability to deliver. In August this year BT finished the cabinet installation, but nothing has improved. Residents have since placed a number of complaints with BT Openreach, but the service is still reliant on very long and very old copper lines. Andrew Kelly, a Parish Councillor, tells us that..
We rely on the copper cable that runs to the village for internet access. It often causes distortion and means residents have never had the luxury of high speed broadband.
Three UK have got wind of all this and have given residents a festive treat – a free broadband wireless router each. It’ll hook onto the local Three mobile transmitter and will then provide speedy WiFi locally. Each router comes loaded with free data which could keep residents online for up to one year. They require a mobile broadband SIM to work, but there are no lengthy installations required and up to 32 wireless devices can be connected at once.
The Three’s Home-Fi kit is ideal for anyone in a similar situation – just ensure that you can get a good strong Three signal first. Strangely though, even though we’ve got this lovely story, there’s no mention of these “Home-Fi” units anywhere on the their Mobile Broadband section or anywhere else. We’re guessing they’ve dished out some of these Huawei E5573 4G MiFi gadgets.
Update – We’ve since found that these routers are currently only available in Three UK stores and it’s actually the Huawei 8310 that is being given out. It’s in 135 stores nationwide in non-congested areas.