Checking you have 4G/5G signal in your area

Why signal check?

Before you choose your equipment it’s important to first understand how strong your signal will be.

This is an important step as locations in poor signal areas will require a higher level of kit than those in good signal strength areas.

Plug & Play Broadband kit: As always, if you would like to skip all these steps you can do so by purchasing one of our plug and play off grid broadband kits. Click here for details. If you would like to carry on and go it alone, no problem just keep reading

It’s also important to understand which service providers offer the best signal in your area. Knowing this will allow you to select the best package whether a Pay as you Go sim or a sim only contract.

Service providers are the very same companies who provide a service to your celluar phone. Don’t be disheartened if you currently receive poor signal on your celluar phone as this can be as a result of many factors, many of which can be resolved with the right equipment and choice of network.

How do you 4G & 5G signal check?

There a numerous online signal checks available. We would recomend signalchecker.co.uk. this is a free service that offers links directly to the service providers signal checks for even more detailed results. We have found SignalChecker.co.uk to be extremly reliable and accurate.

Simply enter the postcode of the location you wish to run signal checks for, press go and you will see instant results for all major service providers in the UK.

4G and 5G signal

You will require 4G signal to receive broadband speeds. We have found 4G speeds to average at approximately 30mbs in the UK. This is more than enough to stream tv such as Netflix or Sky which will usually be the most demanding test of your home broadband.

5G is still in its early stages of rollout across the UK. It offers speeds even greater than 4G, in fact the speeds will be 10x’s that of 4G. This makes it faster than most fibre optic connection offered to homes in the UK and looks likely to become the new norm for all properties in the future.

5G connections

As 5G is still quite new to the market there is limited hardware available to support it. This means relatively high equipment cost in comparison to 4G. We will discuss this further in our Hardware Selection step but at this point we would recommend you prioritise a good 4G connection when selecting your network.

Poor indoors signal?

So you have run the signal checks and it returns mixed results. In some cases it states “poor indoor signal” What does this mean?

Poor indoor signal tends to indicate two things. Either you have interference at your location, meaning signal strength is severely hampered entering your building

or the buildings in the area do not lend themselves to signal entry.

The good news is that this is easily resolved with the use of an external antenna. For more information on antenna’s go to our External antenna selection step