Working from Home when it’s stormy outside – Using 4G when Broadband is unavailable

Eunice blew me out the other week…along with several (thousand) others.
The eponymous storm screamed through the place like a Banshee… with a nasty case of wind.
As a result, I was reminded once again, of the importance of electricity in maintaining connectivity to work and how challenging it becomes to access it when there’s an all-day power cut.
One thing we noticed was that, whilst the mobile coverage from my provider was unavailable, Deb – who is on a different physical network, had her access to a 4G signal restored quite a while before mine came back.
This got me thinking about how I might ensure some redundancy in my ability to continue to connect to work remotely when broadband is not available.

In this post, I’m going to look at :

• using a 4G phone as a Wireless Hotspot when Broadband is unavailable
• which UK mobile providers use which physical network
• unlocking a mobile so you can use it with SIM cards from multiple providers

Connecting to Work over 4G

There have been occasions in the past, especially when moving house and waiting for broadband to be switched over, when it’s been necessary for me to use my 4G mobile phone as a wireless hotspot so I can access the internet ( and work) from my PC/laptop.
Accessing the outside world in this way does eat into your mobile data allowance, but perhaps not as much as you’d think.
In my experience, whether connecting via a supplied laptop over a VPN or using a Citrix Receiver to on my local machine, an average day seems to require around 500MB of data.
Obviously, this figure will vary somewhat depending on the amount of data being downloaded to your local machine, type of work being done etc.
As for the speed, it tends to be “fast enough”, especially if watching videos does not comprise a significant portion of your working day.

To enable your Android phone as a wireless hotspot, you can simply swipe down from the top of the Home screen and scroll across to the Hotspot icon and tap it.

Full details can be found on this Google Help Page.

Once you’ve got your hotspot configured and activated, you can simply choose it from the list of available Wi-Fi networks on your computer. After that, it’ll work just the same as a normal broadband connection.

Physical Mobile Networks in the UK

There are four physical networks in the UK :

• Three
• Vodafone

All other mobile providers “piggyback” on one of these networks.
Details of which provider runs on which network can be found here, on Compare the Market.

So, if you want some additional redundancy in your use-4G-to-connect contingency plan, you can simply acquire a Pay-As-You-Go SIM from a provider on each network.
In doing so, you may think it worth adding a data bundle to the SIM. If so then there are some things you need to consider.

First of all, there appears to be an expiry date on the bundles. You need to activate ( use them) within a certain time frame. This can be done easily enough by simply sending a text using the SIM to your main number.
Secondly, the allowances for Text and Calls on the bundle may lapse ( usually one month after activation).
We’re primarily interested in the data allowance here and on EE, O2 and Vodafone, any unused data will rollover to the following month. However, this is not the case on any bundles I’ve been able to find on the Three network.

Unlocking a Phone from a Network

Up until around 2018, it was common practice for a mobile phone to be locked on the network of whoever was providing it.
Whilst phones provided on a contract are now unlocked, and can therefore operate using a SIM from any network, older phones and Pay-As-You-Go handsets may still be locked.
Operators are now legally obliged to provide an unlock code for a handset free of charge. All you need to provide them with is the handset’s IMEI number. We’ll come onto how to retrieve this for an Android phone shortly.
Before I do though, I think it’s worth adding a health warning here about the numerous sites that promise to give you an unlock code for your phone if you provide the IMEI number.
They invariably take the code then re-direct you to forms where you have to provide lots of personal data. They then finish by demanding that you accept one of half-a-dozen or so “offers” before they give you the code.
As this all looks rather suspicious, I did take the plunge – to a point, and provided some personal data… just not necessarily mine.
Ms Eunice Storm has been bombarded with spam ever since.

My experience was that, within two hours of requesting it, O2 had provided me with an unlock code for an old handset, which worked first time.

An Android handset’s IMEI number can be found on the current Android version ( 11 as I write) by going to the Settings menu and selecting About phone. If you scroll down you’ll find it under Hardware Information.

Alternatively, you can use a dialler code to get this. The advantage is that it appears to work on any Android version ( the oldest I’ve tried it on is Android 4.3).

Open the dialler as if you’re going to dial a number and enter :

*#06#

Incidentally, if you really want to dig into the innards of your handset, you can access the testing menu using the code :

*#*#4636#*#*

NOTE – be careful when using this as it’s possible to change some quite important looking settings if you’re not paying attention !

There is a list of codes here, if you’re still curious.