kyber

Slightly off topic, but if you have some spare time http://www.419eater.com/ is well worth a visit to read of the worm turning and trapping scammers at their own game.

My personal regular experience is more positive. Perhaps I have been lucky in choice of locations, but most weeks working away from home I have found my Three phone sim hotspot more reliable for BBC iPlayer and Netflix use most evenings than the WiFi in many hotels (and for a while, better than a heavily congested Virgin Media service in a house I lodged in). Often, my work laptop is connected and using a VPN to some office network, and a personal VPN is operating on my tablet so I can see Netflix content from another country. There have been times when I have had poor signals, but not so often (other than really too deep within a building) but whenever I have had a good signal, my streaming has been largely uninterrupted. It has been a while since I have used a Three MiFi, perhaps it is unfair comparing older technology with a 4G smartphone (Samsung Galaxy Note 3). Until June last year, I had a corporate O2 service with streaming, and found better coverage overall for phone calls but much poorer data services. Not tried EE or Vodafone. As an aside, I am now working in Helsinki every other week or so, and have installed a dual sim adapter in my phone and switch to a DNA sim when in Finland which turns in a excellent performance (easily >20Mbits most of time, 17 Euros a month unlimited inc tethering). YMMV.

It is worth noting that some networks provide only capped usage for mifi devices but provide genuine unlimited use for smartphones including hotspot/tethering use. Might be worth using a cheap smartphone just as a hotspot device rather than a dedicated mifi device in some cases. (They can detect what kind of device their sim card is installed in.) I have unlimited data including tethering (up to 5 devices) from Three for my phone on a monthly rolling contract of £18, if I signed for 12 months it would be £15 a month. Given Three works on higher frequency than others, might want an external aerial on your boat. Just a thought.

A little off topic, but I am really curious about what is different about cruising through bridges in winter etc (other than maybe the dangers of compressing ice and slicing fibreglass boats maybe).

Thanks Kim, good to hear we are not blazing a trail but following some established tracks. It amazing how different things look when you have shifted your mind-set, and although we have a potentially difficult time ahead, we know where we are heading and that we will get through it. (A little after my initial post, my oil fired boiler split, so I am now very cold but for one small room that has an electric fire.)

​Abandoning the Rat Race Hi all. Fantastic forum. Huge amounts of useful information (much of which I need). My wife, Lucy, and I have decided that we would like to live afloat. This is triggered by lots of factors, but the main one is that I do not want to have to find another high-powered (and very stressful) job after being made redundant earlier this year just to maintain a house that is way too large for us now our two children are reaching the end of their university courses and have plans to live elsewhere. Although we have never lived afloat long term, we have had many many holidays over the years sometimes as small family units, sometimes taking large groups (with me usually doing the cooking in all cases). We have even had a Christmas on a near frozen canal with me producing a full Christmas Dinner in a small galley. Selling up It is going to take a while to sell the house, and having lived on redundancy money for a few months, we do need to sell before we buy. That gives us time to find suitable moorings (leisure rather than residential as we do not need to stay all year in one location, we should have jobs that let us take work in different places from time-to-time). Not sure whether to buy used or new as yet, nor exactly what we want. Our biggest challenge will probably be trying to sell all the stuff we do not want to put in storage. Frankly, we do not have much we want to store anyway (aside from costs). Anyone been down this path?