I can’t remember the last time I received or made a call on my landline. With many mobile plans now providing close to unlimited outgoing call allowance makes having a landline redundant. However like many, the only reason for maintaining a landline is because it is a prerequisite for getting broadband in the UK, be it dialup, ADSL or Fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC).

UK Broadband which has been operating a 4G LTE commercial system since 2012 with various degree of success recently launched a new service, Relish in central London. It is a basically a plug and play service connecting up to 25 WiFi enabled devices to a router that transmits data using their 4G network. UK Broadband operates in the 3.5/3.6GHz bands using spectrum awarded by Ofcom for Fixed Wireless Access until 2018 and employing TD-LTE (Time Division Long Term Evolution). The company touts download speeds of up to 65Mbps, although I think speeds of around 10-30Mbps are more realistic.

Relish has 2 different residential tariffs:

	1 Month	12 Months
Monthly fee	£20	£20
Router	£50	Free

The provider is so confident of their offering that they are offering a 14 day money back guarantee. This is a refreshing change to the lengthy 12-24 months contract required by traditional broadband ISP.

Coverage is restricted to central London at launch, covering the core area from Kensington in the west to Canary Wharf in the East and from North to South, Shoreditch to Southwark.

I tried signing up for the service online. However after entering my postcode, I got an error message telling me that “Looks like you’re out of our range”, despite living in an area where there is meant to be coverage. This is not a promising start. Relish has an online chat facility which I used to enquire if it was a system error or if there was indeed no coverage in my area. Response was prompt but what came as a surprise was their offer to send a technician out within 4 hours to my premise to perform a signal test.

True to their word, a technician knocked on my door within the specified time frame. Download speed came in at around 9-10Mbps, not much faster than the existing ASDL service but the idea of being landline free was appealing. Moreover, if I placed an order before 1600hrs, the router would be delivered the next working day.

I decided to go for the 1 month service and completed the order over the telephone. Despite reconfirming twice with the telephone agent that I want to be on the 1 month service, I received an email confirmation that I signed up for the 12 months service. I tried calling customer service but realised that it was after normal business hours so I thought the next best thing would be to drop them a line via email. To my horror, Relish only engages with customers via online chat, telephone and social media. What happened to good old email support?

The router arrived the following day and customer support told me that my order would be changed from 12 months to 1 month. However, they were unable to send me a revised invoice or reset my login password as those had to be processed by the finance department and admin department respectively. I was assured that both errors would be resolved in a couple of days.

Fast forward one week and neither the finance department nor admin department got in touch. Download speeds does peak at around 9-10 Mbps but varies greatly depending on the time of usage. It was also somewhat weather dependent. The real let down comes in terms of crawling upload speed of less than 1 Mbps.

I believe the business concept is great and Relish has an excellent marketing team but the technology needs massive investments and improvements to make it a serious contender to fixed line ISP. But more importantly, the massive disconnect between the sales team and customer services that needs to be addressed urgently.