The time has come to try an experiment. “An experiment with what?” you reasonably ask.

Going to the Three shop

I will explain later but here’s a clue: setting up the experiment involved us in a visit to the Three Mobile shop in Upper Street.

Our favourite coffee place

Having completed our negotiations, we went to our favourite coffee place, Myddelton’s deli where we relaxed for a while.

Garnault Mews

We then passed through this passage leading to Rosebery Avenue.

Exmouth Market

We walked on down to Exmouth Market. We passed along it looking for lunch but…

Cafe Maya

…decided to go to Cafe Maya on the corner of Farringdon Road with Rosebery Avenue. We used to come here a lot but hadn’t visited in a while so it was interesting to try it out again.

The old fire station

We went past the old fire station, looking very sad and empty.

Continuing down Rosebery Avenue

We continued down Rosebery Avenue and then came upon the first of a series of streets with strange or poetic names.

Coldbath Square

This is Coldbath Square, whose evocative name (according to information received) comes from a Cold Bath (a natural spring?) discovered in 1697 which was believed to cure nervous disorders. It existed until 1870..

Warner Street from Rosebery Avenue

Rosebery Avenue crosses Warner Street by a bridge.

The stairs

We accessed Warner Street by this rather grubby staircase.

The bridge

From Warner Street we have this view of the Rosebery Avenue bridge.

The Coach (and Horses)

This fine Victorian pub was originally called The Coach and Horses but, for some strange reason, the name has been shortened to The Coach.

Herbal Hill

The second poetic name was this one, Herbal Hill. The name may derive from the onetime cultivation of saffron here as the road was previously known as Little Saffron Hill.

Saffron Hill

The name of this street, Saffron Hill, definitely comes from the fact that saffron was cultivated here in the 18th century.

Hatton Wall

This street has the curious name Hatton Wall. I don’t know what wall is referred to.

Lily Place

Here is another street named after cultivated plants: Lily Place. I wonder what it looked like originally: was there once a garden here?

Steps to the street

Saffron Hill led us to a passage that joined the street by a staircase, 28 steps in all, if I remember correctly.

Shoe Lane

We now came to the last of today’s curious and poetic street names, Shoe Lane. Was this once a district for shoemakers? If so, there is no sign of them now. I do know that there was once a wworkhouse here.

Man and sculpture

This pair made an engaging picture, a building labourer and a sculpture. Unfortunately, there was no plate indicating the sculpture’s details.

Aboard the 341

We finally arrived in Fleet Street and there caught a number 341 bus back to the Angel.

Now, about the experiment. For some years, our ISP has been Zen. They are quite good but recently BT suffered a nationwide outage and as Zen provides its service through BT, our connection went down. Once the BT outage had been dealt with, Zen itself had problems. All in all, we were without a connection for 36 hours. This is the third time in recent months that we have had problems. Might it be time to try something new?

That something new is called “wireless broadband”. Your router achieves its connection by wireless from the mobile phone mast. You connect your computers, tablets and phones to your router also by wireless.

The best routers are those thot work off the 5G network but if your area is not yet on 5G you can use 4G. It’s not as fast as 5G but if, like us, you have only DSL and not fibre, then 4G is likely to be faster than your existing connection.

The wireless router

We acquired a 5G router and SIM card from Three. You insert the SIM and plug the router into a power point and wait a couple of minutes for it to boot up. You connect your devices by supplying the username and password printed in the side of the router. There is also a slot for an ethernet connection if this is needed: the black cable links to the NAS on which Tigger stores her photos. The router is about 23 cm (9 ins) tall and very lightweight.

But does it work? Yes, it seems to work very well. Our neighbourhood is 4G with 5G for mobiles only. The router seems to run mainly on 4G with occasional flickers of 5G. Speed tests suggest that the connection is 9 to 10 times faster than our plain vanilla DSL

We have the router on a 24-month contract (£10 per month for the first 6 months, £20 per month thereafter) but we can cancel within the first 30 days if we are not happy with it. We shall be testing it rigorously to decide whether to keep it or not.

If we keep it, we will cancel our account with Zen. Furthermore, because we use the landline only for Internet and never to make or receive calls, if we continue with wireless broadband, we can cancel our account with BT, saving £25 per month. A lot hangs in the router’s performance over the next couple of weeks.

Update: see The experiment fails.