Networks So, your ADSL sucks? (Trials and tribulations of wireless broadband)

Have you checked for 5G, EE and Three etc have been rolling that out in odd places, I had a line outage in January and hooked my phone up to my router and was surprised to see 5G and 250/30 speeds, that's faster than my fibre connection, I didn't even know it was there as my phone is always on Wifi, last time I used it I only had 4g and ~50Mb, Some people are seeing 3x the speed of that 5G connection too. Three have also upgradeed the 4G using old bands and that even gets ~100 odd now in recent tests but needs the hardware to support it which my S10 does.

Would consider switching from Fibre to mobile as its 40quid vs 16quid but not everything likes it, Sky Q seems to detect mobile and block downloads and as that is the main downloader in the house, it is not ideal.

Your idea to Dual WAN with policies looks like a good option though, aggregating connections to take advantage of something I have just sitting there not being used (my mobile phone) is interesting, wondering if I can do it on hardware I already have like my NAS.

 

Hmm... So on paper there are no 5G services available in the area, or even close - I don't have any devices that can actually check but now you're giving me second thoughts.

I'd be surprised if there was any serviceable 5G out here in the Nottinghamshire countryside in all honesty, which is why I just looked at the 4G. And EE appear to be the only ones doing an uncaveated unlimited service, and on 4G only (the 5G is 1TB). I expected 4G will be as good as it gets for the duration of the 18 month contract, and then consider my options once again.

 

Three tells me I can't get 5g broadband either

EDIT - just checked again It does show a small pocket of 5G in my area on the phone side which I happen to sit in but when I look for broadband it says no, still it works fine off my phone and I can pipe that into my router and tether via ethernet so whatever

 

Where are you in relation to somewhere you would expect maybe to get 5G, or that Three says you can?

 

Outskirts of Bristol which looks to have good 5G coverage generally, if you are out in the sticks perhaps you'll be out of luck, just thought it was worth mentioning as it just appeared for me and if you've not done a site survey for a while you might also be lucky.

 

Just want to drop a thanks Tad - we are now running one of the Poynting XPOL-1 antennae from Amazon and getting some great speeds.
Previously we were getting about 30 down so I do think the antenna had a positive effect.

To say it was life changing coming from a 5 down 0.5 up ASDL connection is an understatement - revolutionary. A life saver with 3 of us working from home

 

Did you mount it in your loft in the end, or outside?

 

It's inside the roof - It was affected by snow a bit but it was still usable. (think 20ish down)

I think it would be better outside but our roof is about 40 ft off the ground and I'm not a ladder fan....

 

Resounding success here so far.

The SIM (and router) arrived today, and straight out of the box 100/40 using the bundled router (Huawei B625, which appears to be an EE special B535) - there's naff all that's configurable on this one though so not viable for the long term.

I tried with by B525 and speed was a bit down, 60-80/40 and will use this until tomorrow as I can without double NATting etc.

Until tomorrow because a shiny new B818 will arrive, which the internets reckon is the best in the business when it comes to extracting all there is to extract out of a 4G signal - fingers crossed.

 

Sounds like a nice improvement for you.

What problems does double NAT pose, I have this at the moment due to not being able to put my Sky hub in modem mode and running a Wifi Mesh setup, everything seems fine but I have not been running it very long, I seem to be able to do everything I could before with much better performance but perhaps there are scenarios I haven't come across yet that may cause me to pull my hair out related to this.

 

When I've had no choice but to use it in the past, found it to be the cause of a variety of aggravations when it came to hosting anything. It in itself isn't the end of the world... I guess the bigger problem with the EE bundle router is there was nothing in the way of network options, e.g. DMZ

I've been climbing around the loft half the day with a long extension cable and a laptop running LTE-H, graph watching, and I've settled on a location... for now.



I'm always amazed how the most minor positioning adjustments have such profound effects on the speed - 5deg here, a few inches there, a bit of an elevation change - the difference between 60mbit and 120mbit.

 

Quite remarkable isn't it! Will 120 suffice or will you be hunting for more? Did you use the built in antenna for this test?

 

OK so for routing through to your own servers it can be an issue, I've not set my NAS up to have remote access, yet, not having left the house for any length of time dur to Corona, I guess this is where I might feel the pain, something to bear in mine for later, thanks.

 

So I did plan to experiment further - the spot it's in now has a great signal, but no carrier aggregation. Whilst there is a spot I can get carrier aggregation, but poor signal resulting in significantly slower speeds. I was going to test out one other corner of the house just in case I could get the best of both worlds for a big DL boost.

"Did" and "was", however, is because in doing some research on how to methodically do this instead of just wandering around the loft all day, found someone upset that EE done gone and limited them on their unlimited plan.

Honestly this didn't come as a massive surprise because frick mobile networks basically, but after this in the graciously retained chat transcript where I signed up...

Me: Are there any "soft" limits? like on speed at certain data thresholds
EE: Theres not no it would be the speed you would get in that area

And this...

Me: Cool - so just to check its properly unlimited, no sneaky caps and so on that will surprise me?
EE: Thats correct

And this...

Is there a fair use policy?
All of our unlimited plans are uncapped so you can use as much data as you like, as long as it's for personal use

I should have been surprised to eventually find, in a T&C doc...

Unlimited Plans are for personal, non-commercial use only. We will consider usage above 600GB/month to be nonpersonal use and have the right to apply traffic management controls to deprioritise your mobile traffic during busy periods or to move you to a business plan

So basically, if you stream a few hours of video per day and download a game or two along with general browsing, you're not a person any more.

FFS.

So I talk to a guy on the phone just now and he says a few things:
- He's never heard of anyone getting capped/throttled
- Someone will be in touch with me if I regularly exceed the limit
- I'll have an option for early cancellation if it's an issue
- He can't advise on or transfer me to a business plan
- He largely guessing about all of this

He put me through to someone that could, but after a few mins holding I hung up as I decided I wanted all of this in writing anyway, so query lodged, we'll see what happens.

In the meantime tested three which have a tried and tested (by users that claim multiple TB per month) unlimited tariff and there's no signal of any sort to speak of. Vodafone has a woollier policy than EE and some users have claimed >1TB of regular usage, but having popped a sim into the router the speed is pretty lacklustre at 15-25 down :/

 

Regarding methodically searching for signal - there must be some sort of hand held device that can scan for mobile signal much more effectively than looking at the router control panel however in my searches I never found out the name of such a thing. If anyone has contacts in telecoms please enlighten us!

We are with three @ £18 / month for unlimited. It was initially £22 but they reduced the price after a couple of outage complaints.

 

There are a bunch of Huawei specific apps that graph multiple signal parameters - the closest I've gotten to what you're suggesting is a laptop/phone connected directly to the router and the router on a 30m extension lead. Move slowly, gradually reposition and respond to when the graph goes up or down. Simple in principle, but balancing on ceiling joists and climbing between roof trusses in relative darkness is doing it on hard mode.

This goes out the window a bit when there are multiple masts available though - since the one with the best signal isn't necessarily the fastest if it has lesser tech in the mast. It doesn't help with pointing out where the masts are either, or identifying what tech is installed in them which would be invaluable.

Kind of disgusting really. £55/month for EE unlimited, and whilst I think it's fair they charge bit of a premium based on their network speeds and capacity, 3x the price for a imminently reachable limit... sorry - traffic prioritisation threshold - takes the pee a bit.]

EDIT: Minor development - I just spoke to someone in EE business who offered a £47/month (+VAT) tariff for unlimited data, and instead of just saying "yeah course it's unlimited" paused, checked something, and came back confirming that it was actual unlimited. So basically the same price, off to dig through fine print to see for myself.

EDIT again: Clowns... "We may consider usage above 1000GB/month to be excessive and have the right to move you to a more suitable plan."

So I just talked to someone else to ask about the mysterious "more suitable plan", because why don't I just start on that... well it's a different limited plan... more suitable for them, not me.

However they have said that they operate on three-strikes notification, so there are no surprises, which would be the main problem - so will exercise my 14-days on the home tariff and switch over to the business one as I would expect to regularly peek over 600GB, but less so 1000TB

 

Out of interest, what sort of latency are you seeing, and is it consistent?

 

28-31ms, generally consistent aside from an occasional spike - maybe a couple of times per day.

I've only noticed because a game I play perma-displays the ping in the corner though - like up to 200 for a couple of seconds and then back down.

I did around 4 hours of video calls yesterday and there was nothing glitchy there.

 

Impressive!

 

So this morning I got a data alert, and I'm thinking surely I've not used nearly 600GB already, in 4 days.

No, I've used 80GB... what the hell...



The EE business SIM comes tomorrow and I've logged my cancellation today for the consumer tariff, this is just daft.