Three UK - 4G Home Broadband - any users here?

[S6PNJ]

FunkyGibbon said:

FunkyGibbon said:

S6PNJ said:

Any Huawei B818 users managed to get the RJ11 socket and a DECT home telephone working through it via the SIM?

I'll give it a go later and report back

Hi Phil

Apologies for the delay. I can confirm that my DECT phone works just fine through the RJ11 socket

FG

Cheers FG - do you mind providing a few more details please (or PM me)? Did you have to change any router settings from the defaults? What SIM provider are you using? What DECT handset are you using? Does it give you dialtone when you 'pick up' the handset?

I've tried mine via an O2 SIM and a Panasonic kx-tg8021e phone. All I did was to remove the RJ11 from my VOIP ATA and stick it into the Huawei modem. I tried calling my O2 SIM from another phone, but it went straight to answerphone (the O2 SIM in the Huawei modem had signal/data etc).

[FunkyGibbon]

S6PNJ said:

Cheers FG - do you mind providing a few more details please (or PM me)? Did you have to change any router settings from the defaults? What SIM provider are you using? What DECT handset are you using? Does it give you dialtone when you 'pick up' the handset?

I've tried mine via an O2 SIM and a Panasonic kx-tg8021e phone. All I did was to remove the RJ11 from my VOIP ATA and stick it into the Huawei modem. I tried calling my O2 SIM from another phone, but it went straight to answerphone (the O2 SIM in the Huawei modem had signal/data etc).

Panasonic KX-TG6621E DECT (very old!)
Three SIM
No dial tone per se, but when you dial after about 5 seconds it starts to ring.
All I did was plug in the RJ11 to the router. No change of settings at all.

Hope that helps.

[S6PNJ]

Thanks FG, I'll give mine another go and see what happens - I also have a Three SIM I can try. Hope it brings you some use!!

[FunkyGibbon]

It will do, as we can hardly get a phone signal in the house. So this will effectively become the land line.

[WyrleyD]

We've got an old Panasonic DECT 'phone base station plugged into the B818 with additional handsets around the house acting as the land line.

[megaphone]

What unlimited SIMs are available at the moment, best deals? Best buys? I would favour EE but it looks like they are only doing one at £37/m.

My Virgin contract is up in two months and I'm thinking again about 4G options. EE has good coverage (my phones are EE). 3 is okay, not as quick when I tested last year.

[FunkyGibbon]

megaphone said:

What unlimited SIMs are available at the moment, best deals? Best buys? I would favour EE but it looks like they are only doing one at £37/m.

My Virgin contract is up in two months and I'm thinking again about 4G options. EE has good coverage (my phones are EE). 3 is okay, not as quick when I tested last year.

Three have a deal of unlimited everything for £10/month for 6 months rising to £20 - 24 month contract

https://3g.co.uk/sim-only/contract

5G ready as well

I just got 55 down and 23 up. Fast enough for the 2 of us to stream UHD on separate devices and browser internet

[Gad-Westy]

I’m looking out for a good EE deal as well. £37 also the best I’ve seen. Best desks all seem to be 3/smarty but poorer coverage and speeds for us.

[megaphone]

Gad-Westy said:

I’m looking out for a good EE deal as well. £37 also the best I’ve seen. Best desks all seem to be 3/smarty but poorer coverage and speeds for us.

Got it down to £33/m for existing customer, however it's a 24m contract, plus prices will go up each March.

[megaphone]

FunkyGibbon said:

megaphone said:

What unlimited SIMs are available at the moment, best deals? Best buys? I would favour EE but it looks like they are only doing one at £37/m.

My Virgin contract is up in two months and I'm thinking again about 4G options. EE has good coverage (my phones are EE). 3 is okay, not as quick when I tested last year.

Three have a deal of unlimited everything for £10/month for 6 months rising to £20 - 24 month contract

https://3g.co.uk/sim-only/contract

5G ready as well

I just got 55 down and 23 up. Fast enough for the 2 of us to stream UHD on separate devices and browser internet

THanks, looks ok, comes out at about £18/m 24m contract though.

I've found a £16/m deal on Three, 12 month contract. On this link, it says £18/m but when you click through it says £16/m on the 3 website.

https://www.comparemymobile.com/buy/sim-only/unlim...

[Tall_Paul]

I'm going to look at Three 5G home broadband as an alternative to our vodafone FTTC which is at 25/5 (on a good day), I'm right on the edge of coverage on 5g and in a bit of a dip so have ordered a payg sim card and will test the 4g and 5g connection through a phone.

I can get 30-50 down and 25 up on my current EE 4g signal at the best signal in the house, so if three 4g is around the same, I'd hope three 5g would be 50-100 down...

Edited by Tall_Paul on Wednesday 13th January 13:39

[FunkyGibbon]

Tall_Paul said:

I'm going to look at Three 5G home broadband

The router they use is the 5G version of the B818 and gets very good reviews.

Be wary of the broadband only deal as that sim will not do voice calls. It may (or not) be important if you wanted to plug a DECT phone into the router to use that SIM as an effective landline (which is what I need).

[Gad-Westy]

FunkyGibbon said:

Tall_Paul said:

I'm going to look at Three 5G home broadband

The router they use is the 5G version of the B818 and gets very good reviews.

Be wary of the broadband only deal as that sim will not do voice calls. It may (or not) be important if you wanted to plug a DECT phone into the router to use that SIM as an effective landline (which is what I need).

I've seen this come up a couple of time on this thread. Just for my own curiosity, what's the appeal of having a landline set up like this? Is it just for better signal strength vs. your mobile or is there more to it?

[Murph7355]

Gad-Westy said:

FunkyGibbon said:

Tall_Paul said:

I'm going to look at Three 5G home broadband

The router they use is the 5G version of the B818 and gets very good reviews.

Be wary of the broadband only deal as that sim will not do voice calls. It may (or not) be important if you wanted to plug a DECT phone into the router to use that SIM as an effective landline (which is what I need).

I've seen this come up a couple of time on this thread. Just for my own curiosity, what's the appeal of having a landline set up like this? Is it just for better signal strength vs. your mobile or is there more to it?

It's not a landline....it's using your standard house phone to call out over the mobile network that your 4G router is connected to

So if you get an unlimited data/minutes/texts sim for your router, you could totally ditch your landline. (I think you would get charged for 0800 calls etc - basically anything not included in your minutes allowance).

BT charge £20 per month for a landline I think. My ADSL provider whacks £15 on top of that for data. 3 do an unlimited data/calls/texts monthly sim for £16 a month.

[Tall_Paul]

FunkyGibbon said:

Tall_Paul said:

I'm going to look at Three 5G home broadband

The router they use is the 5G version of the B818 and gets very good reviews.

Be wary of the broadband only deal as that sim will not do voice calls. It may (or not) be important if you wanted to plug a DECT phone into the router to use that SIM as an effective landline (which is what I need).

Thanks, I'll be ditching the landline as we literally have one person who calls it (apart from the 10 or so spam calls per week), so not an issue. I would have switch to VM if they rolled it out here, again with no phone line needed.

I'm hoping I get the Three payg sim tomorrow then I can test the 4g speed, need to wait for a mate with a 5g phone to come by and test the 5g signal though.

[Tall_Paul]

Murph7355 said:

Gad-Westy said:

FunkyGibbon said:

Tall_Paul said:

I'm going to look at Three 5G home broadband

The router they use is the 5G version of the B818 and gets very good reviews.

Be wary of the broadband only deal as that sim will not do voice calls. It may (or not) be important if you wanted to plug a DECT phone into the router to use that SIM as an effective landline (which is what I need).

I've seen this come up a couple of time on this thread. Just for my own curiosity, what's the appeal of having a landline set up like this? Is it just for better signal strength vs. your mobile or is there more to it?

It's not a landline....it's using your standard house phone to call out over the mobile network that your 4G router is connected to

So if you get an unlimited data/minutes/texts sim for your router, you could totally ditch your landline. (I think you would get charged for 0800 calls etc - basically anything not included in your minutes allowance).

BT charge £20 per month for a landline I think. My ADSL provider whacks £15 on top of that for data. 3 do an unlimited data/calls/texts monthly sim for £16 a month.

Ah so a standard phone plugged into the router would make use of any included mins etc on a normal mobile sim (not data only), interesting. Not something we'll need, but interesting none the less.

[Gad-Westy]

Murph7355 said:

Gad-Westy said:

FunkyGibbon said:

Tall_Paul said:

I'm going to look at Three 5G home broadband

The router they use is the 5G version of the B818 and gets very good reviews.

Be wary of the broadband only deal as that sim will not do voice calls. It may (or not) be important if you wanted to plug a DECT phone into the router to use that SIM as an effective landline (which is what I need).

I've seen this come up a couple of time on this thread. Just for my own curiosity, what's the appeal of having a landline set up like this? Is it just for better signal strength vs. your mobile or is there more to it?

It's not a landline....it's using your standard house phone to call out over the mobile network that your 4G router is connected to

So if you get an unlimited data/minutes/texts sim for your router, you could totally ditch your landline. (I think you would get charged for 0800 calls etc - basically anything not included in your minutes allowance).

BT charge £20 per month for a landline I think. My ADSL provider whacks £15 on top of that for data. 3 do an unlimited data/calls/texts monthly sim for £16 a month.

Cheers. Presumably only useful if you don't have included minutes anyway on your mobile contract?

[Murph7355]

Quick update on this from my side.

Secured a Huawei B818 router and bought a couple of 1mth phone sims - a 3 "everything unlimited" one (£16 per mth initially but think it rises to £24) and an EE with 30Gb of data (just as a trial - I want unlimited data with wfh and kids who are loving iPlayer/YouTube), this was £30. They do unlimited ones for £37 per month I think.

Router setup was a doddle. Stuck the sims in (one at a time obviously - there's only one sim slot) and away they went. No need to activate them via my phone etc.

Being the dull data nerd I am, I roped my 8yr old into helping see what was what ("home schooling maths and science" ). Obviously all figures are variable, but all were taken semi-scientifically and at the same time

My ADSL2 broadband actually came good this week (this costs me £35 a month incl. landline). John Lewis had pushed OpenReach who twiddled at the exchange. I am now getting 12.6Mbps download and 0.99Mbps upload. Living rurally with no chance of fibre without massive cost, this is pretty good.

For the 4G router, as you might expect speeds were variable (up to 48% on the same 4G network) depending on exactly where the router was placed. And it wasn't always "logical" where the worst places would be - e.g. I have some cupboards that are heavily insulated with foil backed material, and these places weren't the worst. Equally my equipment cupboard, which is low down, and full of electrical gear, DECT phone, wifi AP etc also wasn't the worst. Which was handy as that's where my preferred placement of the router is.

On 3's network I received an average of 14.35Mbps download and 5.42Mbps upload. Best was 18.03/6.19. In my equipment cupboard I got 12.69/5.62. So marginally better download than ADSL2, but much better upload - which has really made a difference on Teams/video calling.

On EE I received an average of 57.85Mbps download (no typo, "fifty seven") and 6.40Mbps upload. Best was 63.21/6.65. In my equipment cupboard I got 52.49/6.65.

Pretty conclusive really, but I do want to run with it for a while to see how reliable it is over a longer period. But generally very happy thus far.

One other change I also made this week was to buy a Unifi USG to take over routing and DHCP duties (I have Unifi APs and a PoE switch)...this has cured the issues I had with connecting to my mail hosts, which suggests something is amiss with the routing part of my old Draytek modem/router (which is now in modem only mode).

A nice biproduct of this is that I can run both the 4G broadband and ADSL2 together. Currently running the latter as failover. Once I'm happy the 4G side is robust I'll likely ditch ADSL and my landline.

One thing I've not yet managed to get working is my home phones through the Huawei. Will give that more of a look over the next few days, but there doesn't seem to be any config option for that in the admin interface.

Am going to keep checking both sims to see how variable speeds are. I'll also have a chat with EE next week to see what sort of deal they can do on a longer contract unlimited sim, bearing in mind I already spend a chunk with them on phones and other add ons.

A couple of other considerations I'm mulling over are that 3 have no real limits on usage at present, e.g. no "fair use" restrictions (may explain why their speeds are so much lower). EE do have limits, though I think it's 600Gb a month which I'm doubtful we'll ever hit! The other consideration is "failover"...I have EE for my phone. If I went '3' for 4G broadband it does give a bit of extra resilience. And am not convinced I really *need* the much higher download speeds right now. '3' are also a lot cheaper.

TL:DR - the Huawei B818 is a very nice bit of kit (so who cares if the Chinese govt are spying on you ). And EE's 4G network does seem very good. For those struggling with ADSL speeds, do a bit of testing with 4G (use your phone's connection initially) as it might now give options.

[megaphone]

As above, check your EE account, they do Unlimited for £33/m for existing customers taking an additional SIM.

[page3]

Murph7355 said:

One other change I also made this week was to buy a Unifi USG to take over routing and DHCP duties (I have Unifi APs and a PoE switch)...this has cured the issues I had with connecting to my mail hosts, which suggests something is amiss with the routing part of my old Draytek modem/router (which is now in modem only mode).

Worth noting that the UniFi USG bizarrely does not support L2TP client, only server. This means it cannot be used if you plan to use something like AAISP's VPN to bypass EE CGNAT and get a fixed IP. The Huawei does support L2TP however only in non-bridge mode, and does not pass through packets via either port forwarding or DMZ from the VPN connection. Catch 22.

I've now switched to running Opnsense on an old Microserver and that does L2TP brilliantly. Now I can also put the Huawei in bridge mode, so even better.

Edited by page3 on Saturday 16th January 20:35