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

[techguyone]

I'll be looking out for 5g modems and masts round me, I'd give up my VM bundle (I only really use the internet part) for something that could do a solid 100 Mbit. (I'm on that currently with a house full of chromecasts, pc's, tablets, phones, cameras and that seems adequate)

[sly fox]

Had a Three 5G mobile broadband router delivered earlier this week, am intending to replace my Virgin Cable modem ( as they have quite the worst service and customer service i've ever come across).
Literally takes 2 mins to set up.

So far, i'm getting between 160-200Mbs . Decent speeds. Great wifi signal in house too, much better than the Virgin v6 box. I saw 150mb/s over wifi at the other end of the house last night.

Working fine for Zoom/ Teams/ VPN etc for business use.

I was offered a current deal for reduced price for 6 months so i am getting this deal for £14.99> going up to 29.99 for unlimited data.

So far, i think it's excellent.

[megaphone]

sly fox said:

Had a Three 5G mobile broadband router delivered earlier this week, am intending to replace my Virgin Cable modem ( as they have quite the worst service and customer service i've ever come across).
Literally takes 2 mins to set up.

So far, i'm getting between 160-200Mbs . Decent speeds. Great wifi signal in house too, much better than the Virgin v6 box. I saw 150mb/s over wifi at the other end of the house last night.

Working fine for Zoom/ Teams/ VPN etc for business use.

I was offered a current deal for reduced price for 6 months so i am getting this deal for £14.99> going up to 29.99 for unlimited data.

So far, i think it's excellent.

Where did you get that deal? I cannot find it.

[sly fox]

Go on the three website, engage with the sales chat bot - that gets passed to a salesperson, and ask for their current deals on 5G broadband.

Delivered next day too.

[Phunk]

What speeds were you getting for upload?

[sly fox]

So far seeing between 10-14Mbs.

[OnaRoll]

sly fox said:

So far seeing between 10-14Mbs.

What's the latency like?

I'm on 4g and getting on a good day 30up. Latency is rarely below 50ms however but I suppose that's also down to the location of the Tower and it's connection.

I'm quite rural so well pleased with the speed.

[CharlesElliott]

I'm interested in 5G (or 4G, with 5G capability) as a backup to my not so great FTTC - I'm too far from the exchange to get anything more than 25Mbps which is OK when it is working 100% but sometimes struggles.

Issue is I have to have a bridge mode capable modem and there seem so few of them about. What's the latest option?

[Gad-Westy]

We've now moved in to a place in the middle of nowhere. Last owner left behind a 4g router furnished with a vodafone PAYG SIM. I've now got an EE unlimited sim in there and have the router feeding 3x unifi access points set up in mesh.

The vodafone sim gave pretty horrendous speeds but it's all ticking along okay(ish) now with EE and better wifi coverage. I'm getting anything from 10-30 mpbs down, similar up and 16ms latency. It's cdertainly workable for now but I am finding we're getting some drop outs so I feel there is work to be done.

Attention is likely to turn to existing router and antenna. Router doesn't look to be anything too fancy and antenna is placed externally at head height currently.

Might I be able to see useful gains by getting a better router and working harder on antenna position? I presume the choice of antenna itself might also be a consideration?

[threadlock]

CharlesElliott said:

Issue is I have to have a bridge mode capable modem and there seem so few of them about. What's the latest option?

Is this because you want to open inbound ports? I tried this too but Vodafone do their own NAT and it made the problem impossible to solve without using a third party VPN somehow. I gave up at that point and will settle for our 16/3 FTTC landline for a while longer

[FunkyGibbon]

threadlock said:

CharlesElliott said:

Issue is I have to have a bridge mode capable modem and there seem so few of them about. What's the latest option?

Is this because you want to open inbound ports? I tried this too but Vodafone do their own NAT and it made the problem impossible to solve without using a third party VPN somehow. I gave up at that point and will settle for our 16/3 FTTC landline for a while longer

If you need an real external IP then Three 4g broadband doesn't have NAT. So using No-IP for DDNS I have a OpenVPN available running on my Pi.

(O2,VF and Sky/EE do NAT)

[FunkyGibbon]

Gad-Westy said:

Router doesn't look to be anything too fancy and antenna is placed externally at head height currently.

Might I be able to see useful gains by getting a better router and working harder on antenna position? I presume the choice of antenna itself might also be a consideration?

What make and model is your current router - that would help making alternative suggestions. Likewise a photo of the external antenna would be useful.

[threadlock]

FunkyGibbon said:

If you need an real external IP then Three 4g broadband doesn't have NAT.

Interesting, thanks. Sadly bugger-all reception for any mobile network except Vodafone here in this part of remote, unpopulated Sussex

[page3]

Tall_Paul said:

5G router installed on Wednesday evening, due to the weather I was struggling to find a spot with decent signal, but ended up getting a solid lock on a weak 5g signal, giving 100mbps down and 10mbps up.

Last night, with much better weather, and some fine tuning of the location (I actually carted the thing all over the house before finding the original location was almost perfect), which turned out to be around 2-3ft away from the first spot, I'm now seeing 160-180mbps down, occasionally 200mbps, and 10-15mbps up.




I'll be monitoring the speed constantly but I'm very happy with 100 or 150mbps, let along hitting 200mbps!

I’m surprised the upload is so slow. I get around 35mbps up on EE 4G.

Edited by page3 on Wednesday 3rd February 19:11

[page3]

FunkyGibbon said:

threadlock said:

CharlesElliott said:

Issue is I have to have a bridge mode capable modem and there seem so few of them about. What's the latest option?

Is this because you want to open inbound ports? I tried this too but Vodafone do their own NAT and it made the problem impossible to solve without using a third party VPN somehow. I gave up at that point and will settle for our 16/3 FTTC landline for a while longer

If you need an real external IP then Three 4g broadband doesn't have NAT. So using No-IP for DDNS I have a OpenVPN available running on my Pi.

(O2,VF and Sky/EE do NAT)

Or use AAISP L2TP VPN. As long as your router supports this (most do) its a doddle to set up and pretty cheap.

[CharlesElliott]

page3 said:

FunkyGibbon said:

threadlock said:

CharlesElliott said:

Issue is I have to have a bridge mode capable modem and there seem so few of them about. What's the latest option?

Is this because you want to open inbound ports? I tried this too but Vodafone do their own NAT and it made the problem impossible to solve without using a third party VPN somehow. I gave up at that point and will settle for our 16/3 FTTC landline for a while longer

If you need an real external IP then Three 4g broadband doesn't have NAT. So using No-IP for DDNS I have a OpenVPN available running on my Pi.

(O2,VF and Sky/EE do NAT)

Or use AAISP L2TP VPN. As long as your router supports this (most do) its a doddle to set up and pretty cheap.

I need a) a real IP and b) no double-NAT as I have a Unifi router / gateway doing DHCP and firewall.

[page3]

CharlesElliott said:

I need a) a real IP and b) no double-NAT as I have a Unifi router / gateway doing DHCP and firewall.

Unfortunately the unifi USG is pretty much the only router I’ve found that doesn't do l2tp vpn. Crazy.

Although you can do the vpn directly on the modem (like the Huawei 535) you then have to use double NAT as you say (using dmz to make it easy). The unifi still does dhcp/firewall and that would have worked fine for me if it wasn’t for the fact the Huawei doesn’t port forward packets incoming from the vpn!

In my case i fired up an old hp microserver and installed opnsense on it. This now handles the vpn, dhcp, firewall etc and the Huawei is simply a bridged modem.

Shame as i liked the USG, but the solution i have now works great. Excellent bandwidth, reliable, no double nat, fixed ip, bypasses EE network sillyness and around £20/month cheaper to boot.

Edited by page3 on Thursday 4th February 19:28

[Phunk]

Can anyone explain how I managed to get this speed on EE 4G, I’ve done multiple tests with similar results. A quick Google says it could possibly be EE 4G+ but that’s only in London and claims to only go up to 90mb/s on the EE network.

100% not on wifi, tried outside in several places over around a mile.

[Psycho Warren]

anybody with recent experience of the three4g lately?

got the hub about 9 months ago as i was fed up of poor service on virgin, regular outages, poor speed despite being fibreoptic and thier increasingly rip off prices.

The last straw was them upping it to over £40 a month. three offered an unlimited tariff on the 4g hub for £15 a month. bargain. on paper slower than virgin but as a single person who only does general internet, youtube and netflix etc then i expected it would be fine.

all has been great until last few weeks.

these are the peak time speeds i am getting:



i know its not a problem with the hub as my three phone gets same kind of speeds.

my hub is line of sight with the tower which is about 3/4 mile away. the problem is only peak hours.

basically as i understand it, either the tower is strugggling due to a fault meaning peak demand 8s too much or there is now congestion due to too many new users in my area.

tried customer services and tech support both through chat and phone and they deny therr is any problems either technical or congestion.

to me those kind of speeds are unacceptable as the net is almost unusable.

do you think i have reasonable case to get out of the contract and go elsewhere? i dont see i have any choice at present.

anybody have a similar expereince? will i get anywhere complaining to three or is it suck it up until out of contract?

[FunkyGibbon]

What sort of speeds can you get at non peak times.

I have seen speeds as high as 65 down and 50 up.

Currently at 5:18 I'm getting 8 and 8

Not great but workable.