5G hub with SIM v "normal" broadband

[Wowbagger]

As has been mentioned elsewhere, I have been given the run-around by Virgin Media for the past 18 months and I want to ditch the bastards. So far as fast connections are concerned, we just wouldn't get one with The Opposition. The best that Andrews & Arnold can offer us is a little more than 10Mbps, and that for quite a bit chunk of cash each month.

However, I'm looking at the possibility of a 5G hub with unlimited data SIM with "Three" (why do these companies give themselves such stupid names?).

http://www.three.co.uk/Huawei/5G-Hub/hbbPlans?1548&bundle=HBBDevice&gclid=CjwKCAiA5t-OBhByEiwAhR-hmzxkMTSMpI9NdU7XsbnE4IuQH79Gs4f8_Bopn_MEnb8lpmsMxIUCSxoCu6MQAvD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds refers.

Does anyone have any experience of this sort of thing? Their website tells me that our area is covered with very good 4g, but no 5G at present.

Thanks in advance!

[DaveJ]

I'd guess that Three, like Vodafone and O2, use CGNAT for this type of connection, and VOIP doesn't play nicely when it has two levels of NAT to traverse, so if you use VOIP for a "landline", I'd avoid connections provided over 3G/4G.

[Kim]

I have a 4G modem with a PAYG Three SIM as a backup to our DSL line.  As the DSL has been extremely reliable, it hasn't seen a lot of use - mostly just as an out-of-band way to access the A&A status website and IRC channel.  Throughput seems adequate (compares very favourably to ADSL2+, not quite as good as VDSL), latency is poor (currently averaging 56ms) with occasional spikes at busy times.  Cellular network performance is a very local phenomenon, thobut, so YMMV (ours depends chiefly on the migratory habits of several thousand data-hungry students).

NAT issues can be worked around by tunnelling with a VPN (A&A provide an L2TP service for the purpose), but that's another layer of complexity and point of failure.  Not ideal for VOIP.


(Three's name made sense back in 2003, when Hutchinson needed a brand name for their Shiny! New! 3G network.  Predictably, it hasn't aged well.  The last network with a sensible name was Cellnet, which turned into O2 at around the same time.)

[quixoticgeek]

The biggest problem with most cell based networks tends to be latency. Throughput will usually be acceptable. But if you're doing anything real time, it can be a right pain.

J

[rafletcher]

What do you need that requires >10Mbs download speed?  Netflix requires a minimum of 5Mbs for HD content. It’s only UHD/4k streaming that requires 15Mbs or greater.

We all like to have fast speeds (I have FTTC), but in all honesty I don’t suppose I really need it.  The only thing I do that really benefits from the higher speed I get is downloading FulGaz ride videos, they can still take a while.

[quixoticgeek]

What do you need that requires >10Mbs download speed?  Netflix requires a minimum of 5Mbs for HD content. It’s only UHD/4k streaming that requires 15Mbs or greater.

We all like to have fast speeds (I have FTTC), but in all honesty I don’t suppose I really need it.  The only thing I do that really benefits from the higher speed I get is downloading FulGaz ride videos, they can still take a while.

Uploading. Usually the upload/download speed difference is such that to be able to upload stuff at any reasonable speed, you have to get a stupidly fast down load speed. It also depends how many people are using the connection.

A friend in Paris has 5Gbps fibre to their home. Where I live, despite being a major city, the fibre stops approx 100m east of my home. Very infuriating.

J

[Kim]

Exactly.  A 10Mbps ADSL2+ connection only gets you 1Mbps of upload, which is less than $popular_videoconferencing_client needs to avoid potatovision issues.  It's positively glacial if you're making serious use of cloud storage for backups etc.

If you're not doing traffic shaping it's likely that VOIP would suffer during big downloads, too, as the upstream gets filled with ACK packets.

[quixoticgeek]

Exactly.  A 10Mbps ADSL2+ connection only gets you 1Mbps of upload, which is less than $popular_videoconferencing_client needs to avoid potatovision issues.  It's positively glacial if you're making serious use of cloud storage for backups etc.

If you're not doing traffic shaping it's likely that VOIP would suffer during big downloads, too, as the upstream gets filled with ACK packets.

ACK

J

[Pickled Onion]

Does anyone have any experience of this sort of thing? Their website tells me that our area is covered with very good 4g, but no 5G at present.

Yes. I have a 4G mobile router, and have often used "home hub" style 4G routers when abroad.

It's not clear why you want a 5G device when you've not got coverage, it's more expensive both for the device and the contract, and they are more power hungry.

Three are cheap. They generally have "coverage" in that you can get a signal, but the signal strength is notoriously patchy. Before you plump for a Three contract, find someone who has a Three phone contract to do a speed test from your house. The sim in my router is ee and my phone is 3, the difference is chalk and cheese. Three is unusable in places where ee gives me 40Mb up and down. I need my internet to work in different places, but if you happen to be in a spot with good 4G on 3, their offering is a bargain.

Exactly.  A 10Mbps ADSL2+ connection only gets you 1Mbps of upload, which is less than $popular_videoconferencing_client needs to avoid potatovision issues.  It's positively glacial if you're making serious use of cloud storage for backups etc.

Videoconferencing does not play well with the asymmetric nature of ADSL. The one we have to use for WFH fails spectacularly at home where I have 35-40 down and 1.6 Mb up. It was fine when abroad on a 2 down/ 1 up (wired) connection. This is one major difference with 4G/5G data - you get roughly the same up as down.

[Ham]

Mini test sat at home:

WiFi 60Mb down/10 up (quite slow d/l at the mo, up is standard) off virgin. I downgraded from the wizziest level, so although still nominally 100+, it is far more variable but still OK, and u/l is still good. The top tier seemed less affected by contention.

5g 85 down/15 up

ETA
Probably deserves a listing in the div thread. I tested on my mobile using wifi, which anyway has a 100mb Ethernet link, apart from being WiFi. Actual download of a desktop on a GE link, 110Mb down and 10 up are the real speeds

[Wowbagger]

Jan has recently switched her mobile provide to Three. I've just disconnected her from the wifi and done a speed test: 3.83Mbps download, 9.12Mbps upload. This is counter-intuitive. Is it not normal for download to be lots faster than upload?

[Kim]

That's probably a result of the upstream link being less congested than the downstream, even if it is asymmetrical.  I expect you'll get different results at less busy times of day.

[Wowbagger]

We're going to have a play later on with Jan on her hotspot (Three) and me on mine (Virgin) and sort out a Zoom call with Dez and as many others as we can muster.

I checked with Three: they won't sell us the 5G hub as they have no 5G signal in this area.

I'm currently playing a Beethoven symphony on Youtube and it's perfectly OK.

[Pickled Onion]

Jan has recently switched her mobile provide to Three. I've just disconnected her from the wifi and done a speed test: 3.83Mbps download, 9.12Mbps upload. This is counter-intuitive. Is it not normal for download to be lots faster than upload?

Only on ADSL.

Those figures are not great, but not abysmal.

[Kim]

Jan has recently switched her mobile provide to Three. I've just disconnected her from the wifi and done a speed test: 3.83Mbps download, 9.12Mbps upload. This is counter-intuitive. Is it not normal for download to be lots faster than upload?

Only on ADSL.

And VDSL.

And DOCSIS.

And GPON.

And LTE...

[Pickled Onion]

Alphabet soup

Ok, Ok, on a 4G, 5G you don't expect the upload to be slower as a matter of course. I know the "A" in ADSL stands for "Asymmetric", I have no idea on the other ones.

[Kim]

Pretty much all consumer broadband services are asymmetric to some extent, for diverse technical reasons that ultimately amount to "it's cheaper that way".  4G (LTE) is no exception.  I'm not sure about 5G, but I see little reason why carriers would waste bandwidth providing a symmetric service if they thought they didn't have to.

[Mr Larrington]

They have to syphon off some of the spare upload capacity on 5G for the Plague Bat Control Rays.

[Wowbagger]

We don't have VDSL. The connection isn't up to it. A & A only offer ADSL.

It's immensely depressing. The only option we have, living here, is Virgin. And they are a bunch of crooks.

[Pickled Onion]

Pretty much all consumer broadband services are asymmetric to some extent, for diverse technical reasons that ultimately amount to "it's cheaper that way".  4G (LTE) is no exception.  I'm not sure about 5G, but I see little reason why carriers would waste bandwidth providing a symmetric service if they thought they didn't have to.

I won't argue your technical expertise on this, but IME LTE and fibre while travelling have been roughly the same up and down, sometimes noticeably higher up than down, with wired always being in line what Wowbagger expects. I'm currently getting 17/17 on ee and 8/17 on 3. (down/up, central London). In the ABROADS it was generally 40/40 up to 100/100 looking through my speed check history.

[Kim]

We don't have VDSL.

No, you have DOCSIS from the afore-mentioned bunch of crooks.

[Mr Larrington]

With A&A FTTP I just got ~75/20.

[Kim]

Pretty much all consumer broadband services are asymmetric to some extent, for diverse technical reasons that ultimately amount to "it's cheaper that way".  4G (LTE) is no exception.  I'm not sure about 5G, but I see little reason why carriers would waste bandwidth providing a symmetric service if they thought they didn't have to.

I won't argue your technical expertise on this, but IME LTE and fibre while travelling have been roughly the same up and down, sometimes noticeably higher up than down, with wired always being in line what Wowbagger expects. I'm currently getting 17/17 on ee and 8/17 on 3. (down/up). In the ABROADS it was generally 40/40 up to 100/100 looking through my speed check history.

Yes, I've seen the higher up than down thing on Three too, it seems to correlate with poor latency, which is why I assume it's likely caused by congestion.  (I don't tend to use mobile for anything particularly data-intensive, so my anecdotes don' really amount to much.)

Fibre in ABROAD tends to actually be fibre (rather than copper that's branded as fibre), which often means symmetric services using established fibre technologies.  The FTTP stuff BT are reluctantly rolling out shares a physical layer between multiple customers, so time-domain multiplexes the upstream to avoid collisions, resulting in an asymmetric service.  Seems a bit short-sighted, but there you go.

[Kim]

With A&A FTTP I just got ~75/20.

Which is the same as I'm getting on VDSL.

[Syd]

Pretty much all consumer broadband services are asymmetric to some extent, for diverse technical reasons that ultimately amount to "it's cheaper that way".  4G (LTE) is no exception.  I'm not sure about 5G, but I see little reason why carriers would waste bandwidth providing a symmetric service if they thought they didn't have to.

My home broadband is 1Gb, both down and up. Had it since I moved to my current address 4 years ago.

Before that, whilst renting for a short period, (I was relocating and was selling my old house, moved county, and looking to buy) I used a similar device to that linked in the OP along with a Three 4G SIM. It served our needs well. Not being gamers the latency issues weren’t a problem for us. The only niggle was the router we had had only one network port so had to use a small switch to accommodate the devices we needed wired at that time.