****The Official 5G Home Broadband Thread**** (Three/EE/Vodafone/etc)

City Fibre were running FTTP in February, so we cancelled our Virgin 350 plan when they announced their April CPI price increase, rather than be locked in another 12 months.
I took out a Three 5G plan (£21/m) on their 30 day rolling contract, so as to be able to quickly cancel when gigabit fibre became available.

Virgin was mainly full speed, with 20-30ms ping on average, but would drop out several times a week for up to 4 hours.

Three 5G started out great, averaging 450-750Mb off-peak, but lately it would absolutely grind around 4pm-10pm, with constant drop-outs and ridiculous latency (2000-5000ms!), meaning it was unusable for three kids wanting to play online.

Reported the issues multiple times but got nowhere, so I weighed up the cost of putting in a 5G aerial on the roof of the house; the only windowsill with Line of Sight to the mast was the upstairs bathroom. Bought a £180 kit from Amazon which made zero difference.

Chased City Fibre to find out they hadn't run a fibre line to our property "because you have a concrete wheelchair ramp to your front door" - despite talking with their install gang at the time and being reassured they'd just run the line to the rear of our property (End of Terrace), which would actually be less work.

Sky were offering their "Ultrafast" broadband (140Mb, using BT line) for £28/m, 18m contract, so we had that installed yesterday.

Now getting 150Mb D/L, 30Mb U/L, with a ping under 10ms - the kids noticed the difference immediately (no more lag, or drop-outs). Fingers crossed it stays that way.

I'm not sure whether to keep the Three 5G router as a backup, or just sell it (even though we'd only had the Three plan for 3 months), their agent cancelling my contract said it's ours to keep.

TL;DR: We found Three's 5G was mostly fast, but the frequency of drop-outs and slow/unstable connection made it unusable for our particular needs.
 
RedMogg said:
Sky were offering their "Ultrafast" broadband (140Mb, using BT line) for £28/m, 18m contract, so we had that installed yesterday.

Now getting 150Mb D/L, 30Mb U/L, with a ping under 10ms - the kids noticed the difference immediately (no more lag, or drop-outs). Fingers crossed it stays that way.
Click to expand...
Is that Openreach G.fast? If so, does Sky router support G.fast? Thought Sky Ultrafast 145 cost £38 a month? Can't find anything for £28 per month?
 
Last edited:
bulldog147 said:
Is that Openreach G.fast? If so, does Sky router support G.fast? Thought Sky Ultrafast 145 cost £38 a month? Can't find anything for £28 per month?
Click to expand...
I think it was a "We miss you" type deal - we took our Sky contract with us when we moved house in Nov '21, then shopped about when the contract ended in Nov '22 - we picked Virgin 350 for the extra speed.

In January '23, City Fibre started laying their cables in the street, so I waited for Virgin's inevitable CPI price increase as an excuse to cancel without paying an early termination fee - we would have been locked in until April '24 otherwise.

I got Three 5G Broadband for £21/m as an existing customer, on a 30 day rolling contract; it wasn't great, but I wanted to be in the position to cancel swiftly and jump on Toob FTTP once it went live (900/900 for £24/m).

When I found out from CityFibre that they hadn't run the cable to our house, I looked at other options: my Wife remembered she'd had either a "Come back" letter/email from Sky offering their "Ultrafast" (145Mb) for £28 on an 18m contract - rang them and asked the chap if they'd still honour the offer from Nov/Dec last year and he initially refused. I explained it might be worth checking with a higher up, "as I may as well go with Plusnet otherwise".

"As a gesture of goodwill" (and likely because we'd previously been with Sky for over 7 years), they agreed to honour it.

Openreach chap was booked to hook us up the day before yesterday - initially he couldn't find the BT phone point, so he looked around the exterior of the house (End of terrace) for their cable and found it going up the rear wall and into an upstairs bedroom (behind where we've put our bed - couldn't say I'd even noticed it when we moved in).

He agreed to pull the cable and re-run it to my downstairs bedroom/study, next to the network gear (we have a POE switch for CCTV, PCs, WiFi AP and anything else we want a wired connection to). He did a very tidy job of running the cable around the rear of the house and in beneath the window, with the rest of the external CAT6 cables.

The unit is the Master Socket 5C with two ports "Modem" (with G. Fast underneath) and "Phone".

I've no idea if it's BT Fibre capable (a postcode search said we can't get it, yet).

Sorry for the essay - Autism makes it difficult to explain without *all* the details :rolleyes:
 
RedMogg said:
I think it was a "We miss you" type deal - we took our Sky contract with us when we moved house in Nov '21, then shopped about when the contract ended in Nov '22 - we picked Virgin 350 for the extra speed.

In January '23, City Fibre started laying their cables in the street, so I waited for Virgin's inevitable CPI price increase as an excuse to cancel without paying an early termination fee - we would have been locked in until April '24 otherwise.

I got Three 5G Broadband for £21/m as an existing customer, on a 30 day rolling contract; it wasn't great, but I wanted to be in the position to cancel swiftly and jump on Toob FTTP once it went live (900/900 for £24/m).

When I found out from CityFibre that they hadn't run the cable to our house, I looked at other options: my Wife remembered she'd had either a "Come back" letter/email from Sky offering their "Ultrafast" (145Mb) for £28 on an 18m contract - rang them and asked the chap if they'd still honour the offer from Nov/Dec last year and he initially refused. I explained it might be worth checking with a higher up, "as I may as well go with Plusnet otherwise".

"As a gesture of goodwill" (and likely because we'd previously been with Sky for over 7 years), they agreed to honour it.

Openreach chap was booked to hook us up the day before yesterday - initially he couldn't find the BT phone point, so he looked around the exterior of the house (End of terrace) for their cable and found it going up the rear wall and into an upstairs bedroom (behind where we've put our bed - couldn't say I'd even noticed it when we moved in).

He agreed to pull the cable and re-run it to my downstairs bedroom/study, next to the network gear (we have a POE switch for CCTV, PCs, WiFi AP and anything else we want a wired connection to). He did a very tidy job of running the cable around the rear of the house and in beneath the window, with the rest of the external CAT6 cables.

The unit is the Master Socket 5C with two ports "Modem" (with G. Fast underneath) and "Phone".

I've no idea if it's BT Fibre capable (a postcode search said we can't get it, yet).

Sorry for the essay - Autism makes it difficult to explain without *all* the details :rolleyes:
Click to expand...
That good as u are lucky to have £28 a month for G.fast 160/30 as Plusnet FTTC 80/20 cost £28.99 (both same 18 months contract) so u got £1 less for double speed! https://i.ibb.co/Y2BH17K/Screenshot.png
 
Last edited:
RedMogg said:
Three 5G started out great, averaging 450-750Mb off-peak, but lately it would absolutely grind around 4pm-10pm, with constant drop-outs and ridiculous latency (2000-5000ms!), meaning it was unusable for three kids wanting to play online.


TL;DR: We found Three's 5G was mostly fast, but the frequency of drop-outs and slow/unstable connection made it unusable for our particular needs.
Click to expand...
My Three 5G was the same started out great, now it's non existant so I've just canceled and bought a lebara sim which isn't quite as fast as Three used to be but it's actually working.
 
This may be some useful information for anyone considering taking out a contract with Three, in the past week they have changed their hub to a ZTE MC888. I took out a contract today in my local Three store, the display model looked ok and had the T9 connections for external antennas but on getting home to set up the device I realised there were no connections for an external antenna.

I took the device back, the guys in the Three store were great, they didn't understand what was going on at first but it appears that the external antenna connections are only on the models used when purchased through a business account. Unfortunately, they couldn't swap my device for one of the business models but told me they could cancel the contact if I wasn't happy but encouraged me to try the device first as I have a 30 day cancelation period.

I have terrible internet, roughly 10mb-14mb, last week it went down to 1.5mb. The Three 5g Hub while located in my house without an external antenna is getting around 200mb-220mb so I'm extremely happy with what I'm getting with the 5g Hub. One thing to note, off my phone I struggle to get a 5g connection so the external antenna was really important to me as I get a really good signal just outside my house, the 5g Hub gets a decent 5g connection from in my house so I've probably saved a few quid as the external antenna isn't needed in my case. I've tried the Hub in my garden on an extension lead and the speeds aren't any better.
 
Had a play around today and managed to improve the speeds i was getting.

My primary 5G connection was with EE in the NR7101 router outside. Lately i've been getting rubbish throughput, ~100Mbps DL and about 60Mbps UL. My secondary 5G router indoors uses a Smarty SIM. This is my backup should EE hit any problems. In the latest NR7101 firmware it says you can utilise the built in dual-sim functionality so I thought cool I'd give it a try, but I couldn't get it to work. It would never connect the second SIM. Didn't seem to matter if it was the EE sim or Smarty sim, which is frustrating. However during this testing when I had tried the Smarty sim in the NR7101 outside to my amazement it resulted in decent speeds. See below:

Smarty-5-G-Outdoors.jpg


So I've taken the EE sim and put it in the indoor router. Which actually works out better because in the house I get a better signal with EE than I do with Smarty - so it was kind of a no brainer and I don't know why I didn't do it sooner. So for a backup solution I now get:

EE-5-G-Indoors.jpg


The upload latency is horrible but for a fallback connection, I'm happy with that. :)
 
Moving to a new area. Three doesn't offer 5g home broadband to the address, but my phone says there's 5g in the area. What's my best option for a router (+ aerial if necessary) at present that can take a EE or Three sim card (depending on which provider has better coverage)? Budget probably no more than £500.

I have no idea how to read cell tower mapping sites but there are multiple masts around my location within 500m or so, however there isn't a direct line of sight as other buildings are in the way.
 
Last edited:
I personally like the Zyxel routers cause you can use cell locking which can come in handy for forcing a specific mast and cell. Not seen that on other brands. I know that the NR7101 and NR5101 both work with EE and Three as I have sim cards with both of those ISPs. There are 5g routers from other brands such as TP-Link, D-Link, ZTE, etc. TP-Link have a new WiFi 7 5G router coming soon - the Deco BE65-5G. I hadn't realsied either that Acer do a Predator Gaming 5G Router - no idea on spec on that one. Looks like Zyxel is also refreshing it's range of 5G indoor routers, lots of new models listed as "coming soon" which is interesting. Antenna wise you probably want something like the Poynting XPOL-2-5G. Just whatever router you pick make sure it has the external connectivity, supports the right bands, and you should be fine.
 
Hello everyone. I am new in this forum and I recently bought 5g router "zte zt801a" and I am thinking to buy antenna but i am not sure which one i really need can some help me please? Also my budget are not a lot.
Thanks guys.
 
So, as the starter of this thread, the time has come for me to bow out!

I've been a happy 5G user for the past 2.5 years, on my latest mast I was seeing 700-800mbps down, however recently speed has been reducing to 600ish Mbps with regular DNS drops where pages wouldn't load. Ping is about 12-15ms on a wired connection.

I've been paying £16 a month for a while on a Smarty monthly contract.

A few weeks back, I spotted some work being done in my area by Netomnia, installing FTTH over the telegraph poles, and this afternoon I had Youfibre round to install the 1gbps up & down service.

£1 a month for the first 3 months then £30 a month

On WiFi

And on eithernet
 
TallPaul_S said:
So, as the starter of this thread, the time has come for me to bow out!

I've been a happy 5G user for the past 2.5 years, on my latest mast I was seeing 700-800mbps down, however recently speed has been reducing to 600ish Mbps with regular DNS drops where pages wouldn't load. Ping is about 12-15ms on a wired connection.

I've been paying £16 a month for a while on a Smarty monthly contract.

A few weeks back, I spotted some work being done in my area by Netomnia, installing FTTH over the telegraph poles, and this afternoon I had Youfibre round to install the 1gbps up & down service.

£1 a month for the first 3 months then £30 a month

On WiFi

And on eithernet
Click to expand...
Hello. Which router do you use and do you use any antenna?
 
Ok am new here so can anybody
PLEASE HELP or at least advise i got the ZTE MC801A 5G thingamabob
From 3 I am getting a very bad signal: 2 lights or if ai am lucky 3 lights alternating, I use only a couple of phones and smart TV, if I use a
4H antenna will it make any difference? As I hardly get 5G anyway, or does it HAVE to be a
5G antenna, any advice would be greatly appreciated. Oh and the mast is quite a distance from me
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom