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

[Firegod]

Definitely seems like a 4G ping though, but the modem reports 5G is working. Bands are B3, N78, N78. I can't find my cell on cell mapper though oddly... numerically the ID looks like it should be on the mast on the hill opposite my house but I don't see it in the list. Signal Strength is -83, seems alright?

It kinda is a 4G ping because the 5G we have currently is a "cheat". It still uses an initial 4G connection with a handoff. 5G SA is the real 5G - that some ISPs are now marketing as 5G Ultra. I think those speeds are good. B3 is probably the slight limiter here. B1 would probably boost those speeds.

 

[Pulseammo]

It kinda is a 4G ping because the 5G we have currently is a "cheat". It still uses an initial 4G connection with a handoff. 5G SA is the real 5G - that some ISPs are now marketing as 5G Ultra. I think those speeds are good. B3 is probably the slight limiter here. B1 would probably boost those speeds.

If I want to try to lock my bands then I should select all of the bands I need? So I could try B1, N78 for instance?

I'm of the understanding that the B-bands are 4G and the N-bands are 5G, so in my case B3 is upload?

When I switch my band selection to manual it gives me a list - do you happen to know if that list is filtered to only show available bands, or is that just every band on the spectrum regardless of whether or not my mast provides it?

Strangely enough when I put my notice period in for my FTTC provider they made a counter offer of Vodafone 5G Ultra for £23/pcm on 18months. Sadly though I'm not sure how I feel about being on CGNAT.

Edit: Actually if the weather is nice at the weekend I may put the modem outside just to find out what its theoretical maximum speeds are.

Edit 2: Tried Band B1, N78 - no change to speed or ping. Then I tried band B28, N78 - signal strength went to -66 instead of -81, so the signal is way better - but absolutely no difference to ping or throughput. I see actually that the headline signal strength is for the B-band, my N-band is at -87.

 

[lovelyhead]

I have had Three 5G using a Zyxel NR5103E V2 router for a couple of months now and I am mostly happy with the experience.

Download speeds 90% of the time are around the 100mbps range the other 10% they are either up to 250mbps or as low as 2mbps. Typically when the speeds really crash is through the night until about 9am. There seems to be a lot of work ongoing in my area. I have lost internet connectivity completely twice. Once when there was a heavy rain storm which lasted about an hour and a second time for a couple of hours when there was a power cut in the area where the mast is located.

I would say that getting 5G has been a slight downgrade over the 75mbps FTTC connection I had before except in one key area, price. I am currently paying £6.60 per month using the Three business data SIM versus £25 a month with Talk talk previously. The less stable and reliable connection VS the slightly faster speeds and much cheaper cost is enough for me to stick with it for as long as the payments stay so low.

FTTP is available in my street now but the prices are around 5X more expensive than my 5G contract and I just don't feel like I would be getting value for money if I switched.

 

[R.O.S.S.I]

Really tempted by moving over to a 5G router out at home from ADSL. The only problem is, where i'd need it to go I don't get amazing throughput on my phone for 5G so I doubt a standalone mobile will do much better (best point in relation to where i have loads of networking cables terminate)
I get stonking speeds in other parts of the house though but they aren't ideal positions for a router so may need to rethink where i have it.

Would getting one through 3 and using their 30 day money back guarantee be a good option to get a sense of it the tech overall works well in my house?

 

[Firegod]

When I switch my band selection to manual it gives me a list - do you happen to know if that list is filtered to only show available bands, or is that just every band on the spectrum regardless of whether or not my mast provides it?

That's just the list of what the Router supports. Yeah regardless whether your mast supports it or not.

 

[Pulseammo]

Really tempted by moving over to a 5G router out at home from ADSL. The only problem is, where i'd need it to go I don't get amazing throughput on my phone for 5G so I doubt a standalone mobile will do much better (best point in relation to where i have loads of networking cables terminate)
I get stonking speeds in other parts of the house though but they aren't ideal positions for a router so may need to rethink where i have it.

Would getting one through 3 and using their 30 day money back guarantee be a good option to get a sense of it the tech overall works well in my house?

That's basically what I'm doing at the moment, I thought about it for a while and realised I can think about it all I want, I just need to try it. There's not much to lose as long as you can make a decision which you want to keep.

So far (only a few days) it's been pretty good, the speeds and the ping are very stable for me - over the last couple of days I'm actually surprised just how stable it is. I'm curious to see if it'll go down the pan at the weekend or anything.

 

[Firegod]

Would getting one through 3 and using their 30 day money back guarantee be a good option to get a sense of it the tech overall works well in my house?

Could do yeah like @Pulseammo . Or you could buy your kit outright your and add any PAYG SIM. Doing it yourself allows you the benefit of trying other carries. Whereas 3 kit = 3 network only. A certain well known place online usually gives 30 day returns. Or elsewhere will do 14 days return by law.

Obviously just check the returns policy from whereever you end up buying. But yeah, test it and if not happy, send it back and get your refund and cancel the auto-renewal on the PAYG SIM.

A v.quick look online. TP-Link Deco X50-5G = £249.99. Huawei 5G CPE Pro 2 = £279.00. ZTE 5G CPE MC888 = £178.80. ZTE MC888 Ultra = £329.00. Zyxel FWA510 = £370. Just as an example of stuff you can look into. Only thing to really check is that if you do buy 3rd party, check it supports the bands used by providers in the UK. (Most do but always worth confirming).

 

[R.O.S.S.I]

Could do yeah like @Pulseammo . Or you could buy your kit outright your and add any PAYG SIM. Doing it yourself allows you the benefit of trying other carries. Whereas 3 kit = 3 network only. A certain well known place online usually gives 30 day returns. Or elsewhere will do 14 days return by law.

Obviously just check the returns policy from whereever you end up buying. But yeah, test it and if not happy, send it back and get your refund and cancel the auto-renewal on the PAYG SIM.

A v.quick look online. TP-Link Deco X50-5G = £249.99. Huawei 5G CPE Pro 2 = £279.00. ZTE 5G CPE MC888 = £178.80. ZTE MC888 Ultra = £329.00. Zyxel FWA510 = £370. Just as an example of stuff you can look into. Only thing to really check is that if you do buy 3rd party, check it supports the bands used by providers in the UK. (Most do but always worth confirming).

Thanks mate, yeh thats what I think may be the way forward.

My brother works in networking and said he may have a 5G Peplink knocking around at work I can borrow to test so will see what comes from that first. I can just chuck my 5G Smarty SIM in to give it a rough and ready testing if thats the case too.

 

[Pulseammo]

Thanks mate, yeh thats what I think may be the way forward.

My brother works in networking and said he may have a 5G Peplink knocking around at work I can borrow to test so will see what comes from that first. I can just chuck my 5G Smarty SIM in to give it a rough and ready testing if thats the case too.

I think the main thing is that you do want to test it with dedicated hardware. I did think about hotspotting my phone but I'd have had to have only used it a few hours at a time, where as with dedicated hardware you can use it as your main household internet for a couple of weeks solid.

 

[R.O.S.S.I]

Yeh true, I may get a cheap lil 1 month sim and give it a blast in that case.

 

[Pulseammo]

I was curious to see what my connection was like in a more objective manner since subjectively I'm very happy with it so far. Any sporadic speed tests I've performed have shown 50ms, 160mbit (d), 100mbit (u). Any ping tests I've done (ping -n 100 1.1.1.1 [cloudflare's dns server]) have always come back between 40 - 60ms with 0% loss.

Wondering what folks make of this graph though. Has anyone else tried to put a TBB monitor on their 5G connection? The FAQ says they are pinging at 1/sec... as far as I'm concerned I've never felt my ping is much worse than the green band, and any manual ping tests I've performed have never shown anything like the 170ms max result, always 40ms - 60ms, but mostly in the 50ms region.

Does 5G just not like this kind of monitoring?

Also while I'm at it, does anyone know if there's a way to know what kind of backhaul my mast uses, or is it basically a case of looking at it to see if there's microwave dishes hanging off it?

EDIT: I've just realised this image automatically updates... new part of the graph is looking more reasonable.
EDIT2: Or on second thoughts I've just checked it again on TBB only to see this:

The period where the latency gets its self under control was when I was on discord and playing games last night... very odd. Seems like when the connection is idle the latency goes weird, guess it's something to do with the mobile technology. Same again with the thin spike of lower latency - I had a download going at that hour.

 

[Pulseammo]

Do any of you know of a way to trial Vodafone 5G Ultra or is it only available on contract? The coverage map seems to be very good here and it's got me curious given my FTTC provider was offering it at £23.

Still a tad dubious whether CGNAT would cause issues playing games that do peer to peer matchmaking mind.

 

[Pulseammo]

Just a heads up for anyone running an NR5103EV2 and IP Passthrough. It appears if you got to the maintenance menu then remote management there are 2 services enabled by default on the WAN side of the connection which basically leaves the admin pages open to the internet on a high port number, but it seems wholly unnecessary to have that enabled...

 

[fray_bentos]

I was previously having problems getting full download speeds (<100 Mbps) after 16 months of full-speed service 600-900 Mbps down from Three. I am here to report that I got my speeds back 600 to 900 Mbps down, by accidentally resetting my ZTE MC801a router to factory defaults (rather than restarting it) when I was getting really slow speeds <5 Mbps.

Prior to that, I tried *all* the APN variants, and also had PDP type set to "IPv4". I originally set IPv4 as I was having connectivity issues at the time (possibly VPN, I can't remember). Now I find that using the factory router defaults, or manually keeping three.co.uk APN with "IPv4v6" set gives me the full speeds, but without the connectivity issues I had before. Interestingly, if I manually set IPv4, I go back to the slow speeds (<100 Mbps), even though the IPv4v6 setting doesn't seem to be giving me an IPv6 IP address. Could be firmware bug, or some other issue about how the handshake is done at the mast?

I haven't played around with other manual APNs as I am afraid of "breaking" the settings again. If it isn't broken, don't fix it. I suspect some people's problems with a sudden switch to low speeds began when Three started enabling IPv6 or changing the handshake routine. The slow speeds started for me when there were reports on three's website of engineering works in my area. That lasted a few weeks, and once they were over, I didn't get my speeds back (until this recent accidental factory reset). I wonder if it may have taken a few months for the IPv4v6 handshake to be properly set up, either that, or could be a bug with the router firmware.

Anyway, posting this here in case it helps anyone.

 

[Pulseammo]

Accidentally broke my pictures in my previous post by deleting the TBB monitor but I tested the weird ping out with a friend.

When my connection is idle inbound ping is about 200ms. When my connection is loaded inbound ping is 40 - 60ms. I guess three are traffic shaping ping requests to lower priority unless you have other traffic inbound? Very odd. When I initiate the ping it's always in the 40ms - 70ms range, but mostly around 50ms.



Again the spots where there's good maximum latency are times where my connection had some load on it.

Anyone else ever run one of these monitors on their 5g? It's not something I'm trying to fix, I'm just curious if it happens to all of our connections.

 

[fray_bentos]

Accidentally broke my pictures in my previous post by deleting the TBB monitor but I tested the weird ping out with a friend.

When my connection is idle inbound ping is about 200ms. When my connection is loaded inbound ping is 40 - 60ms. I guess three are traffic shaping ping requests to lower priority unless you have other traffic inbound? Very odd. When I initiate the ping it's always in the 40ms - 70ms range, but mostly around 50ms.


Again the spots where there's good maximum latency are times where my connection had some load on it.

Anyone else ever run one of these monitors on their 5g? It's not something I'm trying to fix, I'm just curious if it happens to all of our connections.

This isn't odd at all. It is normal for masts to employ various power saving strategies during periods of low demand.

 

[lovelyhead]

I have to say my Three 5G using a 5G router has been dire recently. I usually got an average download speed around 75mb/s, often higher but lately I am usually stuck around 20mb/s. The weird thing is that my upload is almost twice as fast as my download. I tried switching to 4G only but both upload and download tank when doing that. My router hasn't moved and the signal is still reading as excellent. Beginning to regret going 5G although at least it is only £6 a month.

 

[Pulseammo]

I have to say my Three 5G using a 5G router has been dire recently. I usually got an average download speed around 75mb/s, often higher but lately I am usually stuck around 20mb/s. The weird thing is that my upload is almost twice as fast as my download. I tried switching to 4G only but both upload and download tank when doing that. My router hasn't moved and the signal is still reading as excellent. Beginning to regret going 5G although at least it is only £6 a month.

Are you not able to get out of the contract at those kind of speeds? I think they quote 150mbps average on their site? There are sections in the contract to let you out for bad service also I think?

That's me tied in now, have to say it's been really good for the month, don't think it's dropped connection once and the speed has been consistently 150mbps.

Speaking of which I realised the other day that I'd disabled hardware offloading on my router because I used to run SQM. Re-enabling it increased the speed to 250mbps... so I've made up a long network cable to test what the *actual* limits of this connection are at some point so I can buy a faster router and or antenna (well, I'll likely get a thin client and put openwrt or pfsense on it for a router).

Also tried running the modem in 4G as an experiment - surprisingly it shaves 10ms off the ping compared to 5g but throughput is about 60mbps down.

 

[fray_bentos]

I have to say my Three 5G using a 5G router has been dire recently. I usually got an average download speed around 75mb/s, often higher but lately I am usually stuck around 20mb/s. The weird thing is that my upload is almost twice as fast as my download. I tried switching to 4G only but both upload and download tank when doing that. My router hasn't moved and the signal is still reading as excellent. Beginning to regret going 5G although at least it is only £6 a month.

Try resetting to factory defaults. Honestly worth a try. I did not think it would work for me but back to 600-700 Mbps down and 80-90 Mbps up (I am running ethernet cable from my router).

 

[lovelyhead]

Try resetting to factory defaults. Honestly worth a try. I did not think it would work for me but back to 600-700 Mbps down and 80-90 Mbps up (I am running ethernet cable from my router).

I'll give it a try. I don't think getting out of the contract is likely to be a possibility as Three would probably class 20mbps to be acceptable plus it still goes up to around 50mbps every now and again.