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

Caged said:
What's your reasoning for swapping from the FWA710?
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Being on the fringe I was hoping the rel16 would offer stability improvements. My signal quality is pretty good but yeah, more of a sideways stability move instead of anything drastic like searching for better speeds. On paper, the spec sheet had some wins vs the FWA710. I also ran it through AI and it seemed to think:

Release 16 introduces:
  • Enhanced UL MIMO
  • UL carrier aggregation improvements
  • Lower latency scheduling
Rel‑16 modem is designed to deliver more consistent uplink under load and in mid‑band SA deployments.

EE’s SA rollout benefits from:
  • Release 16’s improved control‑channel efficiency
  • Better handling of mid‑band TDD patterns
  • More stable latency under congestion
So while the FWA710 is still a very capable outdoor router, the FWA70 is simply a newer, more efficient, more SA‑optimised platform.
 
Well that's been a waste ot time and money. FWA70 is going back. Need to raise an RMA today. Spent in total 7 hours yesterday with it and cannot get it working with the Firewalla. Firewalla WAN in DHCP mode just says no internet and gets no ipv4 info.

Router is connected to 5G fine. Nebula is connected. But it refuses to pass info down to the firewalla. Hook in the old Router and it works straight away.

Deleted the WAN interface. Tried multiple reboots of everything. Nothing helped.

Compared config. Identical between both routers. The interface is the same so I'm not missing anything.

Thought perhaps exterior ethernet cable could be dodgy. So brought everything indoors and hooked up directly with new cables. Same experience. New router no worky. Old router worky.

Went nuclear and factory reset the new router and the firewalla. No joy from fresh setup. Still no wan info. Try again with old router, configures straight away. Had no backups so then spent the next few hours setting the network, VLANs, firewalla rules back up. Hey how fun!

Given my experience with the NR7101 and FWA710 I can only put it down to hardware bug. Add that to the list of problems I'll be sure to mention to them is the fact it isn't even compatible with their zyxel air app for signal strength and positioning setup.

Absolute joke.

I'm now thinking of going all in with ubiquiti.
 
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Hi all.

I'm with talktalk at the moment on Fibre 35 broadband and our connection is 28 download and 2 upload and FTTC is our only option. BRSK is in our area and street but we had a private land issue with the last pole about 150 meters needed to get to our house :|

So I think our alternatives for anything faster are now either Starlink or mobile 4G / 5G connection. Our home shows as unavailable for service on three's home broadband coverage check and outdoors only on EE, o2, and Smarty coverage maps.

If i hold my iPhone on Smarty up to my office window this is the result. Its promising but I've read in this thread that Smarty doesn't allow for using data sims as home broadband replacement ?!

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We are a family of four and have a few devices too, four phones, two iPads, two laptops, two nest camera's, Playstation, Xbox and sometimes they are in use at once.

I saw people mention the FWA70 but id need to be certain it would work and it would last at its price or are there cheaper options ?

Whats the best resources to improve my knowledge and confidence or is Starlink a more straightforward option in my situation ?

Thanks for any help!
 
If you're happy that the signal on the Three network is decent then do the availability check at an address that is offered the service to get past that barrier, and then complete the order by filling in your actual address. You have 30 days to return it all if it doesn't work out.
 
Mark JB said:
If i hold my iPhone on Smarty up to my office window this is the result. Its promising but I've read in this thread that Smarty doesn't allow for using data sims as home broadband replacement ?!
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I don't live far from you, if you like I can loan you a 5G CPE Pro and a Three 5G Unlimited SIM to see how you get on for a week?
 
Finally getting round to trying to get a stable connection on a 5g sim (as in, no packet loss).

Changing from 3 to iD I noticed a general decline while tethering from a Poco F3, and then recently switching to a Pixel 10 it got even worse.

I've ended up with an outdoor ZTE Modem and indoor ZTE Router. Wasn't impressed with the performance given the cost of the hardware.

I've downloaded NetLimiter and capping both the upload and download speeds has helped tremendously, barely any packet loss now!
 
Thanks for the replies. Cadged, I did the availability check trick and it let me through. I haven't ordered but I did read about the outdoor router that you can install on the window. So I went to the other side of the house and put my phone on the window ledge :o

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I'm going to head into the local 3 store today and show them this test and ask about availability. I'm nervous about ordering when its not actually available in the area.

Journey - If this doesn't work out I'd love to do that, thanks very much for the offer! Given that the connection seems stronger outside are antennas and internal routers preferred over outdoor routers ?
 
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Mark JB said:
I'm going to head into the local 3 store today and show them this test and ask about availability. I'm nervous about ordering when its not actually available in the area.
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I wouldn't waste your time, they'll not care and just want to tie you into an over priced contract.
Mark JB said:
Journey - If this doesn't work out I'd love to do that, thanks very much for the offer! Given that the connection seems stronger outside are antennas and internal routers preferred over outdoor routers ?
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No trouble for me could pop over this evening and help you set it up. :)

Outdoor will be better, but then you have to power it and run cables back inside for either PoE or have an outdoor waterproof socket etc.
 
I visited the three store and they were great. They were happy to put the order through and I walked out with the outdoor hub and Eero 6 router. Its working quite well indoors but I'll report back properly when I've got the hub mounted outside :)

Journey - Thanks again for the offer, you spurred me on!
 
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Mark JB said:
I visited the three store and they were great. They were happy to put the order through and I walked out with the outdoor hub and Eero 6 router. Its working quite well indoors but I'll report back properly when I've got the hub mounted outside :)

Journey - Thanks again for the offer, you spurred me on!
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Ok well I am glad you got it sorted, been using it for six years now via Three and can count down time in days on less than one hand.
 
Evening all - I’m about to sign up for EE broadband at our new property and wanted to check that £34.99 for the below is their best deal currently - Complete on the property on the 16th of February so getting everything arranged beforehand, it was them or Virgin Media and I’m not a fan as I had them for a while and they were not the most stable at all and work remotely so

Full Fibre 900 Core​

 
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Hullo everyone. I've been using a ZTE MC888 for a couple of years on EE, recently switching to Lebara (Vodafone cuckoo). It's been mostly fine - there are some weirdnesses with Ubuntu failing to reconnect automatically from ephemeral router side wifi failures and the CGNATing drives me batty, but all off this is mild annoyance next to the rage inducing experience of wired supply.

Anyway, I moved house: the 5G coverage is worse and the MC888 wifi no longer reaches the whole house... so I want to either add external antenna to the MC888 and add mesh somehow, or get a new router with external antenna and mesh capability built in.

I'm thinking about either the TP-Link Deco or Archer NX500 because I have good experiences with their kit... or sending the MC888 off to router-mods for surgery.

Anyone got any recs, warnings or heartwarming anecdotes?
 
dynamicalsystem said:
so I want to either add external antenna to the MC888 and add mesh somehow, or get a new router with external antenna and mesh capability built in.
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the simplest way is to turn off wifi on the MC888, and get a mesh wifi system.
the primary mesh hub will connect to the MC888 via a lan ethernet cable, and you can connect the rest of the secondary hubs to that primary hub.

the above is what i've done with my system (i use a zyxel nr5103e 5g router and 3x tenda nova mx12 mesh wifi hubs)
 
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tamzzy said:
the simplest way is to turn off wifi on the MC888, and get a mesh wifi system.
the primary mesh hub will connect to the MC888 via a lan ethernet cable, and you can connect the rest of the secondary hubs to that primary hub.

the above is what i've done with my system (i use a zyxel nr5103e 5g router and 3x tenda nova mx12 mesh wifi hubs)
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Thanks - so you would advocate getting router-mods to add external antenna connectors to the MC888? I'll ping them and see what the turnaround time is...
 
So the outdoor hub is up at the top of the house now and moving outside nearly doubled the upload speed via Ethernet cable connected straight to the Eero.



I'm very happy that Three and this outdoor package has saved us from terrible FTTC speeds. My cat5e cable takes it reliably downstairs and Wifi around the house seems to cut download speed to between 300 - 600 but I might put another Eero 6 downstairs eventually via the cable to see if that helps!

I'll tip my cap when driving past the local masts too :)
 
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