Mobile BB to replace Fixed

Hello,
Hoping this is the correct area for my post:
I am evaluating the possibility of replacing my increasingly expensive fixed broadband with a 4G service. I have acquired an EE Sim with the free 100gb allowance to make tests. I have bought a suitable USB dongle. I am getting impressive results both testing in a macbook pro and in a Draytek 2830 router. Both devices returning around 30/40ms ping, 30/50mb down, 20mb up. However, with the SIM in the router and running the Ookla speednet test, there is a delay of around 30 seconds before the test starts which then performs OK. This delay is apparent when request a 'page' on a browser and connecting to, say, Spotify, or iPlayer. When these streaming/downloading services eventually start, they are working perfectly. i.e Spotify streams without any issues and iPlayer, if set to download, rapidly accomplishes this. TV streams fine. With the SIM in the macbook the experience almost instantaneous. Could there be some settings I can apply in the router to eliminate the delay I have described.
My objective is to replace the ADSL with 4G in the router and hence my entire home network.
Hope this is clear and thanks in advance for any advice!!

Have looked at this idea many times but can't make it financially viable. The cheapest I could find for mobile broadband was £20 for 15GB, with 3 when I am paying sky £21.40 for unlimited BB and calls. Until I can find a 3/4G connection at way less than fixed I can't see how to make pay. Then you need to add that 3/4G can slow to a snails pace much slower than fixed, when the mast gets hammered, early evening sometimes right upto 7/8pm.

Hi, Janitor, thanks for replying. Appreciate your comments on the costs but it will not be like this for long and BT fixed line costs me almost £60 pm now and I can't have Fibre (18 mb Max). At this stage I'm trying to establish the performance difference of the same 4G SIM in a MacBook versus the Draytek router. The other thing to mention is that speed is fairly constant. Just ran Ookla on the MAC and got 40ms/42u/31d. If I can get the router to work 'properly' with the 4G, then I can run the home network with all the devices/airplay stuff etc etc on the SIM over a lengthy period of time and see what the experience is.

Still don't see how you plan to make this work, as the 100GB sim is a limited edition, after that you are going to need a mobile BB package that has a large enough capacity, to make it viable, unless of course you are a very light user, which would allow you to make it work, most of the packages on the market at the moment, would not give you much change even from £60. I did actually manage to run a 3G home BB connection for about 6 weeks, while I waited for BT to fit a fixed line, it worked ok, but was a nightmare between 4 and 6pm, as the mast got swamped and was like being back on dial up. Was running two iMacs one MacBook air and a couple of iPads,

Janitor, thanks again for your response. Are you able to offer any insight into my query concerning the issue with the router?
Thanks.

Unfortunately can't really offer much help, I had a fritz box router, that accepted a old type usb mobile BB modem, the the whole setup worked well for what it was used for, which was just email and browsing, was of course trying to keep usage down to stay within my data limit, didn't try Iplayer or spotify, and apart from fixed line BB didn't really have anything to compare it to, but was only getting 6mbps on a speed test, but this was all wireless, and of course was only for a short period.

Edited by janitor (Sat 27-Dec-14 21:17:24)

In reply to a post by golfcity:

Janitor, thanks again for your response. Are you able to offer any insight into my query concerning the issue with the router?
Thanks.

I've had some similar 'pauses' occasionally using the EE SIM card in a MiFi, but the throughput is fine once it gets going. I wonder if it could be a DNS issue. You could try configuring your router to use a public DNS server.

But as Janitor said, I can't see a way to make this work financially. Although my 4G speed is way faster than my 1.7Mbps ADSL I'd hate to think of my data bill after watching a series on Netflix!

Hi golfcity,

I am also thinking about Mobile BB to replace a fixed line - as infinity seems to be corectly named in regard to when it will arrive!

I get a similar delay using a Three sim-card (3G) with a TP-Link mifi unit. The delay is not DNS related because a "Test Again" on the TBB Speedtester will not involve DNS for the second and subsequent tests.

The delay seems to be about two seconds, but as the TBB speedtest has no measurements on the time axis I can not be sure.

The next time I have the sim card in a USB Dongle (lap top or DrayTek 2820 router), I will look again for the delay.

Where did you get the EE sim cad?

Hello Liebstrom,
Thanks for your comments. The key issue is the difference in performance between using the sim/dongle directly in a MacBook compared to configuring my Draytek router to use the sim as a WAN. Just to re-iterate the router appears to be taking around 20 seconds to connect to the internet whereas the MacBook is more or less instant. I have timed the 20 seconds myself with a stopwatch!. There must be some settings in the router that need looking at.

Hello, Sandgrounder,
As per my response to Liebstrom, the delay before the router connects to the internet is around 20 seconds, which I've timed with a stopwatch.
The EE Sim card was 'The Dan and Phil Limited Edition Sim' which came with 100gb free for two months (200gb). No account set up required. Unfortunately they've dished them all out according to the website. When I saw this, I thought it was ideal to do my testing without getting bogged down with contracts etc. The price of data is falling so 4G will become a viable alternative to fixed in the not to distant future.
Please update me with any findings.
Thanks.

It sounds like the Draytek is just using the 3/4G connection as a failover for when the ADSL service is not available.

So, it'll only connect using that after it's attempted to connect on the ADSL service first (which would explain why it appears to take 20 seconds or so to connect, but once it's connected, it appears fine).

In the Draytek I assume you've set the WAN connection for the mobile service on the router. I would make sure that the other WAN interfaces are disabled as well.

Hello, dronkula,
Thanks for your interest. I have made sure I have configured the router such that ADSL (WAN 1) is disabled and USB/4G is enabled and set to 'always on'. I have also physically disconnected the adsl line. I also have tried making the USB/4G the 'back-up' and disabling/disconnecting the ADSL (WAN 1) to trigger 'backup'. No change in the outcome. It's as though there is some sort of throttling after a number of page hits or a specific time. I have cleared my browser history and tried obscure URL's. What's VERY interesting is that tonight I have tried the tests using a Voda 4G sim in the Draytek and it's consistently fast. Also remember that when the EE sim is in my MacBook, this situation of slow-down does not occur. I still think it's a router config issue unless EE can detect something they don't allow?

Are you using the same APN details for the Mac and your router?

I've been forced to use EE as a temporary replacement for fixed broadband, waiting for a fixed line installation that will accept fibre (Openreach records show the wrong cabinet, so can't get fibre until they are corrected).

I have the following setup:
- EE 4G PAYG Mobile Broadband SIM
- Huawei E5372 MiFi router, Cat4 LTE device
- External Antenna
- TP-Link WDR3600 router, flashed with "ROOter" variant of OpenWRT

The ROOter firmware connects with the E5372 over USB, giving WWAN access to all of our devices connecting over the LAN & WLAN.

It also gives access to better signal strength data - the E5372 shows 5 bars, while the signal strength reported over USB is still only around 60-65%. With the better stats, I found a much better location for the antenna giving 90% signal strength.

However, I find EE 4G sloooowwwwww.

I can certainly see speed spikes as high as 40/8 (40Mbps down, 8Mbps up), but the best tests tend to average out around 30/5. During daytime, the speeds become more like 15/2. Then anytime after 3PM, the cell can easily be congested - particularly upstream - giving results more like 5/0.01. At this point, all manner of things fail, but especially DNS and VoIP calls.

Sometimes the system acts like the 4G part is working, but EE has lost connectivity to the internet. At other times, the 4G cell disappears, and you revert to 3G ... until you notice, and try to manually switch back again. One memorable occasion, EE was unusable all day long.

I have found it to be acceptable for 90% of the day, and unreliable for 10%. I can't wait to get a fixed line back.

The one problem I don't have is a long delay before speed tests run, or before a page returns to a browser: Page response would be immediate; speedtests would start slow for at most a couple of seconds (slow, but not zero) before ramping to full speed (though I use the word "full" advisedly; I don't ever see anything I'd consider decent 4G here)

Perhaps the difference is that I am using a "proper" mobile broadband SIM, whereas the "Dan & Phil" SIM is really meant for use in a mobile phone. Perhaps it is set to use a different APN.

Network providers can detect if a sim is in a phone or modem, but if it was the case you would still have the lag on the MacBook.

In reply to a post by WWWombat:

Perhaps the difference is that I am using a "proper" mobile broadband SIM, whereas the "Dan & Phil" SIM is really meant for use in a mobile phone. Perhaps it is set to use a different APN.

Both EE's data and phone SIMs use the same APN, simply the word: everywhere even works on older T-Mobile and Orange plans.

However that doesn't mean they can't do something different with the traffic from a phone or data SIM. But I've not seen a difference, although I've just closed my data SIM account.

Hello, Wombat, thanks for replying. You raise some interesting points in particular when you say that the system acts as if part of 4G is working without connectivity to the internet. .
I have figured out that the 'delay' when using the EE Sim in the dongle plugged into the router is because there is no connection to the internet. I discovered this when testing with Spotify. I clicked to play and saw a 'no connection' message then it kicked in and streamed perfectly. As I have said in previous posts, with a Voda SIM, this does not happen, and when the EE Sim is in my MacBook, it doesn't happen either, so I'm convinced it's the router when paired with the EE Sim. I don't think the EE network can detect device type beyond the dongle, and if it's a data Sim only, it would only be in a dongle/mifi. I might try a similar setup to you using MacBook + dongle to feed the router! As regards performance, when I have been playing with the EE Sim, I have never seen speed below 23mb and have achieved 64mb, but I need to test it over aa period of time before any next steps. Thanks again for your interest.

Hi, Kev,
Yes I am:
APN = everywhere
Username: tried eesecure, ee secure or null
Password: secure or null

Searched for alternatives but these seem to be the ones.

Thanks for getting back on this!

Hi,

The EE dongle will not 'see' anything further the router it's plugged in to.
Does the router support any AT commands?
The 4G stack does have a time out for data sessions but if you are in a service area (coverage) the LTE network will push a PDP context to your device and provide a IP address. The data session is now in-place and you should not have any delay.

Hi, Paul, yes the router supports AT commands.......what do I need to do?

I use 4G as I am too far from my flakey rural exchange to get anything over 3MB speeds.
The best set up I have come up with is

Asus RTN66U using Astrill VPN and merlin firmware as my main router.

You can use a 4G USB dongle with this but I use a Huawei B539s-22 as the modem and everything goes to the Asus router which is great at everything I throw at it - including VOIP, games, streaming and internet browsing.

To get any decent data I pay £50 a month to EE. It is a lot but it is the only way I can have a robust speedy connection at the moment.

fearby, i have a very similar set-up as you have. Are you using a dmz to connect your Huawei B539s-22 to the asus? or are you just plugging in the ethernet cable and thats it?

I am not using a vpn, but i do have some problems connecting to certain websites using this set up. If i connect direct to the huawei, i can reach all sites.

I cannot just go back to using the huawei itself as the performance is really bad when i have more than half a dozen devices connected to the router at the same time. My asus router does not suffer from any performance issues regardless of how many devices are connect, although certain websites cannot be reached.....ebuyer being one of them.

Yes I set the Asus as the DMZ.
I think the ebuyer.com issue may be due to CGNAT which is used with 4G by a lot of providers and makes some sites difficult. A VPN solves this.

Hi,

No-one has mentioned that mobile broadband providers tend to monitor how customers use their equipment. If they detect that you are using it for more than just as a mobile broadband device then they might close down your account citing breach of T's & C's. They don't want people using mobile broadband as a substitute for standard broadband.

HTH,

In reply to a post by mking90031:

They don't want people using mobile broadband as a substitute for standard broadband.

For the amount they charge I'd have thought that they would be more than happy!

In reply to a post by mking90031:

No-one has mentioned that mobile broadband providers tend to monitor how customers use their equipment. If they detect that you are using it for more than just as a mobile broadband device then they might close down your account citing breach of T's & C's. They don't want people using mobile broadband as a substitute for standard broadband.

I think you're confused. Mobile broadband is sold by data volume. They don't care how you use the data (as long as its legal). That means data SIM in a data device (e.g. tablet, laptop or MiFi or dongle).

Where it is complex is data on phone contracts and using that as a hotspot / tethering. Many voice & data contracts have issues with how the data is used. T-mobile used to have restrictions for example no VoIP (skype) usage. EE's 4G price plans have no such restrictions, they have no issue how you use the data, and the data stops when you run out of allowance (contract) or credit (prepay). You can then buy more or wait for the next month to start.