You could try what woodmass14 suggested and see what 3G does for you. The 3G spectrum may be slightly better if there are less devices on it. You should be able to force 3G somewhere under "Dial-Up" if I recall correctly.

In reply to a post by j0el:

You could try what woodmass14 suggested and see what 3G does for you. The 3G spectrum may be slightly better if there are less devices on it. You should be able to force 3G somewhere under "Dial-Up" if I recall correctly.

It is actually what Three are telling all customers. It made my 311 faster for the very brief time I had it.

I am in the process of moving to using a 3 sim in a Huawei router. It came with external antennas which consistently get better signal and better speeds. Not a huge surprise.

What is a huge surprise is where it works best. I initally tried it in an upstairs window, facing out across a wide valley, where I know several base stations are in view. Rather disappointing speeds. I tried it in various different places, all upstairs near windows, facing in all four directions. Mostly disappointing.

So I took it downstairs to near where the old router was, where the switch is and near the UPS power. I put it on a shelf well away from the rather small window that faces a farmhouse not 100 metres away. No clear line of sight of anything. Inside walls of millstone grit, more than a metre thick.

The plan was to switch back to the wired connection, but I didn't have time to swap the cables over, so I left it running for a while.

The signal level is not great, but the signal quality is good. And the speeds are far better. More than twice as fast as it was in a "good" position.

Not entirely consistent. It varies from around 20Mb/sec to 48Mb/sec download, 6Mb/sec to 32Mb/sec up. But good enough: I reckon that anything over 20 down is fine for my needs.

Moral of the story? Try everywhere, not just where you think signal will be good.

I have recently acquired Three Homefi and I did several things to improve my speeds. Admittedly I was starting from an already impressive baseline with the supplied router (40 mbps down, 15 Mbps up, a vast improvement from our old now deceased landline 2.5mbps down 0.5mbps up). These were great speeds and I was more than happy with them but felt there was more available and wanted to future proof things a bit. First I checked https://www.cellmapper.net/map to see if the Cellular mast we have direct line of sight of on the hill overlooking the field behind our house did in fact have Three Cells (It did). I think it is uesful to know where your nearest Three Cell tower is as this may help figure out best placement for your router or external antenna. Second I purchased an external driectional antenna, an omni directional one may be better depending on your circumstances (depends if you have direct line of sight), but because we had direct line of sight to the cell tower I went directional. Third I purchased a rather expensive Netgear M1100 4G router (I got mine second hand on Ebay for half the retail price, still expensive though). With all of these upgrades I am now getting up to 120mbps down 40mbps up, obviously these are maximum speeds but my average speeds would be 100mbps down 30mbps up so I am extatic. If I look at the speed improvement I got from the baseline it was almost exactly 50% due to the better router and 50% due to the external antenna. I was a bit surprised the antenna made such a difference as I had a fulll strength signal before I attached it to the router, but I guess it improves signal quality not just strength. Of course this is all highly location dependent and things I did may not be helpful in your circumstances, I am lucky to be in a situation where I have direct line of sight to a Three Cell tower and because it is a semi-rural area with low population density the Tower is not likely to become congested. If your tower serves a large population you may find you speeds are restricted by congestion at certain times of the day.

ufb200,

Could you tell me the name of the directional antenna please? I've been on the lookout for one.

Thanks