My three connection drops and takes me to the 'You've ran out of credit' page and is like that from anywhere between 3mins - 6hours. Sometimes when that happens even the 4g unlimited add-on that I have disappears so I have to contact three live chat and explain that it's disappeared (they claims that they can still see it on my account) and I have to spent hours showing them by emailing them pictures and explaining to customer relations how they can temporarily fix it by giving me X amount of weeks of data add-on.

I've never had that, but then my Three SIM doesn't need an extra addon to get unlimited data.

Three's billing/product configuration systems are absolutely awful. If I wanted my data SIM to keep working I'd make sure I had one with unlimited data builtin to the base product.

Yeah, I would've bought a contract but Openreach has installed overhead fibre down my road last month, just waiting for them to switch it on so I can switch and I won't have to pay the remaining X amount of months left on the contract.

I should clarify that the drops last about a minute, including the time taken to reconnect and restart PPP, get a new DHCP lease, etc. The dongle has a cyan LED that goes out when the connection drops, and flashes when it's reconnecting.

The good news is that everything's stayed up for the past 18 hours, since I turned off all the Linux torrents and cloud backups. I should probably bite the bullet and replace the dongle with a "real" LTE gateway, but I was hoping to wait for 5G became viable.

In reply to a post by richi:

I should clarify that the drops last about a minute, including the time taken to reconnect and restart PPP, get a new DHCP lease, etc.

On my Mikrotik SXT that all takes less than a second

In reply to a post by andynormancx:

In reply to a post by richi:

I should clarify that the drops last about a minute, including the time taken to reconnect and restart PPP, get a new DHCP lease, etc.

On my Mikrotik SXT that all takes less than a second

Yeah, I think what's happening is the dongle is overheating and completely restarting, rather than simply renegotiating with the cell tower.

If a dongle isn't up to heavy use, and I can pay a bit more to push my 50/30 connection to the dizzy heights of 150/50, it might be worth buying a whole new Cat-4 router.

Category 6 seems like the bleeding edge, but I've not found one that advertises the new Band 32 (1500 MHz). So I don't see the point in shelling out twice the price for a Cat-6 box.

Am I missing something?

My Huawei B525-23a has Band 32 on it, just waiting for Three to enable it on the local mast, I already get carrier aggregation on Band 20 and Band 3, Band 32 on top would be good.

Edited by kommando (Fri 16-Aug-19 16:56:16)

In reply to a post by richi:

Category 6 seems like the bleeding edge.
Am I missing something?

Yes, LTE Cat 6 is about 6 years ago, Cat 20 is closer to bleeding edge, the table on this page may help:
https://www.cablefree.net/wirelesstechnology/4glte/l...

It is hard to find non-phone hardware that is higher than Cat 4, but it is worth it. You can buy some expensive hardware from Netgear for example:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/NETGEAR-MR1100-100EUS-Night...

It's official: The dongle overheats and reboots itself. I can't make it happen with a fan cooling it down, but it happens almost at will if I load it up.

But I still don't want to over-invest in kit that might be obsolete in a year or two. So I cheaped out on a TL-MR6400. I made sure to get the v4 (the v3 doesn't have removable antennae).

I'm seeing 70/30 Mb/s. Typical pings down in the 30�35 ms range.

Still searching for the optimum placement, but it looks like a nice bit of kit for just £70.