When I moved house recently and had no broadband at all- I bought a DrayTek Vigor 2862ac router for a hopefully forthcoming fibre service, and found it has a WAN2 option which you can use to tether your phone to via a hotspot set up on the phone. The Draytek then routes the tethered connection transparently via its own Ethernet ports, and it's own WiFi setup.

I couldn't get the Draytek to tether wirelessly to the phone (Huawei Mate 10 pro) via a 5Ghz link (though the Draytek interface seemed to support that) but it worked spectacularly well at 2.4ghz. I was getting 25+ megabits/second most of the time via EE around my Draytek based Lan network and the Draytek Wifi.

One could find an old Sim free phone, setup the Draytek, and put the phone somewhere near but where 4G can be received and tethered via the WiFI. Of course this will only work if the 4G signal is good in a place the phone can be replaced so the Draytek can tether to it, but it worked extremely well for me.

Some models in this series also have a built in 4G slot for a sim card, and my model also supports it via certain USB dongles as well, there's a list on the Draytek site. Again the router would have to be in a suitable place.

It means you could use your day to day phone for this, as I did! Great for a backup connection!

Just a suggestion.

PS: Not sure about the double NAT aspect by doing this -(I wasn't using server of any VPN) but that goes on at the 4G provider's end of things too, lots of people's phones simultaneously share the same public IP unless you buy a specific SIM with a static IP, which are available, but I saw that they cost a small fortune with high monthly subs and a small allowance. I guess any Wi-Fi hotspot scheme will involve NAT going on in the phone too.

No connection with Draytek at all, other than a long time trouble free user of their gear.

Edited by shaunhw (Mon 20-May-19 18:29:04)

In reply to a post by shaunhw:

but that goes on at the 4G provider's end of things too, lots of people's phones simultaneously share the same public IP unless you buy a specific SIM with a static IP, which are available, but I saw that they cost a small fortune with high monthly subs and a small allowance. I guess any Wi-Fi hotspot scheme will involve NAT going on in the phone too.

On Three you can use the 3internet APN, then you get a public (but not static) IP address and no NAT at all at Three's end. For the same cost as a normal NATted connection.

Thanks for all the ideas and suggestions.

So, in the interest of completeness, I bit the bullet and ordered a Netgear LB2120 LTE modem and an acompanying external antenna as it seemed to give me the most "bang for the buck", of course that may not be the case for anyone else.

Yesterday I went and purchased the £20 SIM from Three and installed it into the modem. On power up I checked the APN and it was already set to 3internet so I switched to bridge mode and set the USG WAn port to DHCP. I then received a real internet address and so no double NAT, result!

So, now, instead of the 2.4Mb down and 400K up that I was getting I seem to be getting in excess of 20Mb down and 2 Mb up, a vast improvement. I am hoping to maybe squeeze a bit more out of the LTE connection by positioning the modem/antenna in a better location, but am quite happy with the speeds we are getting, especially so the wife as she now can watch netflix without any buffering - Yay!


Anyboy else considering this, my advice would be to go for it. I have reduced my monthly home broadband bill from £46 with BT down to £20 with Three so the money I have spent on the modem etc will be recovered within 6 months.

Of course I no longer have a landline, but, all we ever got on that were nuisance calls anyway so no great loss there.

I have seen posts in other threads recommending the Huawei B525s-65a, does anyone have any experience with that or similar?

I'm looking for a similar 3 Mobile solution for a friend that's too far for FTTPoD but he would prefer something that can go up to 300 rather than 150 Mbps. He is in a good 3 signal area and close to 2 masts, not far from 2 more.

I did look at the Netgear Nighthawk M1 which supposedly (with carrier aggregation) goes all the way up to 1Gbit on LTE.

I cant get much above 20Mbps from my LTE here (no CA) so it would have been overkill for me and the price is set to reflect the faster speeds it is able to do.

Ok, I know this post is as old as Methusala, but I think it is still relevant and useful.

I was trolling the internet (like I usually do!) and was looking to see what others have done to overcome problems with wired broadband. It is quite fascinating to see that there are many ideas, but no real solutions.

My setup is Ubiquiti around the property (USG, AP's, CKC, G4 Camera, PoE) and of course using some kind of 3/4G modem operating over Three's network (not a static IP here, as some have already mentioned, still very expensive, especially if, like me you can use over 1TB regularly).

I have used various ones, but to add a spanner to the works, we are rural and technically have no 3/4G coverage. So, up goes an antenna to suck in some waves! So far, fairly ok, but needs improvement. Managed to get up to 60Mbps and 15Mbps, so reasonably good - all due to antenna; without antenna, either zero or barely 5Mbps/1Mbps.

Again, in order to benefit from the USG, modems need to be in bridge or passthrough mode to play well, but it seems to be that many modems fail to work reliably in any mode, other than NAT. Surprising, since many brands advertise their modes quite prominently. So far, haven't managed to find a reliable and stable modem.

So, for those that are looking at the Teltonika modems, I hate to disappoint, but my experience has not been successful. Up to now, I still haven't pinpointed exactly what the issues are, but the first modem (RUT240) was faulty - power input was flaky and it would reset randomly, most likely due to the bad power along with other issues. We experience similar issues with the replacement, but although the power issue is solved, we regularly get spontaneous reboots (even though the ping, periodic and anything else is turned off!), so there must be some bugs in their firmware. An unusual issue we get is, the local network fails, by this I mean that after some time, several hours, the local network is inaccessible and after some investigation, just rebooting the modem brings it all back again! Strange, since the network SHOULD work independently in Passthough mode and the modem shouldn't interfere, but it SEEMS that it does, somehow. Don't ask how, I have no clue! So, we are now at the stage where we reboot the modem every few hours, via various methods, to find our local network again. Another aspect is, the modem is inaccessible via a webpage when it craps out, but interestingly, the internet still works, albeit, we will await he time when that goes too! So, either memory leaks or a serious firmware bug. This is a WIP ATM. I would like to try bridge mode (which I have done previously), but as it craps out so often, I need to have access to it to troubleshoot, hence using Passthough.

I'll assume that since the Teltonika range is similar, the firmware may be similar and there will be common code for the basic functions and maybe additional code for the higher tiers of modem, so going down the track of doubling/tripling the amount spent and going for another model seems ludicrous, but that's only my opinion. So, now looking further afield.

Although this paragraph is inserted here, I think it useful to mention that Three is going through changes for its 5G network which disrupts the 4G signal, but since they are knob ends, they don't publicise anything so that techies can be prevented from wasting time on what is Three's stability issues. We experience a VERY flaky signal and it drops off for no reason for short/long periods which is another issue that gets added to the mix and needs to be isolated when an issue is presented in our setup. This has been ongoing since July 2019 (now October 2020) and we've learnt to work around it, albeit painfully!

Having said that, many of our issues are modem related, not service related, we've managed to identify which box to look in here!
Anyone that's used other modems/devices for utilisation of mobile internet ONLY, without a wired BB mix would be useful to learn from.

We've used the standard Three modem Huawei 310s, B311s-220 as a gauge for the ability to have a stable connection, but obviously no Bridge or Passthrough modes! Shame, because even though they are budget modems, they work better than the Teltonika! I've considered the Netgear B2120-100UKS, but that, according to some reports, is a PoS too! I had a DrayTek 2862Lac, but had unrelated issues with that so didn't get much chance to give it a real test in its mobile and bridge mode! If anyone has experience with that modem on 4G, I'd like to hear your results. There are not that many to choose from - it doesn't seem to be flooded market and use experiences are very lean, but I'm posting here to try to spark up some interest and possibly enable us to assist each other in having some real data to work from.


Notes: The RUT240 takes around 5 minutes to reboot, God created the earth in less time!

I use a ZyXel https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07BR1YFXP/ref=p... connected in Bridge Mode to the ethernet port of a Draytek 2862.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/DrayTek-Vigor-2862-Router-F...

This uses a Smarty Unlimited SIM.

I load balance this connection with Sky VDSL. I was hoping to drop sky completely but have found the most reliable and fastest connection to be both the LTE and VDSL load balanced together. The LTE signal when using only VPN to work is rock solid, otherwise it can be quite flaky for general browsing periodically just slowing down and stopping. In load balance mode this does not appear to be a problem as the draytek does seem to send the traffic down the ultra reliable VDSL connection when the LTE is not working.

I get aggerated download speeds with large files of around 80Mbs, 20 from Sky and 60 from LTE.

Its not perfect but with 5 of us now back in the house the demand on the internet connection was too mcuh for Sky alone.

The Zyxel needs a reboot about once a month, the draytek is completely rock solid.

Have been running with both connections for about 3 weeks now and all seems pretty quick and stable. Even the gamers in the house seem happy again.

Just my experience with the net gear lb
Bridge mode doesn’t work at all . It seems to reboot every time the ip changes
And on three that’s every 30 seconds at the moment !

Are you seeing IP changes on Three or on Smarty? Not the same, not by a long chalk!

After my Virgin Media connection went down for weeks, I bought a Huawei B818-263 CAT19 4G router. Not that cheap at about £220 but two of us working from home couldn't be without a stable connection for that long.

I previously used the Virgin SuperHub in modem mode, preferring to use my own set up for wifi and other networking things. My main router is a Netgear Nighthawk X4S R7800.

Installation of the Huawei B818-263 was as simple as setting it to bridge mode, then removing the cable from the SuperHub and connecting it to the that instead. In the city centre I get speeds of about 80mbps down and 30mbps up - not bad! Although ping times are fairly high at 60-70ms.

Would totally recommend this Huawei unit, it's solid enough to use as a main internet connection.