I hadn't noticed the increase in the limits - thanks for that info!
I use a Mikrotik SXT LTE kit, which I've been very happy with, although it is getting a bit old now - it only has 100Mb ethernet, which is fine for my 4G signal. They do have newer models with better throughput available.

I've looked at Mikrotik kit, with that do you literally put your SIM in, mount it and then plug it in your WAN port? What router do you use at the other end, can it dial and present the IP at router level?

In reply to a post by MattL:

I've looked at Mikrotik kit, with that do you literally put your SIM in, mount it and then plug it in your WAN port? What router do you use at the other end, can it dial and present the IP at router level?

Yes to all of that. It has two SIM sockets so you can switch between two networks if you want. It has pass through functionality to present the IP address to the internal network.

It has two Ethernet ports, so you can use one for the IP pass through and the other one for management. Or you can use VLANs over a single port to do the same.

In reply to a post by andynormancx:

Yes to all of that. It has two SIM sockets so you can switch between two networks if you want. It has pass through functionality to present the IP address to the internal network

Has Microtik upgraded from LTE Category 4 yet? Quite limited compared to a Cat 12 or higher phone.

My vote would be for a ZTE MC7010 outside CPE - which runs a fairly snappy 🤩 snapdragon X55 chipset. @ something like Cat 22.

If you’re rural / edge of signal mount it in front of a mini parabolic to boost the signal. The only trouble is they’re £280 odd + shipping. But it’s a very good router.

They moved beyond cat 4 quite a while ago now, but only to cat 6:

https://mikrotik.com/product/sxt_lte6_kit

It seems they are in the process of moving to hardware with more modern modems.

https://mikrotik.com/product/chateau_lte12
https://mikrotik.com/product/chateau_5g

No sign of newer modems beyond cat 6 for the Let range yet though.

And you can pay someone to add extra external antenna ports to the cat 12 routers

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/184887842050?mkevt=1&mkci...

Edited by andynormancx (Tue 11-Jan-22 22:17:56)

In reply to a post by amiga_dude:

In reply to a post by pluralist:

I know a lot of people here use pfsense on Raspberry Pi kit for some reason, but I have no knowledge or understanding of why. However!

Unless I am mistaken it not possible on RPi to run pfsence as far I know. It much more likely to be something like OpenWRT.

Pretty sure pfSense solely runs on x86-64/AMD64 on third party kit. So plenty of low power cheap Atom based mobo's for example.

Although there are also a couple of Netgate factory boxes using ARMv7 and ARMv8 based processors - this is as far as it goes. So although Pi's run ARM - there is no either official or unofficial support, compilation or porting of pfSense for the Pi family.

https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/hardware/...

From what I've read some folks have ported (unofficial development releases) of OPNsense to the ARM architecture. That's about as close as it gets.

@smouty is the resident expert on OPNsense related matters so he no doubt knows way more.

So yeah as you say its basically OpenWRT

In reply to a post by andynormancx:

And you can pay someone to add extra external antenna ports to the cat 12 routers

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/184887842050?mkevt=1&mkci...

...to be fair router-mods aren't particularly fussy lads and they'll happily take the drill and soldering iron to the latest Huawei CPE Pro 2 routers that are Cat 20+ for that unique 'from the set of Matrix films' look 😂

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/185004719469

They really should show it with all the cables plugged in for the full Matrix effect.