First impressions of HONOR Router 3.
The UI tries to do everything for you which seemed nice at first except AP (Bridge) mode seems to disable the LAN ports and does not allowed UI access from the LAN, only when connected to the WiFi on the HONOR itself. Its clearly leaving the firewall up on the WAN port even when in bridge mode which is silly.
I tried bypassing this by connecting LAN to LAN and got this working once, but this disabled automatic firmware updates due to no longer having a gateway and is REALLY tricky to do as the More Functions section is buggy when there is no Internet connection and I can't change the LAN IP to the same subnet as the WAN for obvious reasons. Then again its Huawei device, maybe not being able to call home is a good thing?
You can still manually update the firmware though I haven't checked if the firmware files are readily available.
2.4Ghz by default used 40Mhz channel width, this is
in breach of the regulatory requirements as there are other networks on all channels around here.
I switched it to 20Mhz and gotta admit I was impressed, it can push 100Mbit over 2.4Ghz, the nanoHD does 40-60Mbit.
5Ghz I'm getting the exact same speed of 400-450Mbit at 160Mhz (1900Mbit link rate) or 80Mhz channel width (1200Mbit link rate), a far cry from the nanoHD which peaks at 700Mbit (1200Mbit link rate) though admittedly that needs 160Mhz to do that on my laptop. More frustratingly it wont let me choose the upper channel for 160Mhz so it clashes will all nearby networks making that mode pointless. I can pull 50MB/s on a 40Mhz channel though, it just doesn't seem to gain much past that.
I switched to WPA2/WPA3 mode on the router, Windows is still connecting over WPA2 Personal for some reason.
[UPDATE]It seems it doesn't like Windows iperf3, real-world speeds are VERY different. I also checked again and iperf3 from my Galaxy S10 DOES work correctly.
Testing a file copy from my NAS I can hit 53MB/s on 40Mhz channel width and 93MB/s on 80Mhz, that's as fast as devices costing ten times what this did.
That's twice the upstream throughput (523Mbit) of the nanoHD and almost 200Mbit more downstream (800Mbit), while using half the channel width.