Kitz Forum
Broadband Related => Mobile broadband => Topic started by: Alex Atkin UK on May 11, 2021, 11:00:43 PM
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I know its usually faster than either of my DSL lines, twice as fast at times, but as today I've disconnected the modems TWICE due to the storms I noticed something curious - page load times seem FASTER on 4G Voxi alone than load balanced across my two DSL lines + 4G! :o
I honestly can't explain why this is, it makes no sense. The latency should be higher, but there seems to be significantly less lag to pages loading.
I suppose it could be that most of my policy routing rules are not enabled (I have pfSense configured to skip generating them if the gateway they are related to is down) but I really wouldn't have thought it would make an obvious difference like this.
I may also have been lucky here, just plugged the modems back in after the last storm and neither are getting any sync. Fried line card?
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Storms here as well, both my lines suffered but no comment on the 4G as I only have it for fail over.
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Apparently the HH5As needed rebooting, go figure.
Well Zen has come back, the Plusnet line for some reason takes AGES to gain sync lately.
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Seems the Plusnet Hub has died, it wont sync. Plugged in the Openreach ECI modem and that's connected fine.
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How are you doing the load balancing? Is it per client, or per connection or what? Just wondering if the load balancing is inefficient where the RTT is wildly different between the circuits.
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Its just per connection and yes the RTT variance can be a problem. When I was on Three it really didn't work as the latency on their service was so much higher than DSL.
However since I've been on Voxi as the tower is really close and contention seems minimal it seems to work fine.
The only "catch" is it can trigger Cloudflare captchas when a protected site sees my IP changing. But any REALLY problematic sites I just policy route out a specific WAN.
Game downloads from Steam, etc easily max out all WANs.
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I am currently at my static caravan in the depths of West Wales, and EE have recently had many outages over previous weekends, citing upgrades to their masts.
Did a speedtest today - 210/20 ! This is indeed faster than my dual FTTC at home. Even had a 350/30 test in Cardiff the other week as I now possess a 5G phone and contract. Impressively fast.
Though the offices new 1Gbps symmetrical internet connection is nice when you are in the office on your own :)
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It wasn't "faster" in speed that surprised me, its web pages seemed to respond faster.
Although I recently found out there was a bug in the pfSense kernel that caused some issues with multi-WAN so that might have been a contributor. Updated to the latest RC and magically the problem I had with port forwards suddenly only working on a single WAN is fixed and things seem faster in general.
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It wasn't "faster" in speed that surprised me, its web pages seemed to respond faster.
Although I recently found out there was a bug in the pfSense kernel that caused some issues with multi-WAN so that might have been a contributor. Updated to the latest RC and magically the problem I had with port forwards suddenly only working on a single WAN is fixed and things seem faster in general.
Yes certainly noticing that here too, web pages feel much snappier @ 170mbps vs 60mbps I'm used to at home (Can only really use 1 connection for a single computer load)
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This is what I get on 4G at home on Three
https://www.speedtest.net/result/i/4646737434
When i'm outside my local shop I get 5G which is around 400+ Mbs
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I wish Three was decent here as they are cheaper than Voxi(Vodafone) and issue public IP addresses.
I've been trying to port forward across my VPN connection to my VPS to get around that, but while it works for standard http, I can't seem to get https or XMPP to work. It seems whenever TLS is involved, something goes wrong.
Obviously I could just get L2TP from AAISP, but seems silly to spend more money on something I should be able to use my existing VPS for.
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I'm in the office today (Cardiff) and have 5G - 450Mbps/40.
Where I live, EE are purportedly rolling out 5G. If it's a decent speed and I can make tethering work for me, I could be tempted to look into 5G in the interim before FTTP comes around.
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I've switched to a H122-373 (5G CPE Pro 2) and despite the fact Three is supposed to have good network coverage here now, its only showing 4G networks when I do a manual network scan. :/ I'm a bit concerned as some other users of this device have said it SHOULD show 5G networks in the scan and that they used to connect to 5G and recent firmware broke it.
Very problematic as I'd have to go closer to the tower to be sure so I could try to get a Vodafone 5G signal as my Three PAYG SIMs appear to have expired.
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During my line fault my EE was faster than my VDSL (not for browsing responsiveness but for streaming buffering and downloads). I am also considering buying a new phone now which would be 5G, although 5G isnt the reason I am buying it.
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Yeah I really can't rationalise a new phone right now, the router was supposed to be to test out what 5G is available in the area, kinda regretting not checking for known issues beforehand. But I guess I have the two year warranty to figure out what's going on. Maybe they will discontinue it after a year and swap it for something newer. ;)
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The only way I justify it is the battery, planned obsolescence not letting me swap it out, but I am buying a phone thats a gen old if I get one so not paying absolute premium.
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Considering I went all out and got the Galaxy S10, I'm hoping Samsung do not discontinue the battery replacement service before I need one. I'd rather not have to send it to some random third-party repair service. I see absolutely no need for 5G on a phone though, unless you're using it as a WiFi hotspot and are never near decent WiFi.
Its so frustrating as I think the phone is TOO thin, so making it a big thicker with a battery door would be fine for me. Had no real problems with the Note 4 except having a metal frame made it hard to use in winter and I found it was a bit too large, thus why I went down to the S10.
Of course the real drag is I got a lot less use out of it than I expected due to the pandemic, as I paid all that money for shooting 4K 60fps video at conventions then everything got cancelled and I'm going to let all the anti-vaxxers be the guinea pigs this year, will reconsider leaving the house again next year.
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Managed to find a Three SIM that was still active, there is indeed a 5G signal. Managed to hit 300Mbit down and it was still slowly climbing when the test ended, upload test failed for some reason so I can't share the result.
Looks like I may be looking at a Three contract again but will go for 12 months this time, not falling for the 24 month tie-in and crap performance after the first month again.
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Managed to find a Three SIM that was still active, there is indeed a 5G signal. Managed to hit 300Mbit down and it was still slowly climbing when the test ended, upload test failed for some reason so I can't share the result.
Looks like I may be looking at a Three contract again but will go for 12 months this time, not falling for the 24 month tie-in and crap performance after the first month again.
what speed test app did you use, fast.com speedtest.net opensignal,
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Speedtest.net, will do more testing when the new SIM arrives.
Speaking of, how wasteful are SIM cards? I have about five Three SIM cards knocking around, but have to order a new one to get a new contract. :no:
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I find that in my area and my location I get c48/50 down and 9 up on a BT line. With an EE sim I can get up to 80mb down and 40up with the router and antennae in the house. I do notice that speeds fluctuate quite a bit. It can drop as low as 20mb down, but averages out at the same as the BT line, so 50 down but much faster uploads at 30 up.
I know every user is different, but I am wondering if I should look into an external modem or aerial which would boost the speed enough to step away from BT line.
I do keep wondering though if at say new years eve or christmas I am going to find I get very low speeds due to the masts being in use - anyone got any experience of this first hand?
I also thought about load balancing but when i tried this I got so many timeouts that I stopped.
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I found that timeouts are usually a problem with the MTU being different between mobile and DSL, you have to reduce the MTU on the router so they match.
I absolutely wouldn't rely on mobile personally. I spent a month or so using only Three 5G on my desktop, then I started to get timeouts on websites and went back to DSL.
I did change some settings and get it working again, but like you said I suspect during certain peak times its inevitable its going to get overloaded as you have a lot more users sharing the same radio frequencies/bandwidth vs DSL where you have your own private allocation per household.
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Speaking of Three 5G, it really surprised me a few days ago with a new speed record. Interestingly I've been unable to replicate it on speedtest.net (the test seems too short for it ramp up as high), it just happened this once on Steam.
At the same time, Voxi has slowed down to half the speed it used to be, its now the same as my DSL so I've decided to cancel it. It might be a temporary issue, but honestly having four ISPs seems overkill given how fast Three is and Voxi is the most expensive of the four. I was planning to cancel Plusnet but honestly the reliability of DSL and having a second public IP to access my server, it seemed kinda a silly move.
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I'll just attach latest speeds:
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That upload is nice, I wonder if that's using 5G for uploading? I was under the impression they haven't rolled out upload support yet so it uses 4G, thus my upload sucks as 4G on this mast was not great and is probably what causes the download to vary so much.