I decided to try with Smarty, £25 per month with a free month. They were not 100% clear that they support all the same bands as Three ...
To my knowledge, the same bands are used.
... but said I could cancel in 14 days if it wasn't satisfactory.
Standard practice.
The Huawei has been returned as suggested by the seller, due to limitations in the Irish Three specific firmware.
Ah, I suppose you purchased a Three (Ireland) branded B525 then (I can't recall whether you mentioned it before
). I had been reading that those devices utilising that firmware do not have bridge mode. Good that you returned it, since flashing it may have been risky (or impossible without soldering).
I decided to dip my toe in the Mikrotik world (technically quite interesting) with an SXT LTE. Coupled with the Smarty SIM and connected up in the spare bedroom it gives just over 20meg download. Still need to get the wall mount bracket and play around with potential exterior mounting points, but so far so good. As with the Huawei it only picks up Band 20 indoors, we'll see if it can get Band 3 when mounted outside.
I did look at Mikrotik for a piece of kit, but I think I would be pushing into realm of diminishing returns (I mean, the B525 was a nice upgrade but as for 4G performance I do not think there are massive improvements for me to have by investing more into 4G kit). I only really use it for my other devices, and so 40-70 Mbps down and 15-28 Mbps up is way more than I need and is sufficient for a backup. I might stick my B525 into bridge mode and configure RouterOS to route certain traffic over it one day.
By the way, to my knowledge, the SXT LTE has NO IP rating. Doesn't mean that it can't withstand weathering, but I have read in a couple of places (including the one
here) that their device had been damaged by the elements. Understandably, these are old posts. Furthermore, perhaps it was down to incorrect installation for the ones that failed. I don't know, but perhaps it is worth reading through some of the topics about them if you are going to mount it outside.
On side note, Pulse8 has had SIMO, 30 day "4G Data" plans appear on their website (
here) starting at £36/mo (incl. VAT). I have no idea how long it's been there fore. I wonder who they are reselling since £45.60/mo for unlimited everything would be regarded as being quite steep if they are reselling Three considering Smarty offers similar service for £25/mo, and Three themselves were selling their service for £20/mo (now currently £24/mo, albeit 12 month contract). In a way, I'm hoping it would be EE (since they have more 4G bandwidth and
maybe even Carrier Aggregation enabled here) or O2 (probably less congested... for now), but that seems fairly unlikely given that none of them offer unlimited data and Pulse8 would be really undercutting.