My monthly discount on Virgin is coming to an end, and also there's the 12% price rise notification I've received. So I thought I'd have a look at 4G mobile broadband to see if that was a viable option. Not sure it will be a full time option, but if I do have to cancel Virgin then I need to know how well it will tide us over.
So after a bit of research I ordered a refurbished Huawei B818-263 from efones, which to all intents and purposes looks brand new, the user interface is branded Optus, which is an Austrailian telecoms company. By all accounts the internal antenna's are very good, but there are connections for external anttenna's if required. It's a CAT 19 device, with Carrier Aggregation (this is dynamic) and has bridge mode.
LTE H-Monitor also works with it.
I live 440 meters from the closest cell tower, and have direct line of sight from a window. As far as I'm aware there is no 5G, I have no way to test either so I didn't go for the 5G version, which is also double the price.
Screenshots of all the screens in order
I've set up a Windows Batch script using the Speedtest CLI to run regular speed tests to the same server on an Intel NUC that just happens to be in the room with a suitable window. I use Scheduled Tasks to run the script every half an hour between 8am and midnight, then on the hour in until 8am.
@echo off
set myfile="C:\Users\Ron\OneDrive\Documents\Results.csv"
for /F %%I in ('curl http://ipecho.net/plain') do set ip=%%I
set timestring=%TIME: =0%
set str=%timestring:~0,5%
set datetimef="%date:~0,2%/%date:~3,2%/%date:~-4% %str%","%ip%",
SPEEDTEST -s 37471 -f csv >Speedtest.csv
set /P var=<Speedtest.csv
ECHO %datetimef%%var% >>%myfile%
The fastest download speed test so far is
and the slowest - no idea why this one is so slow, the two either side were 67 and 88 Mbps.
the average download is 96.46Mbps, and the average upload is 22.32 Mbps
Fastest upload has been 31.44 Mbps, and slowest 9.61 Mbps
The speed test ping ranges between 16.668 to 98.979 with an average of 45.44.
Jitter ranges between 0.105 and 20.974, average of 4.02.
I'm going to create some graphs, and see how things look on there, it's would be nice if the Speedtest CLI allowed you to link the speed test results to an account, but like the Android and Windows Apps I don't this is possible.
So far I've had the same IP, the modem set it's self up with the 3internet APN which apparently results in a public IP address and no NAT at Three's end. Only problem is I can ping the IP 92.x.x.x from my Three mobile, but I can't ping it from my home network, of via TBB Ping monitor, any idea's?