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New router - worth upgrading my B593 yet?

Hi all.

Due to the slow and unstable 0.5mbps adsl in my rural location, like many people here we survive on 4G for our home internet. We use a mixture of EE (4 x 32gb SIMs @ £14.50 per month) and Three (1 x 40gb SIM @ £20 per month). That's about 150gb per month for £80. If anyone knows of a better way to get that kind of allowance or more for a better price, please let me know! (our kids are very Internet hungry).

Anyway... for the last few years I have used a Huawei B953 and a couple of antennae on my roof. It works well enough, but it's getting a bit long in the tooth (and the wifi was always poor).

So is it worth upgrading now? What's the best router on the market, and can I expect better 4G and wifi performance. I have a B310 sitting in a box - is it worth using, or sticking on eBay?

I don't mind forking out for a new router, if it would provide tangible benefits. Or is it a case of 'if it ain't broke...'.

Thanks :)
 
The question may come down to whether or not EE / Three UK have upgraded the network in your area to support LTE Advanced (Carrier Aggregation) and also whether you can find a router that's able to cope with faster than LTE Category 4-6 speeds on UK spectrum/networks, as well as allowing you to plug in an external antenna.

I think the Huawei B618 can do Cat 11 and it has two antenna ports at the top under a flap, but it's not exactly cheap. However it does seem to support all the UK 4G bands.

http://amzn.to/2wVhuGS
 
The question may come down to whether or not EE / Three UK have upgraded the network in your area to support LTE Advanced (Carrier Aggregation) and also whether you can find a router that's able to cope with faster than LTE Category 4-6 speeds on UK spectrum/networks, as well as allowing you to plug in an external antenna.

I think the Huawei B618 can do Cat 11 and it has two antenna ports at the top under a flap, but it's not exactly cheap. However it does seem to support all the UK 4G bands.

http://amzn.to/2wVhuGS

Thanks.

Right, that's thrown me. I was looking at the E5186, but I had not seen that model. Is it new?
 
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Yes. I think it was soft launched in Feb 2017 but it only really started to become available from certain UK outlets around April-May and it can apparently handle three different frequency ranges with a maximum of 20 MHz each (triple Carrier Aggregation).

However take note that its external antenna ports appear to be for CRC9 connectors (not SMA) and I've heard that they can struggle to support the weight of cables that are often used for larger outdoor antennas (i.e. the cables may drop out of the socket).
 
The TPLink MR200 can take external antenna feeds (although the two attached are pretty good), for around £100. It is "only" 150/50 Mbps, but has 750Mbps ac wireless and can run 4 wifi networks - 2 per frequency.
 
I think his current 4G router can already do 150Mbps or similar but that's likely to be an older LTE category, which can't fully benefit from recent network upgrades.
 
Ok, I think I'll go with the E5186 for now which is a cat 6 device.

But in terms of 4G speeds alone, if I'm only getting 20mbps down and 5mps up, with a ping of around 25, am I likely to see an improvement with the new router?
 
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I know, I was thinking of the wifi side of things; who really needs more than 150mbps right now; it would chew through so much data, it would be cheaper over a single year to get fibre run to the house.

The radio space around our shop is jammed with wifi networks; I can pick up dozens on my phone, yet the connection to the TPL stays solid.
 
That's about 150gb per month for £80. If anyone knows of a better way to get that kind of allowance or more for a better price, please let me know!

18 month contract.. comes with a device too - which I expect you will just not use and put the SIM into your own router?

https://shop.ee.co.uk/dongles/pay-monthly-mobile-broadband/4gee-router/details
Seems to be 200GB for £100 per month..
Wonder if EE would do the sim for less per month without their hardware.
However may work out more expensive if you don't always use up all the data on your current SIMs each month?

Tom - www.mouselike.org
 
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