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Questions about 3G/4G connection replacing existing ADSL connection.

Hmm, I have 2 4G phones but they are locked to Vodafone *sighs*. What sort of prices would you look at for getting a second hand 4G dongle? And im curious whether Sky sattelite dishes work with the Huawei B593s?
 
If I were you, I'd take one of them to the "man who unlocks phones, usually sited in the tawdry run-down part of the local town centre somewhere near the Cash Converters place" type affair and get it unlocked. That will be a cheap quick route to trying out networks.

I honestly have no idea how much a second hand dongle costs. A guess would be about £15.

If you want to improve the reception of the B593 you can plug in an external antenna which could be the cheaper "just outside the window" style thing, or the more ambitious directional roof antenna (what we have).

That said, while that improves the speed here, it's still perfectly reasonable without it (20 down, 20 up) as the B593 is a decent piece of kit.

However that's for later on if it is a workable solution. Or if you find no workable solutions and want to take a punt on spending quite a bit of cash.

Mobile broadband antennae and satellite dishes are not related.

If you have a Sky service that will carry on working separately. Though IIRC Sky require you to have a phone line to have the TV service so the box can spy on what you watch, and send data to Sky, and I don't know if that bit can work over 4G - it used to "dial out" like a dial up modem during the night. Likewise ordering films might or might not work over the 4G connection. I haven't had Sky for 15 years, so I'm probably out of date on that.

If the Sky box simply connects to your modem/router via Ethernet, then in theory, it should work with the B593, for example. You'd just plug the Ethernet cable into that instead like any other device.
 
@DTMark - I recently switched my B593 to Vodafone and it worked straight away, perhaps Huawei or Vodafone updated their configs.
 
@DTMark - I recently switched my B593 to Vodafone and it worked straight away, perhaps Huawei or Vodafone updated their configs.

May well be. I remember having to put in a different APN.

Just as a forewarning for how utterly useless EE are:

For about a week now, the part of the EE website where you can purchase a "top up" for your data allowance has been broken.

Again.

404 Not Found errors this time.

They really are that inept and useless. You don't even see this sort of thing on "amateur" websites, let alone supposedly professionally built websites of major companies.

These things generally break about every 3 months, and remain broken for between a week and a couple of months. Nobody notices that the revenue stream has dropped to zero.

It's a company so awash with money that it doesn't need any income from customers ;) The tech works well, but the company still doesn't really seem to be "finished" yet.

So it's handy to have a Three SIM card to pop in to the modem in the meantime.
 
I'm also finding Vodafone's network is more reliable. I can get reasonable speeds from '2 bar' connections from both networks from masts in Dundee. When I was on EE I'd lose the data connection twice on an average working day. It would reconnect within 5 minutes but still annoying.

I've been on Vodafone for a month now, exact same setup but not a single drop-out that I've noticed.
 
Vodafone 4G is reliable here with a 3 bar signal. However it looks like there's only one transmitter covering a wide area, so the speeds are all over the place - anything from 2 Meg to 25 Meg down. Mind you that may have changed, haven't tried it in a year or so. I'll give it a go when the data on the Three SIM is used up and see if anything has changed.
 
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Some phones can be unlocked for free, have you tried doing a search?? I have managed to unlock several phones in the past, using instructions posted online.

Did you already know about the Data allowance being up and down?? You would be surprised the number of people who dont; possibly because a lot of older ADSL contracts only metered the downloads, as the upload speed was so slow, even 24/7 it didnt amount to much.

Funny story of the day; my step father has been telling everyone they have fibre internet now (with PlusNet); no one really believed him, so while they have been away we went round and ran some speed tests.

PN HAVE upped his connection speed.

From 2.2Mbps to 3.4Mbps!!!

As regulars will know, I was on the same exchange, but 400m further away and getting 5.5-6Mbps on my old ADSL connection.
 
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