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ZTE MC801A Faulty?

dmo

Casual Member
I bought a 5G phone a few weeks ago to use with my sim only contract on Three. My speed at home according to ookla had been a consistent ~900 download and 130~ upload as I live about 200m away from a 5G tower. My internet always felt snappy and just worked.

Three sent me a notification to change contract as the previous 24 month term had passed. I went on their site to see what was available and noticed they do 5G hubs for the home. I thought, if my phone can do these speeds then maybe one of their hubs can replace VM as my main connection because it has been off and on a lot just lately and tethering my home network to a phone hotspot is not ideal. I decided to take out a second contract for this home broadband because surely it would work similar to my phone?

The ZTE MC801A hub was delivered next day after ordering and although it booted up straight away and appeared to be working fine initially, I cannot seem to get the same speed or stability as what I have on my phone. When it's actually working properly, it averages at ~900 download and saving files from sites is super fast but I only have ~10 upload and sometimes it falls as low as ~3 upload. When it's not working properly, I'm sat around waiting for sites to load and it doesn't feel like broadband at all. I can pick up my phone while the hub connection isn't responding and the phone connection works perfectly, at full speed.

When I switch the hub to 4G mode then sites don't seem to stall quite as much and the upload speed goes to ~25 but the download speed is all over the place, sometimes going over 200, which is about what my VM connection does on an average day, but often dropping back down to less than 100 download.

I've tried uploading and downloading large files on sharing sites to see whether ookla was accurate and it seems so. Whether in 5G or 4G mode, sites tell me I'm transferring at whatever speed the 192 status page says, which was the same values ookla showed during speed tests.

After some testing I found that both my mobile and the hub are connected to the same 5G tower. I tried using the debug JS script on chrome while accessing the 192 status page to set band, cell lock etc. but nothing seems to raise the upload or stabilise the download.

I noticed that the connection keeps switching between LTE-NSA / ENDC and also the bands keep jumping between LTE BAND 1, LTE BAND 3, B1, B3 on MAIN and then CA is a mixture (or sometimes a single) of B1, B3, B20, B28 and n78. My signal strength is about -65 dBm but sometimes the number changes to — — for a few seconds. I have line of sight with the 5G tower and the hub is on an upstairs windowsill, directly facing it.

The hub auto updated to firmware B09 the first time I powered it up. After doing several factory resets while testing various things, the hub decided to update again but ended up on firmware B04, which seems odd. This hasn't affected the speeds at all.

Speed test on hub 5G
https://www.speedtest.net/result/13386474304

Speed test on hub 4G
https://www.speedtest.net/result/13386479052

Speed test on phone 5G
https://www.speedtest.net/result/a/8514888740

Does anyone have any ideas that could help me stabilise this hub?
 
If you don't have it, get hold of the Miononno script shown in the MC801A review thread. If you have the script settings, try setting 4G to 1+3 (SET 4G tab top left) which should improve your upload speed. Leave 5G set to auto. Remember if you use cell locking it hard-wires the lock and only a factory reset can remove it so best not to use it at first when playing around with different NSA CA settings or you'll be forever waiting for it to reboot.
Firmware B04 is the current stable Three version. B09 is buggy.
 
Thanks for your reply. I would like to try what you've suggested but the hub decided to reboot about an hour ago and now it's not coming back online. The power light comes on but then about 10 seconds later the power light goes off. No lights afterwards, it's as if it's not even plugged in.
 
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Sounds like a dodgy hub, I guess you've tried swapping the sims but I'm guessing the problem is with the hub. I only get 10 upload on my laptop but I think that's due to my network card limitation, dl is in the hundreds. On my phone wifi I often see 800/135 depending on which app/server.
 
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I spoke to Three support and they replaced the dead hub for a working one. The tech explained about B07 firmware being faulty and even though I never received that version, he said he thought the hub might have tried to update the firmware and somehow failed mid update. I'm not sure why it would do that when I had updates disabled.

The replacement hub came with B07 firmware, funnily enough. It updated to B09 within a few minutes of being online and was working the same as before, really fast ~900 download but only ~10 upload on a wired connection.

Connecting to the 5G hub wirelessly granted me Wi-Fi 6 on my phone which performed almost as fast as my phone's data connection. Connecting a tablet via 5 GHz also granted much faster upload speeds. Connecting from a computer with a 5 GHz dongle gave the same poor speeds as before. At this point, it couldn't be all 6 of my wired network interfaces spread across multiple computers and my wireless dongle, it was clearly an issue with the hub.

I did a lot of tweaking and speed testing...

What ended up fixing the upload speed on desktop connections was changing MTU and MSS in the Advanced Settings > Router page. The default MTU of 1500 and default MSS of 1460 seems to cause an issue (packet fragmentation?) with my desktop connections (Intel, TP-Link, Realtek, Netgear). None of them managed more than ~10 upload but after changing these values they now all work as expected.

Here's what helped me to fix it:
https://www.techrepublic.com/articl...etting-on-your-router-for-better-performance/

Using bbc.co.uk as my ping target, I eventually ended up with 1352 for MTU. The MSS must be at least 40 less than the MTU, so I ended up with 1312 for MSS. As soon as I modified these values, the speed changed to ~900 download and ~130 upload. The hub didn't even need to be rebooted.

Speed test before tweaking the MTU + MSS
https://www.speedtest.net/result/13397813128

Speed test after tweaking the MTU + MSS
https://www.speedtest.net/result/13397819256

I tried to upload some large files to sharing sites to confirm the upload speed was accurate and it is. So that's that.

One problem I have now, a few days after fixing the upload speed is that the hub seems to have dropped to ~150 download but my phone's data connection is still easily pushing ~900 download, which is strange because it was working fine on the day I fixed everything. I tried the old MTU / MSS values without success. I also tried using my phone sim card in the hub and vice versa, no difference. Did Three give me a taste of gigabit download speeds and then immediately traffic shape my connection? Seems like it.

Anything between 100 - 200 on both download and upload is great in 2022. All I really want now is for the hub to keep working with stable speeds and I'll be happy.
 
Thanks for posting this, I tried this using your settings as my upload speeds on laptop have been poor(on phone it has been fine though). I wasn't expecting it to work but surprisingly my results mirror yours so I will keep using the 1352/1312 for a while and see how I get on:-)
 
Thanks for posting this

No problem. It was your post that tipped me off about that as I didn't test wireless speeds with any of my mobile devices.

Have you noticed any major download speed reductions during your time using this hub like what I mentioned in my previous post? Just wondering whether my download speed might go back up again at some point.

Here's what I'm getting at the moment:
https://www.speedtest.net/result/13412748518

Like I said before, it's great but it would be nice to be able to download computer updates and games in seconds rather than minutes or hours.
 
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I bought a 5G phone a few weeks ago to use with my sim only contract on Three. My speed at home according to ookla had been a consistent ~900 download and 130~ upload as I live about 200m away from a 5G tower. My internet always felt snappy and just worked.

Three sent me a notification to change contract as the previous 24 month term had passed. I went on their site to see what was available and noticed they do 5G hubs for the home. I thought, if my phone can do these speeds then maybe one of their hubs can replace VM as my main connection because it has been off and on a lot just lately and tethering my home network to a phone hotspot is not ideal. I decided to take out a second contract for this home broadband because surely it would work similar to my phone?

The ZTE MC801A hub was delivered next day after ordering and although it booted up straight away and appeared to be working fine initially, I cannot seem to get the same speed or stability as what I have on my phone. When it's actually working properly, it averages at ~900 download and saving files from sites is super fast but I only have ~10 upload and sometimes it falls as low as ~3 upload. When it's not working properly, I'm sat around waiting for sites to load and it doesn't feel like broadband at all. I can pick up my phone while the hub connection isn't responding and the phone connection works perfectly, at full speed.

When I switch the hub to 4G mode then sites don't seem to stall quite as much and the upload speed goes to ~25 but the download speed is all over the place, sometimes going over 200, which is about what my VM connection does on an average day, but often dropping back down to less than 100 download.

I've tried uploading and downloading large files on sharing sites to see whether ookla was accurate and it seems so. Whether in 5G or 4G mode, sites tell me I'm transferring at whatever speed the 192 status page says, which was the same values ookla showed during speed tests.

After some testing I found that both my mobile and the hub are connected to the same 5G tower. I tried using the debug JS script on chrome while accessing the 192 status page to set band, cell lock etc. but nothing seems to raise the upload or stabilise the download.

I noticed that the connection keeps switching between LTE-NSA / ENDC and also the bands keep jumping between LTE BAND 1, LTE BAND 3, B1, B3 on MAIN and then CA is a mixture (or sometimes a single) of B1, B3, B20, B28 and n78. My signal strength is about -65 dBm but sometimes the number changes to — — for a few seconds. I have line of sight with the 5G tower and the hub is on an upstairs windowsill, directly facing it.

The hub auto updated to firmware B09 the first time I powered it up. After doing several factory resets while testing various things, the hub decided to update again but ended up on firmware B04, which seems odd. This hasn't affected the speeds at all.

Speed test on hub 5G
https://www.speedtest.net/result/13386474304

Speed test on hub 4G
https://www.speedtest.net/result/13386479052

Speed test on phone 5G
https://www.speedtest.net/result/a/8514888740

Does anyone have any ideas that could help me stabilise this hub?
Did you do anything in particular to get it to downgrade from B09 or did it just happen after a factory reset?
 
Did you do anything in particular to get it to downgrade from B09

I doubt it. I was just experimenting with my home network settings. The MAC IP Bind feature seems to get stuck whenever you change the IP address of an already entered MAC. My other routers don't have issues with this, but I had to factory reset the ZTE to clear it. Very annoying.

What kind of issue are you having with B09 firmware? Have you tried calling Three to see if it can be fixed remotely? Maybe they can send the older update to your hub.
 
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