Today I received my ZTE MC801A purchased for around £250 on Amazon shipped by a company called Sotel in Germany. The package took 3 days and arrived via Fedex with no additional import/customs charges.
TLDR; Speed:
and for comparison, after the testing I ran a test with ONLY my Huawei CPE Pro 2 so just a few minutes later, and on the same speedtest server
Upload was better, but due to the nature of mobile internet, I don't know if this is due to the Huawei maybe being better, or if it was just down to 3's network when I tested it. I will be running more tests as time goes on and i'll let you know.
Images:
They were even kind enough to stick this horrible adaptor on the end of the power supply.
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Which I immediately decided not to use, and opted for the power supply from an old EE router which has a massive long cable on it, and is the same voltage/amperage (12V , 1.5 A if anyone is wondering)
Mine appeared to be running T-Mobile firmware. Not sure if this is good or bad. But bridge mode works as expected:
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Menus
Hidden menus:
and my favourite hidden menu
It has WiFi 6 , and that gives me full speed, but I don't use it. I have my two 5G modems hooked up to a managed Zyxel 10G switch that gives each 5G modem a VLAN and then trunks them down to my router downstairs over 1 Cat5e cable (running at 10Gig just fine lol)
I can also confirm the above hidden menus/locking bands does work. There is an SMS feature too if you need to be able to read messages sent to the SIM. I can also confirm the two antennae connectors are TS9 and my Panorama antenna fits in there just fine.
Overall, very impressive unit, and for me , where I live it's on par with the king of 5G routers the CPE Pro 2 but it costs like half the amount.
I will be doing some more tests, but if anyone wants to know something about it, feel free to ask.
And lastly to give you all a giggle, here they are in their natural habitat (don't judge, it works)
The ZTE is the smaller white thing on the left. Initially I tried it in the same place as the CPE Pro 2 because that was the best spot I found for that, but it did not give as good results. Presumably because of the antennae ? Not sure, but where it is now gets between 500-600 mbit so it seems to be about as good as it gets (the best i've seen on the CPE Pro 2 is 700)