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Zyxel NR5103 issues on 3 vs ZTE MC801A

salexc

Member
Hi folks,

Apologies if this is in the wrong place, I'm sure the mods will shift if so.

I'm on 3's 24-month 5G broadband deal, they sent me a MC801A in July. No complaints at all at first, but over time the latency on the connection degraded to the point where I was only getting 2000-3000ms pings to various sites. I have a 5G Samsung mobile on iDMobile and could get 50-70ms ping when tethering and connected to the same mast, so I phoned up 3's technical support and told them they needed to send me a new router. After some to-ing and fro-ing they did, and today I took delivery of the NR5103.

So, this thing is annoying me already...hopefully if anyone can answer some questions I have then it won't be going back tomorrow!
  1. The Zyxel seems to have a much poorer internal antenna than the ZTE - it's barely maintaining a 5G connection to my tower, when the ZTE had no problem locking on and always gave me around -105dBm. Is this others' experience? It seems to fall back on to 4G far too quickly, which isn't what I'm paying my money for. My postcode is B92 7EE..
  2. How do I put the Zyxel in to bridge mode? It clearly supports such a use, but I can't find anything in the (bloody awful) admin pages to switch it out of router mode. I've enabled the WAN port under Broadband -> Ethernet WAN. On the ZTE this was a very simple procedure. I run my home network through a Linksys Velop mesh so this is a bit of a problem if it can't be enabled.
Thanks in advance for any suggestions!
 
Just a quick update - have found elsewhere on this forum that manually setting bands to B1/B3/n78 seems to resolve the 5G connectivity issue, so that's good (albeit something that a layman would never discover, so go 3.)

Just the bridge mode question now...
 
2nd update - found the router/bridge switch also, it's under Broadband -> Broadband -> modify ETHWAN -> set mode: bridge.

Well that was easy... 🤪
 
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2nd update - found the router/bridge switch also, it's under Broadband -> Broadband -> modify ETHWAN -> set mode: bridge.

Well that was easy... 🤪
This is interesting - I too wanted to put my Zyxel into 'modem mode' so that I could use it as a second WAN connection with my Untangle firewall.

I didn't play around with the ETHWAN menu screen - instead the "IP Passthrough" or "Cellular Passthrough" is what will switch the router off and put it into modem mode. This too is in the same menu screen (i.e. under Broadband).
 
First I've heard of the ETHWAN option too, ip passthrough seems to be the method others have used.
 
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