Hi,
I just received my new Three Mobile Home Broadband (24 month) package which includes the Huawei 535-333 router and 4g sim card. I've set the router up which was straight forward and connected my computer so it all went fine.
However, testing my internet speeds on both fast.com and speedtest.net, I'm getting less than 5 or 6 Mb on average. Sometimes I get a peak circa 20Mb but never consistently. To note, the upload is nearly always 30Mb or more.
So to properly test my signal as I live in Midleton, I used comreg's site viewer to isolate the nearest 3 mobile masts. See below image. I live where the middle highlighted yellow is. While there is a mast north of me there is another south west of me both are within 500 meters away and are LTE. I've moved the router to sit on the window sill at the front of the house and back of the house with no objects other than the glass window in the way. I have tried the tests via WiFi (2.4Ghz & 5Ghz) and also Ethernet cable; the results are still the same. To exclude the computer, I connected my laptop and turned of the computer. Same results. The time of testing was near midnight last night so I don't expect that there would be much contention either. I have tried moving the router to different places within the rooms, still no improvement on speed.
I was rather hoping by signing up to a fix term broadband deal that the quality and internet speed within a small town would be better than what I was doing before. Which was hot-spotting from my mobile phone. Which is also Three Mobile and the speeds are roughly the same.
Can you provide assistance with this matter? As I rather return it and cancel the agreement if I have no improvement from my previous setup but spending more each month.
Update: I managed to stabilise the signal enough to get a more consistent speed. I suspected the router was not able to obtain a strong quality signal from one of the LTE masts even though it is close enough to me that the signal indicates full bars but the quality must be volatile. I managed to get the router speed up by finding the sweet spot on the window which brought the speed to about the 8Mb - 16Mb range.
However, I wasn't finished so I employed a hack method which was to use a colander from the kitchen. It increased the download speeds dramatically to the 54Mb - 63Mb range. After some fine tuning of the angle of the colander, speeds improved to a staggering 93Mb (note: this speed was never repeated, the best there after was about 75Mb+).
To conclude, perhaps a better router or the ability to buy external antenna for poor quality signal locations. My solution is not ideal and in fact ridiculous which should be a warning to other potential customers that Mobile broadband advertised is not theoretical maximum of 4G but should be advertised as other customer real world speeds in their area.
