I got 99 problems but my WiFi ain't one

I just ordered a Three branded ZTE MC888 for £135. I get 200mbps on 5g on my phone so hopefully the router antenna is equally good.

From ebay? I'm thinking that it makes more sense to go into the Three store and try and sign up there. If it's crap, I send it back and I'm only down £25 or whatever the monthly fee is.

Yes, ebay

I don’t get 5g Three signal at our address and the Vodafone router+plan is spendy.

There’s a 30 day return policy so if it doesn’t work I’m only out of pocket for the postage costs.

£135 for the router, £16 a month for Talkmobile unlimited data sim.

Hmm, that sounds cheaper than Three but I know Three works so I'm more inclined to try them first. I was just going to get a router off ebay and use my own SIM initially but I keep putting it off so I probably should just go to the store and try their plan. I don't think we're in 5G area so they might not give me the unit I want though, but I could add an external aerial if it was any good.

Router has arrived - plug and play set up, very easy.

400mbps down, 20mbps up on my iphone
40mbps down, 5mbps up on my macbook

Not sure why theres such a difference but it's not the 5G signal which is limiting it. I just wish I had checked my phone connection first before I spent an hour walking round the flat trying to find the best position for the router and being disappointed with the low speeds.

edit: the wifi signal is awful on it though, barely reaches across our 35sqm flat.

They do in store, or at least they do in Brixton 3. Friend who is renting my flat bought from there, told her to say it works at her address as 3 website says 4G only at that postcode.
Speeds are a bit slower but still reasonable, about 60-250.
Does vary though I get between 300-700 but am line of sight to the masts.

In response to the weak wifi signal on my new 5g router mentioned above - what's the cheapest way I can increase the wifi signal strength to reach across my flat?

A mesh system seems like overkill for a 1 bed flat with a maximum distance of 10m from the router.

Do plug in extenders actually work or will my phone be randomly selecting between the router signal and the extender signal (and most probably spend most of its time on the wrong one)?

Should I just get a better router to handle the wifi and hope it's got enough guts to reach the other room?

When I had three 5G broadband I bought a unifi access point, the range is far superior. The ones with wifi5 are probably fairly cheap to pick up now

Thanks, I’ll take a look

By separating the 2.4ghz and 5ghz networks the signal seems much more stable across devices and also reaches the other room no problem. Not a perfect solution but for now it seems to work ok.

Can those Three 5G boxes be plugged into a wifi router? I already have an Ausus and pihole so I wonder if they can be set to "modem only" mode like the Virgin box?

Yes. though I had to get googling and turn some ipv things off in the settings. have to redo all this if there’s an automatic update which also means I have to reset the 5G back to factory and login to reconfigure.
There are some annoying things in the whole process where the default passwords in the router and on the bottom are wrong. (this is the older 5G modem, will hopefully be different with the one available now)

I went to Three store to get one but they got pissy about my ID DOB not matching my website DOB (no shit, why would I scatter my real DOB all over the internet) so I told them to poke it and left.

I think I'll go back to trying to nab one off ebay and then it looks like Lebara have Unlimited monthly for like £25. TalkTalk are a cheaper option but their data breach history puts me off.

I have had 900Mbps down, 300 up fttp installed today and now have to worry about the wifi being a bottleneck.

We have a Ubiquiti UAP-AC-LITE as our access point and I'm getting ~195Mbps on upload and download when I speed test on my phone and pc (using a TP-Link AC1900 wifi dongle). If I connect directly to the router wifi network and stand next to it I get ~800Mbps down, which suggests the access point is a bottleneck.

How does wifi even work with multiple streams? Is it limit per device (not so bad as we could have 3-4 devices with high-ish demand at the same time) or a total (a waste of 900Mbps if it can only ever supply 200)?

How can I solve this (other than wiring everything in)?

The router network is probably WiFi 6, the AP isn't so is slower.

I have a similar issue but ultimately decided sod it. Vast majority of use on WiFi we won't notice the speed difference.

I do have one wired machine but even that tends to cap out with whatever I'm downloading/uploading to not giving full 1Gbps anyway.

Eventual solution will be to upgrade the APs to the pro or whatever they're called ones but I don't think it's going to be that noticeable outside of speed tests.

You might be able to get a bit more out of it by widening the channel width on the radio settings.

Bigger the number effectively allows more data at the expense of a bigger risk for interference/reduced range.

I've had a play with the Ubiquiti app but the AP appears to be stuck and won't change channel or width. Getting some very strange behaviour - speed test maxing out at 230Mbps but happily downloading at 30MBps via torrents.

Ubiquiti UAP-AC-LITE

I have one of these spare if you want it for cheap?

Thanks for the offer but a firmware update (it probably hadn't had one for years) seems to have sorted it out! Changed to a DFS channel and 80MHz width, now getting 420D/310U on speedtest, which will do until I can get hold of an enterprise AP.

Got myself a Three 4G/5G router now and maybe a spare SIM off the missus via Smarty.

Wifi works. Anyone spied useful guides on how to configure it as "modem-only"? I'll poke around now but no harm firing questions early.

I haven't actually done anything about this yet as don't want to kill my internet but:

Anyone like to hazard a guess why I can no longer see my Unifi Dream Machine on the network or access the controller? It has a white flashing light on it which the manual says is Device is booting up/Device is initializing/deinitializing

Internet is still working fine so it is still routing stuff. The APs are now showing as standalone APs as the controller is in the dream machine.

I've tried plugging it and unplugging it and still get the same. I could try resetting it as I do have some backups but I'm not 100% whether the "console backup" restores everything. It's also a bit of a faff as I need to clone MAC addresses and something else I can't quite remember to get the UDM internet access to get the backups.

Any suggestions on what else to try? My google isn't finding anything useful.

I've a UDM-Pro, but had similar. IIRC it was after a power cut, and I had to hard reset, as nothing else worked.

Is there a management port on a UDM? You could SSH onto it that way, then dump out the config / logs to see if anything is amiss.

Cheers. Don't think there's a management port but I haven't tried SSHing on to it (although not entirely sure what the username or password is or whether I turned that off).

Looking for a cheapo access point or wifi router that will do surfshark/nordvpn. I normally use nice stuff but this is for a friend, who wants to violate Netflix' terms (separate SSID/device from their home wifi, for the TV). Fired up my 6 year old Archer C7 to check but apparently (latest firmware being from 2018) it doesn't do such things. OpenWRT isn't an option as I don't want to deal with IT support afterwards.

Do you still have this? @spotter

Anyone else with any UniFi APs to sell.

Need to sort out my Dad, constantly breaking stuff!

Thanks

Yep, send me a DM so i dont forget