LTE Broadband

wheresthebeef

Hey all,
Am looking into broadband options for my companys offices. DSL is only available at 10-12Mbps. Strangely we have pretty good coverage from Three/Virgin Mobile for 4G LTE. I am consistently getting 120-140Mbps download and 30 Mbps upload at a latency of 30-50ms. This is insane speed for LTE as far as I'm concerned. I've never seen LTE speeds so good before. Is this a fluke or some kind of freak accident?
I appreciate the technology is never going to be as resilient as DSL, but am I crazy for thinking of having a dual WAN set up with 1 DSL line and 1 LTE with load balancing?
Those three speeds are almost undistinguishable from my FTTH speeds at home.

robbiep958

Yes Those kind of speeds are indeed achieveable on 4G+ ..

ED E

150Mb is the limit of 4G never mind 4G+.

You could set it up but in two months time it could grind down to 5Mb. Depends on the locality.

wheresthebeef

ED E wrote: »

150Mb is the limit of 4G never mind 4G+.

You could set it up but in two months time it could grind down to 5Mb. Depends on the locality.

It's been consistently good for weeks across a number of devices. It's a sparsely populated area and we're about 750 metres from the mast.

westyIrl

wheresthebeef wrote: »

It's been consistently good for weeks across a number of devices. It's a sparsely populated area and we're about 750 metres from the mast.

Sounds like you could be onto a runner. ED E does make a good point however; the caveat that if speed does reduce, theres not really anything you can do about it although you're starting off at a great point.

On a side note, I setup something recently using pfsense for dual wan balancing/failover with DSL and cellular. Works great albeit on line speeds far less that yours. My advice is get an actual router such as an huawei e5186 or b593 for your sim (don't mess with dongles), get a 4 port gigabit ethernet pci-e card and stick it into a low power box like a HP T620 Plus or like I did a Fujitsu Futro S900 and load with Pfsense (OPNSense is another option)

I went cheap on my equipment. Theres a load of Futro's on ebay for ~€40 and a €15 IBM 4 port pcie card. Note the Futro S900 doesn't support AES-NI if you wish to stay with PFSense.

Either way its just an idea if you were planning going down a similar route.

Jim

m99T

This is all well and good untill your latency spikes up and down and round in ****ing circles because the providers dont care about contention on 4G.

westyIrl

m99T wrote: »

This is all well and good untill your latency spikes up and down and round in ****ing circles because the providers dont care about contention on 4G.

That's the risk you run with such a solution which is of course less than ideal.

One of the advantages of using a fairly capable dual wan router is that you can direct more latency sensitive machines/apps through the DSL connection and direct everything else cellular. It also gives you failover if the need arises.

But as m99T said, it can go to crap quick so be sure to trial it fairly regularly over a decent period and after that it still might go to the dogs, so don't invest much in it.

I'm also in a sparsely populated area and while the speeds aren't anywhere near yours (15 up/2 down) its superior to my DSL for the majority of tasks for a couple of months now. I won't however be telling any of my few neighbours how much better it is and I'd advise you the same

Jim

m99T

westyIrl wrote: »

That's the risk you run with such a solution which is of course less than ideal.

One of the advantages of using a fairly capable dual wan router is that you can direct more latency sensitive machines/apps through the DSL connection and direct everything else cellular. It also gives you failover if the need arises.

But as m99T said, it can go to crap quick so be sure to trial it fairly regularly over a decent period and after that it still might go to the dogs, so don't invest much in it.

I'm also in a sparsely populated area and while the speeds aren't anywhere near yours (15 up/2 down) its superior to DSL for the majority of tasks for a couple of months now. I won't however be telling any of my few neighbours how much better it is and I'd advise you the same

Jim

Yeah, what this guy said.

wheresthebeef

m99T wrote: »

Yeah, what this guy said.

Thanks for the advice guys. Will likely put non mission critical stuff out over LTE and prioritise DSL for latency sensitive, critical stuff.

ED E

IMO:

Basic load balancing router such as MTik, Ubi or TP's offering. B593 or sister model. Simple directional antenna. €20/28 days 3 Sim.

You'll spend a small amount on this, maybe a few hours to setup exactly how you want it. Should be very zippy for now with LTE as primary and DSL as failover. If it degrades later you can swap them and have LTE in use in case your DSL line gets ripped away in the Jan/Feb storms etc etc.


This combi will also allow you maintain inward access if required.

Eric Cartman

get a business package for LTE with Vodafone or imagine , you'll have better cell priority than a 28 day contract user ,

get the DSL connection and then let your firewall/UTM do load balancing, put any voip or UDP traffic things (video etc...) over the DSL and use the LTE for everything else.