Saturday 10 November 2018

Travelling with the new 4G router

Well, we're back from a 10 day road trip to Bendigo, Halls Gap, Port Fairy, and Leongatha.

Apart from Hall's Gap, where our accommodation came with an individual Optus wireless NBN connection we've been dependent on our new Huawei unit for internet.

Now I didn't carry out any scientific tests but our usage involved a MacBook Air and a Samsung tablet simultaneously surfing the web, reading email, twitter stuff and some other stuff like Pinterest.

Unusually we didn't bother uploading any pictures this time so I can't comment on speed for that, but in practice performance was not markedly different from that over the complimentary wireless NBN connection in Halls Gap, or indeed markedly different from our 50GB FTTC connection at home.

Now if we'd streamed video or done something else bandwidth intensive it might have been a different story, but for general on the road use it was absolutely fine.

Occasionally if a web page was slow to load it would throw you into the unit's management page, but that was usually the downstream sites performance not the link itself - that was fast enough for most purposes.

And that's it - most purposes. Once the link is fast enough it's the performance of the downstream servers and your local host that governs your experience, not the link.

For example, I had to download a 30MB pdf document over the NBN service we had access to in Halls Gap. Prior to that I'd have called the service adaquate - which it was until I tried downloading and it was like going back to the early days of ADSL - and remember I was downloading. Uploading would have been worse.

I didn't have occasion to try a similar upload or download over the 4G link, but I suspect that performance might not have been stellar.

Battery performance was good - it lasted something similar to the advertised 11h. On standby the unit needed a kick to wake it up, but again that's perfectly understandable.

So, in conclusion, we have a good well performing unit that's fit for purpose ...