My fixed line broadband is VDSL supplied by Ireland’s largest Telco Eir. By and large I’m getting a pretty good service. I have a static IP so my eir F3000 modem (Sagemcom) is bridged so my PPPoE connection is handled by a Mikrotik RB3011.
Occasionally however DSL resyncs itself and always at the most inopportune times. It got so bad at one stage (up to 7 times a day) that I decided to replace the main telephone wiring in the house using two pairs of a Cat6 cable and decided to get a pay as you go SIM card for an LTE backup connection.
The rewiring did the trick on the DSL sync issues. Now it only resyncs every 4 or 5 days. However the backup link is quite handy for offloading some other traffic so you can see in my previous posts how I implemented policy based routing to utilise the LTE link.
I opted to go for a 3 SIM only pay as you go package and for the router I chose a Mikrotik Chateau LTE12.
As I live at the bottom of a hill I also opted to go for an external antenna and I’m using a dual polarisation Yagi Antenna in the attic pointed in the general direction of the nearest antenna. The Mikrotik Chateau supports carrier aggregation and it initially chose for itself LTE bands 3 (1800 Mhz) and 20 (800Mhz).
Band 3 on the 3 Network has double the bandwidth of Band 20 available and 2100Mhz has more available again.
Initial SpeedTests to my own server in a Data Centre in Cork City showed that speeds were not at all that bad. Depending on the time of the day it was possible to get speeds of up to 80Mbps. Not to shabby and on a par with my VDSL connection.
Above was a test this morning at approximately 09:00
I know that LTE Band 1 (2100Mhz) was repurposed and licensed temporarily for 4G to provide extra capacity for the Home Work and Home Schooling necessary because of the Covid pandemic. However I never saw it available near me until this morning.
For some reason the Chateau couldn’t use Band 1 and Band 3 but it could use Band 1 and Band 20. After configuring it to use these settings I performed another SpeedTest and I think the result speaks for itself:
A quick check of the router and it seems to be using Band 1 for CA as well:
The performance increase of Band 1 speaks for itself really! However the repurposing of 2100Mhz (Band 1) is only valid until the 1st of July 2021 which is only 18 days from the time of writing this. Here’s hoping they extend the license!
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