Really basic wifi question

[BooBooKing]

We are just back from a tour of Scotland. No issues with wifi using just our phones anywhere until we stopover at Clumber park CMHC on the way home-absolutely nothing there. We have been pondering whether to splash out on something from Motorhome wifi or similar, but wonder if it is reliable in the UK where there is currently little or no signal-so, has anybody been to Clumber Park site and actually had decent signal using your motorhome wifi? If so, what do you have please.

 

[h8ten]

The highest signal is not always the fastest service. CAMC Clubfest this weekend strongest signal was a band 20 Three (and EE) signal on site, which was also only about 20Kbit/sec throughput. You had to actually block this to get usable signal on a 5g service on Three at least from a further away cell tower.

I'm loathe to reccomend multi-network sims for this reason as the strongest signal can be a poorly performing high signal but low width signal.

I was considering jumping to Honest when my renewal comes around, but if it is really only useful for calls and not so great for data, then maybe not yet anyway.

 

[Captain Yoghurtpot]

Clumber Park is renowned for having zero signal regardless of network.

Correct!
Robin Hood nicked all the masts to melt down and make arrowheads.

 

[fred_jb]

Some extensive ramblings about my experience of this topic, in case it is of any interest:

We have used a spare mobile phone with an iD SIM as backup for the Starlink - useful when the Starlink played up and died on our last trip (now have a free replacement, so good customer service from Starlink). I also use the phone to maintain connectivity to the Reolink CCTV camera and the Renogy One Core 12V system monitoring when away from the van, to save wasting power on the Starlink.

This phone was USB tethered to the van's GL-iNet router by a long cable, routed behind the trim panels, which allows it to live in the cubby on top of the passenger side dashboard which has a cooling air vent. Seems to get plenty of signal there through the windscreen, and when using it we have never experienced any problems in France, Spain or Portugal, even for streaming Netflix, etc.

Having said that I have been experimenting with replacing the phone with small USB modem dongles, or MiFi devices. The two modems I tried just would not connect to the network despite being given the correct APN settings, so they went back to Amazon. The smaller of the two MiFi devices connected OK but was dreadfully slow, like 10 x slower than the phone using the same SIM, and although advertised as dual band actually only had 2.4 Ghz wifi which matters as it shares its Internet by means of the router acting as a wifi repeater for the wifi signal from the mifi. This method generally involves double NAT, once in my router and once in the mifi, but that is not a concern for my use. I could connect devices direct to the mifi but don't as I want to make use of the VPN capabilities of my router. Anyway, that device went back to Amazon too!

The other mifi is a Huawei E5783-330 and I have been very pleased with this, especially as I only paid £21 for it on eBay. It is getting download speeds of about 75 Mbit/s which is even better than the phone achieved. I have it connected to my router via the USB cable used for phone tethering just for charging purposes, but was expecting to have share the Internet to the router via its 5Ghz wifi signal, but strangely it also presents in the routers Multi WAN menu as a tethered Android device just like the phone did. That still works if I turn off the router's wifi repeater option but not if I disable reception of the mifi wireless signal. I'm not sure how this is working, and it doesn't seem to be documented, but seems to be avoiding NAT in the mifi which is a bonus.

I have found that this version of the Huawei is supposedly optimised for mobile network frequencies in Asia, though it works fine in the UK on the iD network which is hosted by Three. There is another version, the E5783B-230a which is supposedly optimised for Europe so I have bought one of these too, again from eBay, for only £20.

The only feature I don't like about these Huewei devices, though others may see it as an advantage is that it has an internal battery, so will run without power from the USB connection from the router. This makes it portable which could be useful - wifi at the beach anyone! However this also means that when I turn the router off at night to get a wifi free environment, it does not switch off the mifi, so I will have to do this manually.