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TELUS LTE HUB - Better wifi and better speed?

ustel
Organizer

I live in a rural area and I use the Huawei B612 with 500GB/mo plan. I had to spend additional $1,200 on buying a cell signal booster to get enough signal in my house for the LTE hub to function. 

 

After all this set up, I have realized two things. The built in wifi in the Telus hub is not that good. And the 25mbps speed is not enough. 

 

For my first problem, is there a way to get the hub into bridged mode so I can use my ASUS router for better wifi signal around the house? 

 

For my second problem, how can I increase speed past 25mbps? I think Telus throttles the speed to 25mbps for people on the LTE Hub plan. This is ridiculous for me, because after spending $1,200 on the cell signal booster, I can get over 100mbps on my Samsung phone in my house but only 25bps on the hub.

 

Thanks

12 REPLIES 12

NFtoBC
Community Power User
Community Power User

Your Asus router may be able to be easily set up as a Wi-Fi access point, rather than a full router if you wish. There also should be no great problem simply using it as a router in addition to the Telus-supplied device, many have done the same with the T3200M used for copper or Fibre connections.

 

Faster speeds are not available to the Cellular router.

 

NFtoBC
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Syaoran
Rockstar

That seems to be a lot of money to spend to get that to happen.  You more than likely could have spent a lot less to import some cell repeaters to achieve the same and not have the Telus artificial limits locking you down to 25Mbit.  It is possible to put your modem into bridge mode to use your router.  You will more than likely have to do it manually by turning off the right settings instead of there just being a click to put into bridge mode, but it is possible.  

How do you put a B612 into bridge mode? Cause I’ve dug into every option and there is no option for specifically bridging. You can DMZ/port forward but NAT can’t be turned off to make it act only as a modem.

There is no Bridge mode function on the Huawei b612! The only option is to set your Wireless Router to Bridge mode or Access point mode. I have my Wireless Router set to Bridge mode! I am still able to use as a (WiFi)Access point.

ustel
Organizer

Years later and I'm still struggling with the slow 25mbps speed. So I have a couple of questions.

 

Can I get two connections, get two of these LTE hubs and bond them together to get 50mbps?

 

And will ZTE MF288 LTE Turbo Hub Unlocked work instead of the B612? And will the MF288 go into bridge mode?

I’ve wondered the same thing about getting two smarthubs and bonding the two together. And if the ZTE MF288 is anything like the ZTE MF279, I wound think it has LTE bridge mode! The only thing though is you won’t be able to access the smarthub setting again due to networking issues, private IP address problems from the research I done online.

I think I'll be buying the NIGHTHAWK M5 MOBILE ROUTER (MR5200) as sort of future proofing. It has 4gbps download whereas the Huawei B612 only has 300mbps. As I was driving by the cell tower near my street, I did a speed test on my phone and I got 460mbps down and 200mbps up. Now I gotta figure out how to convince Telus to let me use that tower and remove the download speed limit. I doubt it'll ever happen lol. But at least with that router, it can act as a pass through and I can use my actual router and APs to get decent wifi coverage.

 

https://www.netgear.com/home/products/mobile-broadband/mobilerouters/mr5200.aspx

Nighthawk
Community Power User
Community Power User

Firstly, there's no guarantee that a third party hub / mobile router will necessarily work on the network. Secondly, bandwidth is capped on smart hub connections and Telus hasn't announced any plans to increase that yet and considering the limitations on many rural towers, it isn't likely to change for some time. The MR5200 would be overkill. 5G likely isn't going to be coming any time soon to rural areas. If and when it does get to rural areas, it will then depend if the towers even have the bandwidth needed to even offer 5G service. I'd expect there to still be bandwidth and data caps on 5G service.


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Unless you have a router that can do some sort of load balancing then you can have two of them and have “bonded” connections. I actually got mine to work way better by pointing my cell booster external antenna to another tower. Now my upload is close to 10mbps. Though my download is around 20mbps.

Also you most likely won’t be allowed to use any 3rd party hubs. I have an ASUS 4G-AC68U LTE hub I bought just for the purpose of having a bridge mode but I imported it and didn’t realize I bought the one with the wrong LTE bands for TELUS were I live and Telus support said they won’t be support BYOD for the hubs anytime soon.

Hmm, I'm wondering if you had ordered the hub with right bands, would it have worked? Is the SIM locked to the specific hub? I see Telus no longer offers the Huawei B612 they have a new ZTE one now.

 

 

jtg575
Friendly Neighbour

If you're on the rural smart hub service, then you can't use any non-Telus sold and approved modems. Just tried a new Netgear LAX20: it could only get as far as a Telus block page, and after multiple attempts with support, a knowedgeable rep said that the modems they sell have some sort of dedicated chip/hardware (beyond SIM card) and that only those ones will work. Has to do with them not letting people on the rural service port the modem around.

adamthebad
Advisor
I use a NightHawk MR1100 with NightHawlk Long range router....less.freezing then the ZTE. Turn the LTE modem into a gateway and the router will connect more then the 10 2.4/10 5ghz that the ZTE is limited to