Three sim (unlimited 4g data) compatibility with 4g LTE Routers

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m_martire

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My question is, will it work? What kind of router should I get for not more than £150? Will I be breaking any terms and condition of Three contract by using the mobile SIM with an external router? I have been browsing forums and different kinds of solutions but I can't find any specific answer to these questions.

Many thanks in advance for any kind of help,

Matteo
 
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When the first unlimited plans came out years ago even before the 4glte they were abuse massively by small numbers of people...mostly using bit torrent. That was the death of the true unlimited plans.

The companies that run on those wireless bands paid huge money. ATT paid over 18 billion dollars to buy more frequencies from the US government in the last auction.

There are actually a huge number of people sharing the bandwidth off a single tower. The only reason it runs really fast is that most people do not use much at any one time. If they have a couple high usage users it will slow down for everyone so they try to limit this both via the pricing and with technical means that degrade tethered users during certain times of day.
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cheese9k

cheese9k

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Yes you will be. Even if it did work (which it probably wouldn't), it'd think you were using it as a mobile hotspot. Not sure if you have that included in your plan, but I'm pretty sure there's a pretty low cap on it because people were downloading hundreds of gigs of stuff.

 
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bill001g

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You are going to have a difficult time finding a router that will take the sim directly. It is easier to get a USB dongle and then hope to find a router that supports it.

Still you can not just put the sim in the device and it magically works even if it is designed to work with your ISP. You will have to activate the device and they will likely refuse to do that on a contract for a sim that is designed to be used on phone.

Now I did a quick look at the plans they offer and you likely could use a phone and tether it to a router with a USB cable. It would likely be simpler to use the phone as a hotspot though and if you need ethernet buy special adapter used for game consoles or tv to let you get wireless with a ethernet cable.

It appears they allow you to use some amount of data every month to provide access to a pc or tablet using the phone as a router. Of course it is not unlimited and they have fine print about limiting the rates during certain hours of the day. This is actually unusual for a plan that is that inexpensive.

Do not think you can hide PC traffic from them and use a unlimited amount. They know all the tricks. Even though it appears they just disable the ability if you exceed the monthly cap but your phone data is ok.
 
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m_martire

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I have 4gb of tethering data available a month and that's it. Unlimited data strictly for phone use. I don't want to break any terms I want to just find a way to somehow use those beautiful 95mb down and 30 mb up that I have with my mobile through 4g, I am stuck with an indecent 15mb down and 1mb up from BT in Borough (zone 1 in London) without a chance of having fiber.. is there anyway I can make 4g a viable solution?

My thought is just I see my phone able to achieve those speeds and I just can't get my mind around how any broadband plan I find is stuck to about 15mb... (Relish promised me 50 mb turned out to be 20 at peak times..)

Thanks for all the input, if you could find a solution to my internet drama it would be lovely, I'm uploading and downloading heavy media files due to my job and this situation is limiting me incredibly.

Many thanks again,

Matteo
 
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m_martire

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As mentioned in my above answer, I won't be able to use my phone as mobile hotspot because tethering is limited to 4gb of data usage, the unlimited data plan only applies to direct mobile phone usage. My monthly usage averages on about 100gb of data both upload and download (mostly due to download and upload of HD media material such as imagery and video collections).

I don't mind researching, I need a solution. Unfortunately at the moment my problem is more on the line of, is there even a solution at all?

Many thanks,

Matteo
 
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bill001g

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I see I thought you said you did not want to break the terms. Attempting to go over the limit is breaking the terms since only data going to the phone is unlimited not going to another device. What would be allowed would be to download things to the phone itself and then transfer the files to a PC with a USB cable or a sim. You can even video stream to a phone and then use a external monitor connected via a HDMI cable if your phone has that option. In all these cases your phone is acting as the computer and the ISP knows very well that phones are not as powerful as a PC which is why they offer their "unlimited" because they know that people can't actually use it.

Trying to hide the fact that you are running tethered is another level of difficulty beyond actually getting the sim to work in another device. The phone company will know any device you place the sim and if it is not a phone they allow they will not allow the plan.

The way people try to hide the tethering is by using a root or jail break phone. Problem is the isp can still see the traffic and if they see WINDOW10 in the http headers they know you are tethering. So people them go the next level which is using this along with a VPN. The ISP know all about this trick and many just count vpn traffic as tethered.

Most ISP are not stupid how to detect the VPN and tethered traffic. There are research papers on this topic from years ago so this is nothing new.

 
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m_martire

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Thank you very much for you reply it cleared up most of the confusion I had around this!

So my other thought is, is there any other kind of service, not necessarily a mobile plan via SIM, to access these 4g LTE bands? I'm saying legally and effectively, I see 96mb down and 35 up on the phone so the signal is there, are all of these bands controlled by a selected amount of companies? Is there no other way (even by paying say 50 / 100£ a month) to have access to 4g lte bands without data cap?

Thank your very much for your help,

Matteo
 
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bill001g

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When the first unlimited plans came out years ago even before the 4glte they were abuse massively by small numbers of people...mostly using bit torrent. That was the death of the true unlimited plans.

The companies that run on those wireless bands paid huge money. ATT paid over 18 billion dollars to buy more frequencies from the US government in the last auction.

There are actually a huge number of people sharing the bandwidth off a single tower. The only reason it runs really fast is that most people do not use much at any one time. If they have a couple high usage users it will slow down for everyone so they try to limit this both via the pricing and with technical means that degrade tethered users during certain times of day.
 
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bill001g

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Be happy BT don't have caps on those too. My current ISP is only slightly faster than that and there are caps....they are pretty high like 150g and it is only $2 per 10g if I exceed it.

This all comes down to bit torrent and the people that abuse the system. You see more and more ISP putting in caps.

It depends what you are doing. Most your normal things like web surfing of even watching high def video off netflix 15m is more than enough....maybe not if you have 4 or 5 people doing it though. For file downloads most people are happy to start it and go to bed and it is done in the morning for even large files.

Only thing I can think of that needs the really high speed is if you just have to have say some large game as soon as it releases and you do not want to wait the 3hours it will take to download at 15m.
 
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m_martire

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No I work in PR and marketing and on a daily basis I have clients transferring material to me which I have to edit and re-upload. Even for the sole purpose of being able to respect guidelines this broadband is making it a nightmare... I am thinking of having to pay for a personal fiber to the building installation from a private company which will kind of rip me off but apparently no sign of Virgin Media or BT Infinity for the next year...

Thanks for everything, hope I'll be able to return the favour.

Matteo
 
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bill001g

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It depends on the cost and the need. We had a building that our private network install got delayed a couple months. Since the employees had to move in we put in a couple mobile broadband routers. The ISP offers plans where you pay about $10/gigbyte with no limitations on the speed. The bill was over $3000 for a month and we limited the traffic to only access to business servers. That is a lot of money to me but the management were very happy because they were looking at the business costs to have employees without connectivity.
 
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