Having recently been to our house in France, I tested the network speed on my phone.
It turns out that the best place was round the back of the house, up a ladder (not very high) and I managed to get 13mbps!
I repeated this a few times with very similar results.
So, next year, it’s a sim router with external areal (around £300 for a good one) and an unlimited data sim for £20.00!
Orange fixed line contract cancelled and live box already sent back (was costing me Euro36.99 a month)!
SOSH is Orange’s budget brand. They have some kind of special offer on every month. I am using a 50GB SIM that costs me €9.99/month in my MR600. Currently they have 100GB SIMs for €16.99/month on a rolling 1 month contract https://m.shop.sosh.fr/mobile/forfaits-mobiles?MCO=SOH&doNotTryToAuthenticateAgain=true
Orange is the only signal we even get a sniff of upstairs in one bedroom. With careful positioning & a following wind I have seen 30Mbps but generally it’s about 10Mbps. I have considered an external aerial.
We have no landline. The previous owner did but the property was unoccupied for over a year & the line is now inactive & Orange tell me it’s impossible to be reconnected.
That’s interesting Nigel. I’ll check out our Orange signal and maybe swap one of our Free SIMS for an orange one to give us better coverage. Though the Free SIMS have been performing well over the last few months. Unlike the Free SIM in my phone. The aerials on the routers really make a difference.
What aerials are you using? Are they external? I really would like to maximise the speed we get.
BTW are you just running two separate networks or doing some sort of bonding with two MR600s? Orange is the only network accessible here & I can’t get an unlimited SIM on Orange so I considered just getting two 100GB subscriptions & swapping SIMs when one was exhausted but if there were some way of using two subscriptions simultaneously with no SIM swap that would be preferable.
I’m just using the MR600’s rabbits ear things. I thought about an external aerial but the performance seems acceptable without, MBPS out of the study window and 7.4MBPS out of the salon window. Plus I didn’t want to start drilling hole in the walls for the cables. BTW, I find a reboot of the MR600s every now and then speeds them up a bit.
I run both MR600s separately with the salon one looking after the salon, dining area, kitchen and patio and the other the study and upstairs bedroom, via a Devolo house wiring LAN. I’ll probably extend that to the garage when I get a minute. That seems to split the traffic about 50:50. Now if I had my way I like both MR600s to talk to one another and route the traffic for all the devices in the house, desktop, laptops, Apple TV, Smart TV and phones etc. across either SIM depending on speed and data balance left. That would involve IP address and DNS issues and goodness knows what else. I’m sure there’s some expensive kit that could do that but it’s now worth the expense IMO. You could probably develop something on a Raspberry Pi do do all that but life’s too short 
Though I might just buy one and have a look. There maybe some Linux freeware that already does it, or something that could be modified.
I’ll have a read of that. Thanks Graham.
I have discovered some extra tweaks that can be applied to the MR600 that may improve performance.
Firstly there is beta firmware that allows you to choose the channels that are selected. When it’s in 4G+ mode two frequency bands are bonded for higher performance. Ion my case it usually uses Band 3 & Band 20 but I noticed that occasionally it used Band 7 & Band 20 which gave double the performance. Here is the link to the download & discussion of the beta firmware https://community.tp-link.com/en/home/forum/topic/205912
You can also specify 4G Preferred or 4G Only or 3G Only I get more consistent performance with 4G Only
I tried a MikroTik mANT LTE which is a small omnidirectional external antenna that was recommended in the TP-Link forum but performance was actually worse. https://www.amazon.fr/gp/product/B07HJPZGQQ/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
I am going to order a larger directional antenna & see if that will improve my performance. What is frustrating is that I have seen download speeds up to 30Mbps but it’s never sustained. I suspect that my signal is so marginal that it’s affected by atmospheric conditions etc. Generally I see about 5Mbps but sometimes it’s as low as 2.5Mbps but sometimes it’s sustained at 10Mbps for hours.
Great post Nigel. This is fun. I remember years and years ago tweaking the microcode to speed up a punchcard reader - it was fine until it started smoking 
How does one check which bands a SIM supports? Do the network providers publish it of is just trial and error?
Yes, I think the humidity can attenuate the signal, you’re basically trying to microwave the mist/rain.
The various networks use a selection from the 5 bands available which varies from area to area
700 MHz (B28)
800 MHz (B20)
1800 MHz (B3)
2100 MHz (B1)
2600 MHz (B7)
In my area I don’t see Band 28 (700MHz) with Orange but can see the other four bands
Good article. I’ll download the beta.
I thought that I had updated this post with my external antenna adventures but obviously not.
I tested another external aerial - Eightwood 4G LTE Antenna 35dbi SMA Male Adapter Omnidirectional LTE Antenna - Just £28.65 including delivery to France.
It boosted performance 3X My best speed was 31.2Mbps/4.5Mbps Interestingly I got better performance with this antenna with Band20 & Band3 whereas with the supplied rabbits ears which preferred Band20 & Band7. I don’t see Band28 (700MHz)
This Eightwood is an indoor antenna & at only £28.65 it’s got to be worth a worth a punt.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07Y1N9ZTF/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
Subsequently I ordered the Poynting XPOL-A002 directional external waterproofed outdoor antenna so far I have just quickly jury rigged it up in the bedroom rather than on an external pole. Performance is great. The best I achieved was 59.9Mbps/8.5Mbps. It’s just lying on the top of the wardrobe now & I’m getting 44.3Mbps/2.22Mbps. Like the Eightwood it too prefers Band3 & Band20 for best performance.
It’s supposed to be directional but doesn’t seem too fussy as swinging 30 degrees from side to side makes little difference to the performance… It likes to be up near the ceiling. It comes with 5m of very high quality heavy-duty cable attached & is much larger than the Eightwood omnidirectional antenna it’s replaced & much more expensive at €173.20.
I will try & find the best place to locate it upstairs for now. but mounting it externally can wait for the moment.
Very interesting Nigel., thanks for the update.
I’ve ordered an Eightwood - if nothing else it will avoid me having to point the MR600s out the window. I’d consider the Poynting but I received a tantalising email from Orange last week telling me to prepare for fibre. Of course I don’t really believe it which is why I’m buying the Eightwood, but I better check it out some more before investing in a Poynting.
For the price of the Eightwood it’s worth trying it out. I thought twice before ordering the Poynting as it is so much more expensive but at least it worked for me & gives a significant boost over the Eightwood…
Since I last enquired a couple of months ago it turns out that the exchange has been upgraded to fibre but the final mile is still copper so VDSL is available up to about 75Mbps in our village except Orange says my house doesn’t have a line & one can’t be fitted. They do say that fibre to the premises is in the process of being rolled out when presumably Orange will have to run a new fibre-optic cable to everyone & then we should get connected but when that will be is anyone’s guess.
Yes, I would have hoped that they would prioritise fibre for those with no access rather than starting to upgrade those who already have excellent speeds. We have a line but we are almost exactly eight KMs from three villages and a town. Fibre from the town to one of the villages runs past the bottom of out road…
Fibre Optics is a complicated business.
The cable running at the bottom of your road may well just be point-to-point and when it arrives at a village may well then be split to provide a passive optical network - point-to-multipoint. Breaking in to an existing PtP cable to provide a branch midpoint will require considerable work to maintain end to end integrity of the infrastructure so not as easy as just splicing copper… (from what I recall from my days installing fibre networks some time ago).
There’s a bloody big distribution box around one K from me Graham. I “accosted” some Orange subbies there probably bout a year ago when they were pulling the fibre. It’s used to branch off in several directions, but not currently mine 
but not too far to go if they make an effort.
I suppose it was inevitable but now that we have much a faster speed using the Poynting antenna we would be using much more data. Previously 50GB was enough for 3-4 weeks but we have used nearly 50GB in the last week!
As you have discovered Parkinson’s law applies to bandwidth consumption.
Or space in the house I am amazed at how much stuff I have accumulated over a lifetime and how little of it I actually need.