Freedom 5G Internet first thoughts
I got the Nokia box yesterday and proceeded to do these things.
- Turn off the Wifi radios
- Put the router into bridge mode.
- Connect it as WAN2 to my UDM Pro
Positioning:
At first I chose a north facing window because I know it faces the closest tower to me. But the second closest tower isn't that much further so I've since moved it to a south facing basement window which is close to my network equipment so it's a cleaner install. With my phone there was a difference in speeds at these locations, but with the Nokia box, there's not that big of a difference, if any at all.
Speedtests:
I had a previous WAN2 which I've now cancelled. It was Ebox VSDL which I was paying 2x for.
Ebox Speed test from UDMP = 50mbps download 5mbps upload
Freedom speed test from UDMP = 117mbps download 11mbps upload
So about 2x the throughput. And the latency is about half as well so it's actually quite good. Ebox latency is pretty bad.
Real world:
I didn't use it yesterday for teams calls and work stuff. There were three of us working from home yesterday so I didn't want to mess with what works. But I switched to Freedom this morning. No one in the house noticed. Two AppleTV's going and whatever browsing. I should note that I have an internal Adgaurd server so DNS is always snappy at sub 1ms for most requests.
Some other observations:
Before getting the box I did some reading on the hardware and it seems that other providers really lock down bridge mode. So instead of hunting around for it, I just accepted the double NAT and used the DMZ mode. But then while poking around, it's quite easy to find and enable bridge mode. I can see the external IP on my UDM.
There's no IPv6.
It uses the n71 5G band.
All in all it's pretty good! I can't use it as primary because we'd use more than 600GB easily. But for the intro price, it's a half price backup from what I had before. Backup is worth it for me because it's much cheaper than losing an hour of work per month.
That's all I can think of that's worth noting. Fire away if you have questions.