Sagem F St 2804 Original Firmware
Esam Rosado
This is not a post bashing what Vodafone 5G Home will be, my experience among other reasons is the reason why this wasn't available several months ago. Do not read this only to think that people's experience will be the same. My issues seem local to my site, and has improved in the last couple days with them moving me to being routed out of Sydney. This is just what happens when you have a inefficient, unproductive company which lives and breaths corporate crap and does not care significantly about the experience of customers. The only way you can try fix this as a Vodafone customer is by using their complaint system. No technical team you can email, there is no helpful onshore support, there is no live chat. The Vodafone app/web portal is not great either. Their mobile phone porting servers I think are also broken and return an error to other providers when you port numbers. Also Vodafone nbn is not the same as other TPG brands, you would think and hope so but no, it's different and worse. I will try and take the Fastmile with an inverter to other 5G sites to test if the atrocious routing/performance is related to my site specifically, I would hope and think it is.
Update: I'm back on being routed through Brisbane, which generally seems less reliable and delivers worse performance but I really can't say that with certainty. Who knows, it's an roller coaster which just goes up and down.
I'm moving to a place where there's no NBN so 2 options, Telstra Velocity cable or Optus or Vodafone 5G home, the shared tower is less than 500 metres from the house so shouldn't be any problems with signal and speed but I'd like to connect my router to this modem to boost the signal as it's a fairly big place but all the reading I've done on here and the Optus forums there's a lot of restrictions placed on the modem by Optus and bridge mode is disabled, it has got me wondering if this is any different on Vodafone?
all the reading I've done on here and the Optus forums there's a lot of restrictions placed on the modem by Optus and bridge mode is disabled, it has got me wondering if this is any different on Vodafone?
On Vodafone, the Nokia Fastmile 5G modem is very locked down too. You cannot use a different router, unless you want a double NAT situation. Just about the only thing you can change is DNS and wifi settings. But what you can do if you want to 'boost' wifi signal is just plug in another router and put it into AP mode, if it has that. Then you can get the advantage of the extra wifi but will not have double NAT issues. You can then disable wifi on the Fastmile OR configure the devices to both use the exact same wifi name and password, your device will choose the closest one but devices will not seamlessly roam between them.
Telstra Velocity doesn't have the best reputation but I suspect that at least it will be reliable and low latency, Telstra's network is pretty decent and I would definitely argue that it's better than Vodafone and Optus. But Velocity is expensive and speeds will not impress you. Also, Velocity will be slowly be converted to Opticomm from July ish next year, Opticomm will upgrade it and they offer the exact same pricing model as nbn and you can order them through various providers, such as Launtel (strongly recommend).
Thanks for the reply, it's my thinking too I really have nothing to lose trying Optus they both have 1st month free and Optus also has the min 50mpbs speed guarantee.
I'm not a gamer but we stream quite a bit so long as it's good enough for that I'm happy, their plan also includes a fetch box.
The tower is maybe 300 metres away so signal should be good.
No less latency (+4ms compared to Telstra LTE to Bris) and especially Sydney route (+10ms compared to most other networks) are still subpar.
DNS performance is still woeful and the Vodafone DNS is your only option, you can't use anything else unless DoH or DoT, the Fastmile seems to force the Vodafone DNS, despite having the option for other DNS'.
To sum up the experience at present, being in an apartment building and at the mercy of strata (I can see Pentanet's wireless gear from my place) I could only get 28Mbits sync on the FTTN. The copper in this apartment complex while being only built 2016 was done on the cheap lets say.
But I just bought a nice Asus XT8 which gave me amazing wifi throughout my apartment... was hoping to use it with whatever I switch to whether it be Telstra, Optus or Voda 5G. Double NAT isn't that bad for a Synology NAS right?
Just coming back to my previous comment though, should I read this as meaning Vodafone 5G is the best option given there's one tower which has all three about 100-200m away with clear line of sight/no obstacles?
I was in the unit directly below the penthouse today and thought I'd run through a lot of Speedtests on my phones to compare my Vodafone 5G (on a Samsung Galaxy Z Fold2 5G) and Telstra 4GX (on an iPhone 12). This was about 4pm on a Saturday afternoon.
Whilst the Telstra phone was consistently faster on most servers (ranging between 375Mbps and 532Mbps), the Vodafone wasn't far behind and averaged somewhere between 262 and 509Mbps depending on server selected. I did note that Telstra didn't have any outliers outside of this range, but the Vodafone had one run which was only 140Mbps. I picked the hosts from each telco to give it the best chance (eg. Telstra and Vodafone servers), as well as a few of the other usuals I've used extensively before when testing my GigaComm connection such as Internode, GigaComm Sydney, Exetel, Optus, Cloudflare, etc...
So based on this, assuming neither telco throttles their 5G home broadband service vs what you can get on their regular cell phone plans, and also acknowledging the Telstra was using 4G rather than 5G (since I'm on a legacy plan), it seems Vodafone isn't a bad choice. I would've tested more but I paid the $5 on my prepaid to get 8GB of data to use today, and then accidentally kept going past this and wiped out my $40 of prepaid credit... oops. Good thing I was struggling to find a way to use it.
(in case anyone is wondering, I use dual sim in both my phones, and in the Z Fold 2, I use a Telstra data share sim from my legacy plan hence why I don't actually use the data on the Vodafone prepaid sim).
I think the thing which struck me as odd is Vodafone were the only ones who didn't publish an average nighttime speed on the uncapped/max plan whereas Telstra/Optus give some indicator of what the average speeds are at night.
Just signed up and got the Vodafone Sagemcom Fast 5866T modem. They said it was the newer model but noted the speeds and network are different to that used in their normal 5G mobile service (ie don't expect the 500Mbps I can get on my Fold 2 on Vodafone).
Time of day definitely has a huge difference on results. I was consistently getting 400-450Mbps in the 11am-3pm window today, with significantly higher upload speeds too circa 60Mpps. Running speedtest again at 6pm and later, presumably the peak of internet usage as everyone turns on streamig, it dropped down to the 300-350Mbps range, and uploads halved back to what looks like some kind of cap at 30Mbps again.
On another note, has anyone gotten port forwarding on the Sagemcom to work? All my rules are set/showing up (Synology actually set them up for me) in the Sagemcom interface, but they aren't able to be enabled. Everytime I toggled the ON/OFF switch in the UI it hangs on please wait and then logs me out of the UI (so I have to go back to 192.168.1.1 again) and the port forwarding rules are still disabled.
EDIT: Restarting the Sagemcom modem brought uploads back to 28Mbps (and downloads went back up to 350ish)... my theory is that there is some shaping during the evenings when I note my uploads drop from about 60Mbps down to 30Mbps.
I think in the 12am onwards time slot the speeds are probably not being throttle/deprioritised (as there's not much traffic going on). Just ran Speedtest from my MacBook (rather than my router) with some pretty good results to provide indicator of what the theoretical "best" I can get when the network is probably least congested.
Like loading a page in facebook just sits there, or another app. A ping test gets occasional timeouts, so I assume that's related. Unfortunately it regularly has a small impact on whatever we're doing.
But the post midnight timeslot was useful because that's when I have my PC/consoles/etc all doing software updates or downloading games. Feels like it's improved a bit since when I first got Vodafone 5G Home at the start of the month it was averaging closer to the 350 mark.
Not with Vodafone's Sagemcom 5866T modem. No bridge mode function available, but I did hear one of the other TPG/Vodafone brands might allow it... I've asked for it so fingers crossed since I currently have double NAT with my ASUS XT8 mesh wifi. Works fine for 99% of the time but not so great when I want to set my NAS up for DDNS and remote virtual machines/etc.
Usually it's 60-66Mbps uploads but I have noticed during some peak periods (eg Friday nights) it's halved to about 30Mbps. I'm sure there's a proper reason as to why it's in multiples of 30's but it looks like a deliberate cap/limit on upload speeds.
Btw I've been sharing my Speedtests because I felt there was a real lack of 'real world usage' speedtests of the home 5G solutions (vs people using their phones). I probably am best case scenario though given I live on the top floor in our short apartment complex (level 5) and my windows face the 5G towers for Telstra/Optus/Voda with no obstructions. My bigger challenge is the apartment is a double storey concrete maze which makes it difficult for wifi signals to penetrate every room hence reliance on the ASUS XT8 which does the trick. I tried the Sagemcom (Vodafone supplied) modem/router combo and it struggled.
I personally have the double NAT situation where I have the Sagemcom 5866T connected to my Asus XT8 in mesh wifi mode. I could set DNS in the Asus XT8 I suppose, or use my PiHole on Synology, but am currently just using default Vodafone one which appears to be
b37509886e