Problems with Huawei B525s-23a download speeds

[StillGame]

Hi Everybody, first post here but had a great deal of useful advice from Séan's site in the past when setting up by Huawei router a few years back (and good advice on paraffin heaters as well!).

I live in the French sticks and after struggling with dialup, then 2 varieties of satellite broadband, I found the superb Huawei B525s-23a router and it's served me pretty well for a few years. It's been happy up in the loft, fitted with a SOSH (Orange) SIM card and without external aerial and, while it's thrown the odd hissy fit, it's generally given me increasingly better connection speeds, although I've occasionally had to reorientate it as Orange have played about with their local masts. Up until quite recently, I've been getting upload and download speeds in the region of 50 Mb/s but over a relatively short time the download speed have dropped to around 1 - 3 Mb/s while the upload speeds remain at 50 Mb/s, which seems very strange to me. As I remember, I used to get a 4G light on the router but that no longer shows - however, I still see 5 bars on the router when I log into it.

If anybody can suggest how I might diagnose the problem or has other ideas, I'd be very grateful. I've tried re-orientating the router with little effect, restarted the router several times. I'm very lucky that fibre has just made an appearance in the area and I hope to install that as soon as I can, but I'm in a situation where I've got a lot of critical stuff to do on the internet at the moment (typical!) and need to keep the router limping along as best I can in the meantime.

Thanks.........

[Seán]

I suggest checking if the download speed improves early in the morning, such as before 9am when there should be little traffic on the mast. If the speed is also poor then, there may be something failing (e.g. bad capacitors) or causing noise within the router that is affecting your download speed, especially as you mention some LEDs are no longer lighting.

As Orange also uses the 700MHz band 28 that could be available in your area, it is worth upgrading to Huawei B628 or a used B818 which supports band 28. If Orange operates multiple high frequency bands there, this may improve your speed further as these routers can aggregate 3 bands, whereas the B525s can only aggregate 2 bands and does not support band 28.

[StillGame]

I suggest checking if the download speed improves early in the morning, such as before 9am when there should be little traffic on the mast.  If the speed is also poor then, there may be something failing (e.g. bad capacitors) or causing noise within the router that is affecting your download speed, especially as you mention some LEDs are no longer lighting.

As Orange also uses the 700MHz band 28 that could be available in your area, it is worth upgrading to Huawei B628 or a used B818 which supports band 28.  If Orange operates multiple high frequency bands there, this may improve your speed further as these routers can aggregate 3 bands, whereas the B525s can only aggregate 2 bands and does not support band 28.

Thanks, Seán, that's very helpful information. I have a phone plugged into the router and disconnecting that seems to have improved things slightly, although could be  coincidence. However, I think the router is probably failing and it's time to sign up for fibre, which I'll do this week, all being well. Meanwhile, I'll try to test out the router in another location with sight of another mast and see if that gives a good signal, just in case it's a local issue. Iain

[StillGame]

Just an update - after much delving and research, I discovered that Orange (Sosh) had admitted to issues with 4G on the mast my router and phone were using and were working on the problem.. Things suddenly sprang to life yesterday and I'm now getting notional upload /download speeds of 50 Mb/s. Nevertheless, as Fibre is now available in this tiny hamlet, I've signed up for an Orange LiveBox. Thanks for the help. Iain