4G with Tele2 – better than expected

Huawei B593 (4G modem/router) branded by Tele2

Since I’m moving soon with my parents, to a place without fiber connection, I’ve been playing with this thing.

ADSL which is still very popular in Sweden, is simply not an option. For starters it sucks, secondly it’s expensive, and last but not least it’s not stable.
So, I’ve been pretty optimistic about 4G since the telco’s here started developing it, but I’ve had my concerns.

Turns out it works great – so far I’ve seen speeds at 30 mbps down and 10 up, and very good response times. Not even comparable to 3G.

Distance to mobile station - about 200 meters

Cell site mast closest to us

Currently we pay for 25 mbps and 30 gigabytes of data per month (Tele2′s mobile broadband “large”), which worries me a bit. I can live with 30 mbps, but not 30 gigabytes.
They do have another monthly plan though – up to 80 mbps and 80 gigabytes of traffic, which is better, but still only allows you to use about 2-3 GB’s of internet traffic per day.

(From now on I’ll have to plan carefully when I should download ISO’s of OS-distributions)

Pros  (Tele2, Huawei B593 and 4G in general):

• Good response times (lower than ADSL and in the league of cable and fiber)
• Reasonably priced. Prices range from around 200 SEK/month to 500
• Good speed – up to 80 mbps down and half of that up. A friend of mine has confirmed this
• No installation fee
• Trivial for non-technical users

• Bandwidth cap – the most you can get is 100 GB per month by Telenor
• Huawei B593 gives you no choice to turn of NAT, meaning that you will have some ugly double-NAT’ing going on
• Shared resource – more users means trouble
• Coverage (in terms of availability) needs to improve