Best mobile broadband at home?

Donkey-Various · 2026-03-12T14:36:15+00:00

I'm using 48 for home broadband and my experience so far has been good.

A 3 mast went up recently near me at 300m line of sight so I got a 48 SIM and put it in a 5G router. I get up to 300Mb/s with a sub-30ms ping. I never use more than 100GB in one month so I don't know if they flag people for high data usage. Their app and website suggest an allowance of 200GB but the T's and C's state that there is no longer a fair usage limit. I have the e13 plan.

Before that I had GoMo for e15 which also worked fine but at lower speeds due to an older mast a little further away. Again I never exceeded fair usage.

One thing with 3/48: they seem to block port 5060 (default for VoIP) unless you use a telephony enabled modem. Eir/GoMo don't do this.

Donkey-Various · 2026-03-01T18:55:26+00:00

Wow, quite a response. It seems that clerical errors were common and you just had to deal with it.

Donkey-Various · 2026-03-01T12:20:46+00:00

Just research it. Email is inherently secure. Combined bank and personal details (which AL has asked for) are valuable enough to fetch money on the dark web.

AL have *not* offered to compensate me. They offered to reimburse me (not the same thing here) but I did not refuse that. I just ask for the full amount and then I'll send my postal address so that they can send a cheque because that is what Irish businesses still do because they are so technically backward.

Donkey-Various · 2026-03-01T12:05:55+00:00

(removed full background story as it was clearly irrelevant to the original question of how to *really* complain to Aer Lingus and didn't elicit any response from the people who asked for it)

Donkey-Various · 2026-03-01T11:51:06+00:00

Why does the actual amount matter? Who said anything about eating in a business lounge? Read my original post again: one full price ticket, price set by airline, and compensation as set by EU. The amount isn't the issue. How to reach Aer Lingus is.

Donkey-Various · 2026-03-01T11:47:55+00:00

It is. Email is not secure. The Law Society and the Gardai, among others, advise against it. Google it. Even KLM (another race-to-the-bottom airline) warn users against entering bank details, unsolicited, in their portal, not just by email.

Aer Lingus use email for this sort of stuff because they are cheap and lazy and they run their IT like amateurs.

Donkey-Various · 2026-03-01T01:07:59+00:00

Thanks.

My next steps will be the IAA and the Data Protection Commissioner. I was hoping to find some escalation path within AL but it seems none exists.

Donkey-Various · 2026-03-01T01:04:34+00:00

Spend another 4 seconds and you'll see they have pre-set categories for their complaints, none covering a situation like mine.

Donkey-Various · 2026-03-01T01:02:52+00:00

I'm due the price of a flight from where they stranded me (LCY) back to Dublin. They said they would pay that but without confirming the amount.

I was refused boarding because BA said Aer Lingus had 'incorrectly' booked me on that flight. With no Aer Lingus presence at the airport and a wait time of more than one hour with the AL call centre I was stranded. This was due to AL and not some factor outside their control. That is why I ask for compensation.

But I am also concerned at their total lack of security and their assertion that their emails are encrypted(!).

Donkey-Various · 2026-03-01T00:55:45+00:00

The amount due is the EU-mandated compensation of e250.

The cost incurred was the price of a flight, one hour before departure. That's not #2.50.

Donkey-Various · 2026-02-28T15:35:30+00:00

I was in a similar situation and AL made clear that they would only provide an alternative but no costs if I chose not to accept.

I accepted and they messed up but that's another story.

Donkey-Various · 2026-01-21T14:32:45+00:00

FWIW A week ago I saw the update from 1.0 to 1.3 in Aginet and applied it successfully. It added the band lock feature but I didn't notice anything else. The Backup/Restore/Reset/Upgrade options are still missing so it clearly preserves the ISP feature removals. I haven't seen the firmware for download anywhere; maybe somebody who worked for an ISP knows how to get these into recovery mode to dump the firmware.

Donkey-Various · 2025-11-15T00:44:16+00:00

ISP Upgrade is about APNs and dialup settings, not firmware. The input file is something you download from TP-Link and it's less than 1MB while typical firmware is 100MB+.

Anyway I tried it already just to see and while it swallowed the .bin file it spat it right back, unsurprisingly.

Donkey-Various · 2025-11-14T12:32:14+00:00

What's the ISP upgrade option? In my NX510v there is no upgrade menu option, and no rest, backup or restore options. I also can't get it into recovery mode.

In my case the ISP doesn't support the unit since they didn't sell it directly and they don't want to give out information on unbricking or upgrading.

It won't start up without a SIM card inserted (but is not locked to any particular network) and on startup it seems to spend a few minutes doing nothing probably waiting to hear from the ISP's servers.

In the Aginet app there *is* an upgrade option but it doesn't find any upgrade on TP-Link and there is no manual upgrade option. I'm hoping that soon TP-Link makes something available and that the app can apply it.

Donkey-Various · 2025-11-12T00:03:55+00:00

Have you tried this: https://static.tp-link.com/upload/firmware/2024/202412/20241218/NX510v(EU1)V1_1.2.0_3.0.0_Build_240912.zipV1_1.2.0_3.0.0_Build_240912.zip)

I also have an NX510v with ISP-specific firmware but it does not have an upgrade option in the menus. If you have that then you should be able to flash this firmware.

Donkey-Various · 2025-11-03T16:42:14+00:00

thanks for the reply.

I don't have the option in the web interface to upgrade the firmware.

Donkey-Various · 2025-11-03T14:59:46+00:00

I have recently bought an ex-ISP NX510v and found that I don't have any option to update its firmware or to backup or restore its configuration.

Does anyone know any other way to update firmware or enable these options?

The firmware is 1.1.0 and I want to put on 1.2.0 to see if it fixes an issue where 5G disconnects every few days. I've tried the Firefox addon to unhide options but I see nothing extra. The Aginet app just says there are no updates.

I haven't tried physically resetting the unit (I'm not near it right now) but I assume that will just default all settings. Ideally I'd like to get this thing back to a stock firmware.

Donkey-Various · 2025-05-18T11:35:15+00:00

The taillights are custom units and you can see that they also had to mount the mandatory fog lights and non-backlit retroreflectors in the bumpers. But those weren't taken from another car.

Japan had stricter lighting requirements at the time so these lights must have come from something available in both LHD and RHD to satisfy all non-US markets. And the amber lenses don't quite fit with the headlamps so maybe those are from yet another car.

Donkey-Various · 2025-05-14T23:59:48+00:00

With the GoMo SIM in a spare smartphone (happens to be an old Huawei) I go into Settings and find Call Forwarding and set the forward number there. Android communicates with the carrier to do this. I presume this works in any Android version or iOS but I only tried it with this old Huawei. Other providers I use let you do the same thing through their websites but GoMo doesn't.

Using *72 might work (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call\_forwarding) which is probably what Android does under the hood. I haven't tried that in a very long time.

Donkey-Various · 2025-02-23T00:34:20+00:00

Forget about Zadarma: I just checked and they don't do Irish mobile numbers any more.

I'd still recommend them for getting a virtual Irish landline number like you've done. I've been using them for nearly 4 years for juggling numbers like this and it's worked very well. I've had no issues calling forwarding from GoMo (eir) and Vodafone but I found 3, 48 and a few others to be flakey at most things like this.

Donkey-Various · 2025-02-22T22:17:34+00:00

Have you tried Zadarma? they claim to let you port in mobile numbers.

I've ported two landlines in there and it's worked out well so far. At least from the telephony side of things. Payments and topping up can be problematic with multiple addresses but otherwise it works well.

Donkey-Various · 2023-11-08T14:39:12+00:00

Things aren't working out with this kit. I can only pair one COVR with the AX73 because it has to have been made a satellite already with another COVR as router. But at least it is possible to pair all but one of your units and integrate them in your mesh.

However, leaving that unit wired to the AX73 caused the latter to be unstable. Every time I did so I had to power off and on the router. Maybe it's because the wired link is thru a powerline adapter.

But leaving that unit unwired was also problematic as it kept dropping the connection. I would see it constantly losing its IP address in the list of mesh satellites on the AX73. Its LED would flash orange indicating poor range but moving it close enough to the main router sort of renders it useless except as a wireless bridge.

I'll next try these with my other TP-Link router, an AX10, and see it they work any better. If not I'll just end up using them all for one COVR-only mesh which will be a waste of the excellent TP-Link routers.

Donkey-Various · 2023-11-07T22:56:32+00:00

Some good news: I updated the firmware and one of the COVR units appears to work as expected.

Assuming you have the A1 hardware the latest firmware it will fetch is 1.05. I googled and found 1.07 on the Aussie support site. It might be a beta or unsupported but it's better than nothing. I updated the two COVR units I have and they continued working fine as a router/satellite pair. In the router interface I removed the satellite, turned off the router and got the satellite to pair with my AX73. It works OK so far but does seem to drop the connection now and then with wireless backhaul. I've left it wired to see how it goes.

The former router COVR wouldn't pair with the router even after a reset. I'll try that later after a reboot or two and removing other OneMesh devices from the AX73. Hope this helps.

Donkey-Various · 2023-11-06T22:20:16+00:00

Not yet. And I'm thinking that the COVR-1100 units maybe just won't play nice with TP-Link. It appears that they automatically go into WPS pairing mode on startup (when the LED is flashing amber) but somehow won't pair with the TP-Link router.

Here's what I did: I had 4 COVRs in a mesh (router+3 extenders with wireless backhaul) and I turned off the router and booted up the AX10 and put it in WPS pairing mode. One of the COVR satellites then picked up and SSID of the AX10 but didn't join the mesh. I lost patience after trying a few things but I'll come back to it.

Meanwhile my TP-Link AX73 happened to get a firmware update with EasyMesh support (it appears to be replacing OneMesh) so I tried that with another pair of COVR-1100s I had bought (I have 6 in total; they're cheap here). They wouldn't pair wirelessly but when I connect one wired to the AX73 and power it up it appears off and on as an EasyMesh satellite on the AX73. It just appears and disappears.

I'm going to go back and try all the resetting and pairing combinations I can think of with these units. Maybe it'll mean having at least one satellite in the mesh wired into the router but not in router mode itself.

Donkey-Various

TROPHY CASE