This is intended as both a review and a guide for anyone with a rural plan trying to set this up. We'll cover setting up the modem to best suit your service area, the limitations of the network and Internet plans, and finally some tips you will not find anywhere else!
5G Hype & Your Service Plan
Don't fall for the hype of 5G. The current Telus rural plans only allow a maximum of 25Mbit down, which is 1/4 of the maximum theoretical 4G speeds. If the backbone or service plan aren't allowing more than 25Mbit, switching your connection to the tower to 5G will not change any of this. In short, they could offer you a plan for 50Mbit right now with the current 4G technology, but they won't because of lacking bandwidth / infrastructure and return on investment to upgrade it. This is further proven by the fact that even at 25Mbit they STILL throttle services like YouTube down to 5Mbit in some locations, capping you at 1080P resolution to save strain on the network... (we'll fix this later!).
Initial Modem Setup
This is why we didn't insert the SIM card into our modems yet right :winking_face:
The firmware this modem ships with by default does not have the debug page locked down, you DO NOT want it to connect to the network and download Telus's firmware that locks this out.
Hook up your new modem to a pc or laptop and power it on with no SIM card installed. Sign into the admin page and head to Advanced Settings>Update, make sure that "Auto-check for update" is disabled to prevent you from loading the locked firmware when you first connect to Telus. You can now power off the modem and insert the SIM card without fear of being locked out of the diagnostics page by any rolled out firmware updates.
Tuning / Band Locking
Sign into the modem's Admin page. Note the top of the screen you will see either 5G, LTE, or LTE+ Whichever of these you see, the key is to make sure they aren't changing from one to another. Each time this happens you will have a huge slowdown and potential lose connectivity. If you are seeing these change, you will want to lock your band to one of them so that you aren't constantly bouncing around. This is where our diagnostics page comes in.
http://telus.smarthub/index.html#debug_page
You will find this accessible only through the URL, as the Telus UI has any links to it removed. Also why we disabled the firmware updates so that this can't be "fixed" with a later firmware update as per their usual tactics.
You now should be able to lock to a specific band, my example the LTE signal was the stronger than the LTE+ and it was necessary to lock it that one to get my full speed without disconnects or interruptions.
You will want to use the status indicator on the main page to compare your signal strength and then do a speed test to see the result. You want to make sure you lock your modem to the strongest band available to you.
Youtube Throttling
How do you know if your YouTube is being throttled (capped at 5Mbit 1080P), and that it's not just bad latency? Since Telus has not invested in DPI (Deep Packet Inspection) we can encrypt our traffic with a VPN and find out!
*See Attached Images and captions.
Reflections / Hindsight
As mentioned in the "5G Hype" section, upgrading your 4G modem to a 5G will not increase your speed when it is limited by the speed of your service plan and the local network backbone. If you are already in an area where you are being throttled with your 25Mbit (theoretical) connection, its due to network backbone saturation. Changing the way you connect to that saturated backbone will not increase your speeds.
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