Rain Recommended LTE/LTE-A Routers

Dillon7769 said:
Will a rain mobile SIM work with an Huawei B315s-936 from Telkom?
Click to expand...
Rain mobile SIM will work in just about anything which supports the right bands. The Telkom-supplied Huawei modems might not be able to connect to Rain's 2600 MHz band, but the 1800 MHz should work just fine.
 
newby_investor said:
Rain mobile SIM will work in just about anything which supports the right bands. The Telkom-supplied Huawei modems might not be able to connect to Rain's 2600 MHz band, but the 1800 MHz should work just fine.
Click to expand...

I have a choice between the Huawei E5885 or the B315s-936 model. Which would be the better option??
 
Dillon7769 said:
Well getting the best download speeds i can get.
Click to expand...
You're not really thinking this through. There are any number of things that can feed into "best download speeds".

The 5885 is a mobile hotspot, it's designed to be portable. It's a nifty thing but you're probably not going to want to use it at home every day.

The 315 is designed to stand in one place, and it doesn't (normally?) have a battery. It's bigger, its antennas are bigger, and it will likely give you better WiFi coverage as well.

It also does depend on which bands both of these modems cover, I'm not too clued up on that. Also depends on which suburb you live in, time of day, the weather conditions... YMMV.
 
newby_investor said:
You're not really thinking this through. There are any number of things that can feed into "best download speeds".

The 5885 is a mobile hotspot, it's designed to be portable. It's a nifty thing but you're probably not going to want to use it at home every day.

The 315 is designed to stand in one place, and it doesn't (normally?) have a battery. It's bigger, its antennas are bigger, and it will likely give you better WiFi coverage as well.

It also does depend on which bands both of these modems cover, I'm not too clued up on that. Also depends on which suburb you live in, time of day, the weather conditions... YMMV.
Click to expand...

I use the 5885 at home fine, it has a ethernet port, and is a cat 6 modem

Regularly get 80mbit downloads no problem, with the bonus of being portable when I leave home

Edit: another bonus of internet during load shedding :P
 
Perhaps I should of been more specific. The from factor isn't my number one concern!
Infact its almost irrelevant to my needs!!!

Which router is capable of higher down n up speeds is more of a concern to me, And yes I'm aware of things such as how far the cell tower is from me helps determin down/up speeds and so on.
However what I'm curious about is which one of these two devices would generally do a better job at receiving a good signal and better speeds if they are in the same area regardless of any other factors.
 
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Dillon7769 said:
Perhaps I should of been more specific. The from factor isn't my number one concern!
Infact its almost irrelevant to my needs!!!

Which router is capable of higher down n up speeds is more of a concern to me, And yes I'm aware of things such as how far the cell tower is from me helps determin down/up speeds and so on.
However what I'm curious about is which one of these two devices would generally do a better job at receiving a good signal and better speeds if they are in the same area regardless of any other factors.
Click to expand...

Category of the modem will make a difference but Rain kind of caps out at about 60-80 Mb/s (AFAIK) so both of these in principle should be able to do it.

The B315 has better antennas just because it's physically bigger and it has more space to fit them in. You also have the ability to connect an external antenna.

But if you are in a good area then you can easily max out Rain mobile with the 5885.
 
Received my rain SIM yesterday & i tried it out today in the Huawei E5885ls-94a & i'm getting around 8-15mbps mostly in the middle to higher numbers though.
My Lenovo Moto z phone is getting between 32-45mbps up to 60+ mbps once or twice during the day in a different part of the house.... So I'm certainly not impressed with this router.
 
Guys, with the huawai E5885 router, how do you make the Rain Fixed LTE sim work in it?
 
I stand to be corrected but the fixed LTE-A sims are device locked. I don't believe the E5885 is part of the supported list. There is only about 6 devices.

article said:
Approved devices
Rain said the following devices will be supported from 1 November.

  • Huawei B315
  • Huawei B618
  • Huawei B2338 (Outdoor)
  • ZTE MF253
  • ZTE MF283+
  • ZTE MF286
Click to expand...
article source

If you have a rain sim directly from rain.co.za then there is no locked device limit. :)

Squall said:
Guys, with the huawai E5885 router, how do you make the Rain Fixed LTE sim work in it?
Click to expand...
 
Yuu said:
I stand to be corrected but the fixed LTE-A sims are device locked. I don't believe the E5885 is part of the supported list. There is only about 6 devices.


article source

If you have a rain sim directly from rain.co.za then there is no locked device limit. :)
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My sim is from Afrihost, I'm aware it's not part of the supported device list but I thought maybe there's a workaround like using a different apn or changing the modem config etc. Thanks for the article link :)
 
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No known way around it because when they first launched, it worked regardless of devices [including phones] then they held it back.

Whether they change their mind going forward remains to be seen. Best bet is to get a supported device otherwise get the rain sim direct. R250 for 19 hours uncapped is pretty awesome. :thumbsup:

Squall said:
My sim is from Afrihost, I'm aware it's not part of the supported device list but I thought maybe there's a workaround like using a different apn or changing the modem config etc. Thanks for the article link :)
Click to expand...
 
Dillon7769 said:
Received my rain SIM yesterday & i tried it out today in the Huawei E5885ls-94a & i'm getting around 8-15mbps mostly in the middle to higher numbers though.
My Lenovo Moto z phone is getting between 32-45mbps up to 60+ mbps once or twice during the day in a different part of the house.... So I'm certainly not impressed with this router.
Click to expand...

Have you tried forcing 2600Mhz?

Your phone also possibly uses CA (Carrier Aggregation) while none of the routers available in SA support CA on rain's frequencies

Did you also do the tests at the same time, Rain is known to be congested in the evenings sometimes
 
Leno said:
Have you tried forcing 2600Mhz?

Your phone also possibly uses CA (Carrier Aggregation) while none of the routers available in SA support CA on rain's frequencies

Did you also do the tests at the same time, Rain is known to be congested in the evenings sometimes
Click to expand...
The 2600 frequently doesn't work. There's no connection In that band. Iv tried it out on both the B618 and E5885. Only 1800 works.
 
Dan C said:
Could be the tower does not support 2600. Mine does.

View attachment 591238
Click to expand...
I was thinking the same thing! But its confusing why my phone speeds are so much higher. If the 2600 band isn't active in the tower I connect to there shouldn't be CA But my phone picks up 4G+ which I think is caused through CA.
 
I'm not sure about the 5885, but does the 315 support CA? And does it support the 2600MHz band at all? There were different models, if this one originated e.g. from Telkom then it wouldn't support 2600 MHz.
 
newby_investor said:
I'm not sure about the 5885, but does the 315 support CA? And does it support the 2600MHz band at all? There were different models, if this one originated e.g. from Telkom then it wouldn't support 2600 MHz.
Click to expand...

None of the Huawei router available in SA support CA on RAIN's bands
 
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