Travelling with a 4G modem to the north
27.4.2023 by HenDaBen
4G vs Lapland
My April started with a trip to the northern part of Finland, Nuorgam. This little town is actually the northermost place you can visit here in Finland. What is the point of this nonsense? I do not know, I was just curious how the 4G network works in there.
Device specification
The model of the 4G modem is Huawei MF289F
The operator service is a 4G / 200Mbps / 50Mbps connection. My home router has the same speed specification as this does, but with a slightly higher monthly fee. This is due to fact I combined my phone plan with the plan, so the service provider combined the deal to make it a little bit better offering.
I had two laptops with me. Asus Vivobook (Ryzen 7 3700U) and Alienware R13 (i7-6700K). Both of these are 4 core and 8 thread systems with a somewhat good iGPU. Vivobook was used to gather the wifi data (due to newer adapter) and Alienware was used to gather cable data.
One of the goals of this report was to strengthen the fact it does not matter what is the speed of the mobile plan, if you live in countryside the connection always stays somewhat bad.
Base data
To actually get any comparison data, I tried to get a good and clear position for the modem in several cities during the trip. These spots were Loppi, Rovaniemi and Nuorgam.
My test method for this particular comparison was to run Speedtest by Ookla, twice per location and per position. Then, the operator specific web application was used, in this case speedtest by DNA. It is unknown where the DNA servers were, but Ookla had the closest server in Vadsjo (just north east of Nuorgam) It was rather important to have more than one website running pings across the servers as the real speed is never the speed you actually get from the cloud. You can only dream of Ooklas speed, letting you download your Steam games at the speed of light but that will never be the case.
Vadso
Download speed (Mbps)
| Location | Ookla cable | Ookla wifi | DNA cable | DNA wifi |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Loppi | 227,3 | 220,7 | 222,4 | 214,3 |
| Rovaniemi | 121,8 | 47,2 | 60,5 | 41,6 |
| Nuorgam | 35,5 | 42,7 | 28,3 | 44,8 |
Upload speed (Mbps)
| Location | Ookla cable | Ookla wifi | DNA cable | DNA wifi |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Loppi | 38,7 | 39 | 43,7 | 49,9 |
| Rovaniemi | 47,75 | 50,1 | 55,1 | 47,0 |
| Nuorgam | 16,1 | 13,8 | 13,9 | 15,4 |
Ping (ms)
| Location | Ookla cable | Ookla wifi | DNA cable | DNA wifi |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Loppi | 64 | 67 | 18 | 22 |
| Rovaniemi | 77 | 77 | 27 | 29 |
| Nuorgam | 78 | 88 | 34 | 34 |
Ookla Vadso vs Ookla Helsinki, download speed (Mbps)
| Location | Ookla cable Hki | Ookla wifi Hki | Ookla cable Vadso | Ookla wifi Vadso |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Loppi | 221,9 | 218,1 | 227,3 | 220,7 |
| Rovaniemi | 123,5 | 47,8 | 121,8 | 47,2 |
| Nuorgam | 32,6 | 31,5 | 35,5 | 42,7 |
Ookla Vadso vs Ookla Helsinki, upload speed (Mbps)
| Location | Ookla cable Hki | Ookla wifi Hki | Ookla cable Vadso | Ookla wifi Vadso |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Loppi | 44,2 | 36,3 | 38,7 | 39 |
| Rovaniemi | 54,8 | 50,4 | 47,7 | 50,1 |
| Nuorgam | 15,5 | 14,3 | 16,1 | 13,8 |
Ookla Vadso vs Ookla Helsinki, ping (ms)
| Location | Ookla cable Hki | Ookla wifi Hki | Ookla cable Vadso | Ookla wifi Vadso |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Loppi | 21 | 32 | 64 | 67 |
| Rovaniemi | 36 | 39 | 77 | 77 |
| Nuorgam | 38 | 38 | 78 | 88 |
The following things might have caused some loss of accurate data:
The location of the target server. Vadso or Helsinki. No clue of DNA's whereabouts.
Weather. Snow caused some troubles
Where the modem is placed, in this test, near multiple windows.
Time, I could get better results if I did not test the speed during "rush hours".
OS; Windows as an OS is ridiculous. No matter what you do, always a random process is affecting network
Roaming. I do not know if DNA uses roaming for their 4G networks during the test. I do have that feature in the plan.
