4G/5G mifi and SIM card for fast upload/backup to the Cloud?

sebtomato

Hi,

I only have a 20mbps upload speed at home (FTTC connection), but I need to upload GBs of data to the cloud, as an initial backup.

Therefore, what would be the best solution? I am thinking getting a 4G router/mifi device, as well as an unlimited 4G SIM card for one month.

However, most routers seem to be limited to 50mbps upload, and I am not sure about 4G Pay Monthly SIM cards either.

5G may be an option, but routers are very expensive in comparison.

Three 5G broadband at home is not available for my address, only 4G. I don't know what upload speed I would expect from Three 4G.
Same for EE. 
Vodafone 5G may be available at home. Maybe Lebara unlimited data could be the SIM card, but I would still need to find a cheap router

matelodave

You'd need to test it. Although a router may have a theoretical maximum speed, it's rarely achieved in the real world.

You'd need to get a cheap paygo sim for each network (Three, EE, O2 and Vodafone), get a router or use your mobile phone and try it out. A proper 4G router will probably get better results than a phone and an external antenna connected to the router may even improve that but it's by no means guaranteed. A 4g router tends to be faster than a MIfi device (I've tried both with my caravan - I've now got a Huawei B535 router but even that only works when there's a service available)

Each supplier has a different coverage depending on where you live or where you want to use their service. Their base stations aren't often co-located and they may all use different frequencies all of which can have a profound effect on the speeds that you can get. Even the time of day and weather can make a big difference.

I can get both EE and Three where I live and download speeds can vary between 10-40mbits with uploads speeds anywhere between 1-10mbit/s (it's 0.9mbit/s at the minute with Three). My mate has borrowed the Huawei router can only get Vodafone where he lives and then only at around 5mbit/s download.

sebtomato

Thanks. Actually, I have done more research, and it's unlikely that any networks will provide a faster upload speed than my home broadband, even with 5G.

According to https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2022/07/three-uk-tops-ooklas-5g-mobile-broadband-speeds-study-h1-2022.html

Median Upload Speed (in 5G)
Vodafone – 15.60Mbps
EE – 14.71Mbps
Three UK – 13.44Mbps
O2 – 10.68Mbps

My home broadband provides a consistent 20Mbps upload speed, so higher than any 4G or 5G networks. I will need to wait for a proper fibre connection to be available, or find a fast cyber cafe...

Rodders53

20 Mbit/s upload is over three times mine.

It'll just take a lot longer to upload all that data to a cloud...  100GBytes should take around half a day at 20 Mbit/s (Google tells me).
Are you backing up TeraBytes of data and not GigaBytes??

Many cloud uploaders will limit their up speed to (say) 75% of the link speed by default so as to allow other use of the broadband connection.  You may get a bit more by 'tweaking' the settings?

If you're willing to wait for a better connection to be installed then the data backup could be over and done in the time taken.  No backup is worse than a slow initial backup.  Incremental backups will be much faster thereafter.

sebtomato

I am getting about 2.3MB/sec consistently (or pretty much maximum actual speed expected for a 20Mbps connection) when uploading files to various cloud providers (BackBlaze S3 or iDrive e2 S3).

Backup providers/solution (as opposed to Cloud storage, S3 buckets) would be different (e.g. standard iDrive backup), where they provide very large/unlimited storage spaces but do indeed limit the upload speed anyway, to constraint how much data people can back up in practical terms.

When copying data between those two Cloud storage providers (iDrive/BackBlaze) from a VPS/server (Hetzner basic Linux server in Germany with a 10Gbps connection to the internet), I get about 70MB/sec throughput (managed to copy 250GB in about 1 hour), so I am very far from being limited by the cloud providers themselves.
Limit is therefore my broadband upload speed.

I need to backup about 700GB initially, and then incremental backups (which won't be an issue from home).

At 2.3MB/sec, the initial backup will take a long time. It's doable but annoying. I assumed that 5G would have some good symmetric speed, but not the case.

Despite living in London, I still can't get proper FTTP fibre to my flat, from any of the providers. The UK is well behind on broadband. In France (towns) for instance, most people can get a 1Gbps broadband for cheap (download AND upload speed).