Dear Telekom,
Your LTE network really is a great thing. Being able to browse at up to 50 Mbit/s in remote places where I previously had to make do with only a few hundred kbit/s is fantastic. BUT THE CONSTANT CRASHES OF THE LTE SPEEDSTICK – FOR EXAMPLE WHEN USING IT ON A TRAIN OR IN A CAR – ARE SIMPLY ANNOYING!
On a journey from Munich to Hamburg, for example, the Huawei E398 USB stick crashes around 30 times. Or from Munich to Ulm by train: five crashes within one hour. What stands out is that handovers into the 4G network appear to cause problems. Most of these crashes occur when travelling near the edge of a 4G cell.
The response from Telekom customer service was also interesting. I was advised simply to switch to 3G only, as the following screenshot shows:
Apparently, some of these crashes are directly related to the hardware being used. I was able to test an O2 ZTE LTE 4G MF821D USB stick for several weeks and, on the same routes, either experienced no crashes at all or at least considerably fewer.
In general, I would recommend the ZTE stick over the Huawei model for LTE users. In addition to crashing less often, I believe it has better reception, does not get quite as hot as the Huawei E398, and the laptop battery lasts longer with the ZTE. I was also generally able to measure higher download rates with the ZTE, as the following video shows:
Finally, I would be interested to hear whether other users of the Huawei LTE stick have experienced the same crash problems – for example, whether they also occur on Windows systems, as I use Apple, or whether they occur when using Vodafone or O2 LTE SIM cards. Feel free to share information in the comments or send me a message.
