GL.iNet GL-X3000 (Spitz AX) Cellular Gateway 5G Router for House & RV, Wi-Fi 6, Detachable Antennas, Dual-SIM, T-Mobile & AT&T IoT Device Certified, Family/Rural Area/Road Trips

I've been using the GL-X3000 cellular gateway for a while now, and it has completely transformed our internet. Living in a rural home, our BT fibre connection was painfully slow, giving us only about 2 Mbit/s down and 1 Mbit/s up. Since installing this device with a 5G SIM, we're now getting a consistent 175 Mbit/s down and 4 Mbit/s up. The difference is night and day. It’s definitely on the expensive side, but I’m now confident it was the right call for a stable and powerful connection. One of the first things I have to mention is the support team. I had a specific question about the configuration and reached out, expecting to wait a while. They got back to me surprisingly quickly with a detailed, knowledgeable answer. It was great to deal with someone who obviously knew the product well. The device itself is incredibly well-made. You can feel the quality as soon as you unbox it; it has a reassuring weight and solid construction that makes you feel it's built to last. Beyond the sheer speed increase, the other features are what make it a truly standout product: Connectivity Options: The dual-SIM feature is fantastic for ensuring the connection is always on, automatically failing over if one network drops. It also handles Multi-WAN, so you can blend different internet sources. Modern Speeds: It combines that powerful 5G modem with Wi-Fi 6, so the fast speeds are delivered effectively to all my devices. Built-in VPN: The onboard WireGuard and OpenVPN clients work really well and don't seem to create a bottleneck, which is a big plus for security. OpenWrt: The fact that it runs on OpenWrt is a huge advantage if you like to tinker and customise your network settings. So, while it's a significant purchase, its performance, solid build, and the surprisingly good support have made me feel it's worth the investment. If you're stuck with poor broadband and need a serious, feature-rich cellular router, I'd highly recommend it.

Second update: I found a way to use unlimited plus (no throttle) Verizon discount carriers on it: Visible ($45/mo) or Total($50/mo). It IS possible, with a very specific configuration to use Verizon (LTE+NSA only) and we're getting killer download speeds where no other internet is available, a few miles out of town, and no extra antennas, through an external wall. Yes, it will require some real research and work to get it set. Once set, we are solid. High speeds and very reliable. Update: A year later, still using the modem and pretty happy, actually. I figured out my speed issues are due to having a carrier that deprioritizes data when the network is congested. This can slow speeds hugely. On a flagship plan, things should be pretty good. I'm a bit out in the country next to a small town with one main 5g tower, so it gets great speeds when it's not too busy, and pretty slow speeds if it gets really congested. In town, I expect this would be much less of an impact, since speeds in town are huge. We took this unit on a car vacation for a week to Florida, and kept the kids online the whole way, hooked up in two different hotel rooms and friends' condo with speeds around 200 mbps down without much searching. Learning the local towers and the band-masking function on the unit help a lot. I learned the issues are generally less with the unit and available local towers. 4 and not 5 stars still because I really need to use a different modem for my smart home devices. One thing this modem has going for it: AT commands to change IMEI is pretty easy. Once that was set and getting my TTL set to 65 for Metro by T-Mobile, it connected. Tower lock is pretty cool to keep your speed pretty steady, unless your tower's signal is low or acting up today, and then you need to step back in and make changes because then you're not connecting at all. Also be warned, carrier aggregation is limited to 2 bands, that is, one 5G and one LTE band. This means it won't be as fast as other modems with 3 band carrier aggregation, though I understand those are a bit more expensive. It's pretty terrible for administrating a smart home. It can handle just a few devices at a time, but in the end I've gone back to my AT&T sim card with my rock-steady CAT18 4G LTE Cudy router, which is frankly much of the time almost as fast and can do combined 2.4GHz and 5GHz networks, keeping those slower smart devices synced up with the faster ones. This modem can only do separate 2.4 and 5 GHz Wifi, and didn't administrate the slower band very well. It does a good job if you just have some PCs wanting to hook up to a 5G 5GHz connection, and not far away from the unit. I also tried LAN out to WAN on the cudy. This took a good bit of setting changes to be able to get them to work together. To be fair there are plenty of options for doing this, though I found that using the Cudy router as an access point seemed to cut both routers' speeds in half, whether or not you leave the gl-x3000's wireless active or not. This setup also made video streaming almost impossible. Your wireless carriers will also still throttle you endlessly, though that's not GL.iNet's fault. VPN is still a must for PC video streaming, while streaming to TV seems to work pretty well. The very worst issue is that depending on your wireless band, you get 100% packet loss to many wireless devices connected to it, including phones and chromebooks. I think this may have something to do with the wifi frequency, because setting that seemed to help with some devices, but there are still moments of delay or no data passing through at all, leaving apps thinking they are offline, even if the device is connected. In the end, it's a solid 5G modem with just ok router capacities. It's supposed to be able to handle functioning as a WiFi repeater, or even as a tethering WiFi distribution device, but at $400+ there are much more affordable and honestly actually effective devices for that purpose for a fraction of the price. tl;dr: The good: Turns a basic wireless phone SIM card into pretty fast 5G home internet (if you can figure out settings) The bad: It's a pretty shoddy router for administering multiple devices, doesn't play well with LAN/WAN. The ugly: Limitedly customizable via a router interface, and doesn't outshine other 5G routers on the same service, especially for the price. In the end, I will probably end up returning this modem due to oddball snags, though I could learn to live with it. Maybe someone can tell me what I'm doing wrong with this one regarding settings to make it work better.

Deel 1. Ik kon de router 5 minuten gebruiken, daarna ging deze niet meer aan. Voeding en kabel gecontroleerd. Dat was het niet. Retour dus. Echter. Ik had een actie korting van 30% gehad. Retour geeft je het geld terug na 4 (!!) Weken. Daarna was de actie over. Gelukkig had de website van de leverancier een vaderdag actie van 30% Nu heb ik dus maar direct in Hongkong besteld bij hun Duitse webshop. Nu maar hopen dat die tweede wel werkt. Wordt vervolgt. Bij GL.inet een nieuwe besteld, want ze hadden 30% vaderdag korting, dus hetzelfde als voorheen op dit platform. Dus voor dezelfde prijs. Deze werkt wel naar behoren. Ik heb mijn simpel nano SIM kaart erin gedaan. De avond ervoor had ik bericht gekregen dat 5G geactiveerd zou worden. Ik kan nu met 150Gbit per seconde downloaden, en meer dan 50Gbit/sec uploaden. Ook het bereik is geweldig. 2.4Ghz, en 5Ghz zijn zelfs door 2 etages met beton vloer te gebruiken. Ik heb 4 unifi access points, die halen dat allemaal bij lange na niet. Super tevreden, Nu nog zien hoe deze router zich op de campig gaat gedragen deze zomer. 3. Op de camping werkte de repeater functie niet omdat er een wifi met een speciaal symbool aanwezig was. De helpdesk heeft binnen een week nieuwe software geïnstalleerd en nu zou het moeten werken. Het wifi wordt nu gevonden. 4. De beveiliging op de camping is erg goed. Nog even verder uitzoeken wat er nodig is om alles te laten werken. Voorlopig nog even via de sim kaart werken dus.

Well built, stable, fast 5G download and upload speeds, very good firmware. Definitely a keeper! The FRITZ!Box 6850 5G I tried previously was not only much more expensive and significantly slower with the same 5G card in the same location, but also stopped working completely after just a few hours of use. Only gripe I had was that the GL-X3000 came with beta (snapshot) firmware pre-installed instead with the latest stable release, which struck me as quite weird since I don't remember signing up for as beta tester. :-) Also, the default MTU value (1500) is way too high, the data packets were so large that the inital download speed was below 1 (in words: one) mbit/s. I couldn't understand what's wrong until Gemini gave me the decisive hint to lower it to 1420. Therefore only 4 stars instead of 5. Other than that, it's a stellar piece of HW & FW, and I'm now hitting DL speeds of 400-600 mbit/s, and UL speeds of 130-170 mbit/s, which is faster than my previous fiber connection (althouth the idle ping is a bit higher - ca. 50 ms, but still online gaming works fine). All that without even an external antenna (but I live a few hundred meters away from my provider's 5G tower). Next I'm gonna install the Waveform QuadPro 4x4 MIMO antenna and see if I can bring down the ping value a bit. All in all, highly recommended, but you MUST adjust the default MTU value.

Der GL.iNet GL-X3000 überzeugt in vielen Bereichen und ist für mich eine klare Empfehlung: - Software: Sehr gute Umsetzung dank OpenWrt – flexibel, übersichtlich und mit vielen Erweiterungsmöglichkeiten. - Verbindungen: Sowohl WLAN als auch 5G laufen stabil und zuverlässig, ohne Abbrüche. - Geschwindigkeit: Hohe Datenraten sind problemlos möglich. Aufgrund des verbauten Qualcomm X62 Modems werden allerdings keine absoluten Spitzengeschwindigkeiten erreicht. Für den Alltag reicht die Performance aber locker aus. - Bufferbloat: Ein klarer Pluspunkt ist die Möglichkeit, mit OpenWrt die Latenzen durch Traffic Shaping zu optimieren. Allerdings ist die verbaute CPU hier der Flaschenhals – mehr als ~300 Mbit/s mit aktivem SQM sind nicht realistisch. Trotz dieser Einschränkung bleibt der Router ein sehr starkes Gesamtpaket. Wer Wert auf stabile 5G- und WLAN-Verbindungen, flexible Konfiguration und gute Alltagsperformance legt, wird hier fündig.