Hi Guys: It is me than Before You Buy Guy. I've been working hard researching and
finding out everything that you need to know before you buy the Huawei B525 Router
Coming up in this short video I'm going to show you how to access the internet
from anywhere that has mobile coverage using a 4G SIM
I'll show you how I boosted my signal using this modem with an external antenna and
I'm also going to show you how to set this device up using a old-school
landline phone. You're going to get all of that and more let's get to it so
First of all let's see what you get in the box with this router
you get the router body itself this comes in black or white. 1 phone line port, 1 USB 2 port
we've got four ethernet ports and over here you've got a factory reset button
you need a paper clip or a skewer or something pointy to press this if you
want to factory reset the device. On the top of the router you've got a WPS
button and a power button. Over here is this light where you put in the SIM card
make sure you read the instructions and don't break your sim down to small or it won't work.
at the front of the device from left to right - you've got a white light
that lights up showing you that the router is switched on. Next to this
you have got a round circle light will let you know the status of your connections
this light will be red when you're not connected to the internet and green when you are
Next up you've got a Wi-Fi indicator that will switch on when this
device is sending out an active Wi-Fi you've got this computer symbol here
that will flash white when you're connected via one of the Ethernet ports to your computer
The last indicator here is for signal strength
going from zero bars for no signal up to five bars for the maximum signal strength
pretty much anywhere that has 4G you'll be able to get
relatively fast internet using a 4G SIM card. Using this router it's like setting
up a giant hotspot that covers your entire house plus you can plug in
devices using the Ethernet cable so that you can have
a more reliable and stable wired wireless connection this router does
work at for both 2.4 gigahertz and a 5 gigahertz Wi-Fi signals I guess it
depends on your location. I purchased this browser because there were very
limited options for internet in my area 4G is the fastest and most reliable
Internet that I can get at the moment. You can see that I've got a couple of
little antennas that I'm using at the back here now they didn't come in the
box with this product I actually have these two small antennas from another 4G
modem and I thought well it's surely going to be better to have summer
antennae than none the why away be 525 does come with internal antennas so you
can use this device without any antennas plugged in. If you want to plug in an
external antenna you've got to go into the settings and then select external antenna
I'll show you how to do that now so you go into system and then you go antenna settings
It will actually pop-up with a warning saying don't use an external
antenna that's not supplied by your provider. I didn't use an antenna that
was supplied by my provider. I actually sourced my own antennas and they all
seem to work just fine. These two little antennas they came from
another 4G modem that did have antennas I plugged them straight into the back of
this router it did improve my speed as opposed to not having any antennas but I
wanted to go further and see if I could actually get even more performance than
what I could get from these two small antennas. I purchased a large 4G antenna
which is normally attached to vehicles but I thought I'm gonna stick this on my roof
and run the wire down to my modem to see what kind of performance increase
I can get using this external antenna. I wasn't sure the best antenna to get so I
reached out to an antenna expert and got their opinion and they recommended that
I purchased this particular model. I'll pop the model number up on the screen here
can't really see this one for sale anymore but essentially it's a large 4G
vehicle antenna Without using any antenna I normally
have around three to four bars of signal. When I'm using these two small external antennas
I can normally get around four to five bars when I plug in this large
external antenna that's on my roof. I'm consistently getting five bars of signal
strength let's take a quick look at a speed test comparing using no antennas
to using the small antennas to using the large antenna on the roof
So you can see from the results that's definitely an increase in speed with the
large antenna as opposed to small antennas which is also faster than no antenna
Now 4G internet it can also be a little bit temperamental when it comes
to the weather but using this large antenna I find that it's much more
reliable and consistent. If I go back to the small antennas I find that it drops
out especially when it's cloudy or raining. Now I didn't realize this before
I bought the router but after I bought it I noticed a little phone port at the
back of the device and I thought hmmm I wonder if you can plug this into a
landline phone how easy it is to set up. I can tell you right now it's very easy
so you can see there's a phone port at the back um all I did was plug a
phone cable here at the back of the modem and then I plugged the other side
of the cable into the back of the phone and then plugged in the phone - Boom
It started working right away got a dial tone and I was able to call and receive calls back in
if you need to have a landline phone at your house for
whatever reason but don't want to pay for line rental or get another phone
plan and you have this 4G router. This is a great solution for you. Now I found
that you could use this device with any SIM card I've tried it with the Optus
SIM card telstra sim card and a Vodafone SIM card they all work just fine it's
great that because this device is 4G you can take it anywhere if you wanted to go
camping or maybe you're a fly-in fly-out worker. If you want to have internet that
you can take with you this is fantastic you just pick up the router unplug it
take it with you to wherever you're going and you've got your internet when
you need it. It is good that you have the option to install external antennas even
though it recommends that you don't do that. I found that it improved the
performance the reliability and the speed of the connection. There aren't
really many negatives that I could find for this device so the USB port at the
back of the router can be used to share files between people who are on the network
but this is USB 2 - I think they could improve this
router by making this a USB 3 for faster data transfer. I also do think they could
improve the Wi-Fi range for this device I found that this router didn't cover my
whole house in Wi-Fi and I had to get a range extender which I put in my round
room so that I could get the best performance for my internet all
throughout my house. So the range extender that I'm using to boost my
Wi-Fi is the Linksys RE6700. I've done a video on that as well you can check that
out in the link just here. The Google reviewers did tend to agree with me
not many people found fault with this device I found it really hard to find a
negative review the only negative review that I found was in another language and
when I translated it it was difficult to understand what they were complaining about
if you're looking for a 4G router you might be hard-pressed to find a
better option than this one it is reliable
it has consistent performance it's got good options for adding external
antennas or a phone and it's got a USB port at the back and it uses dual band Wi-Fi
thank you for watching please like this video and subscribe to the channel
I'll see you next time