There are also a couple of alternative products on Three. The HomeFi B311 has slightly lower specs with only 2.4GHz WiFi and lower maximum speeds, but has the option to add an external SMA aerial which can boost range significantly. It’s a great addition to any home where Wi-Fi connectivity proves problematic and 4G performance is strong. It could also become a useful travel companion if your premises don’t always tend to have reliable Wi-Fi. The Huawei AI Cube can also theoretically manage upload speeds of 50Mbps over 4G. Again, actual speeds are likely to be lower, but still higher than most of the competition. Having said that, the Huawei B535 WebBox does beat it here, with upload speeds of up to 100Mbps.

In the flesh, it is loud, making plenty of noise in a busy room. While loud is good, there was depth and roundness to the sound too, though without testing the audio quality alongside its key competitors or in a controlled environment we couldn’t give a definitive verdict based on our early impressions. Figuring out how to establish a Bluetooth link isn’t immediately apparent, though. It’s strange that you can’t hook up your smartphone in this way (for direct music streaming) from the HiLink app, but rather have to ask Alexa to do so. But at least the function is there, contrary to reports you might have read elsewhere. Features Another useful piece of software is the "Best Position" feature, which enables you to find the position with the best signal strength. The Huawei AI Cube pulls off the feat of being unique in an increasingly crowded smart speaker market. While it’s a fully functioning Alexa smart speaker and a viable Bluetooth speaker, the main function here is its 4G router capability.The SIM card slot is also at the bottom with the Reset hole. The Huawei B900 WiFi cube uses Micro SIM card size. Below the IMEI & S/N number label, there is an Ethernet port for LAN and WAN. The power plug port is at the side of the Ethernet port. The main feature of the Huawei AI Cube beyond providing 4G home broadband, is its smart speaker credentials. The 4G mast that I connect to is situated in the next door property to my house, exactly 28 metres away from the router with a direct line of sight, hence my disappointment at the speeds that I have been getting.

That makes it the potential heart of any smart home and a very versatile device. And it’s a speaker that you’ll likely want to listen to music through, as it includes a 400ml sound cavity and an aluminium diaphragm. Still, the AI Cube is fast, and that’s good news, because some home broadband can be faster than 4G, so for a 4G alternative to compete it needs to be able to make full use of 4G speeds. The R219 isn't really suitable for home working setup that out of preference uses wired connections to get best quality connections for web conferencing and the like - especially if you need to lead some sessions. In my area I find it drops out often, and data throughput is inconsistent. Also, if you have a smarthome setup, a max of 10 connections on a hotspot really won't do, and I've tried lots of configurations to try to keep that going. I was looking for affordable ways to tide me over until fibre restored, and on the face of it, similar technology from Huawei looked favourable, with an Ethernet connection.The CAT level is a simplistic number which generalises the 'level' of technology that a device supports. The higher the number the 'better' it should be. However that's very dependant on the provider in terms of what frequency bands a provider uses, aggregations that are available and what levels of MIMO and QAM are deployed on their network combined with what the individual device supports.