Spitz AX (GL-X3000) Wi-Fi 6 Dual-SIM 5G Cellular Gateway

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.

I found the GL-X3000 (Spitz AX) randomly when looking for travel routers, unrelated to cellular networks, but had an existing (other brand) carrier-locked 5G hotspot router and decided it would be great to replace it with this device. I've never used a GL-iNet device before but knew that they used a fork of OpenWRT which I've never used, but wanted to and knew the functionality was great and "unlocked". I was originally using AT&T's network in my other device but decided to get a second T-Mobile SIM to use the dual-SIM functionality of the Spitz AX. After about an hour of testing and "tweaking" SIM-related options to get things to work properly with the network providers, the router has full 4G LTE and 5G access to both networks - and the automatic SIM network switching feature is awesome.. Network switching when one loses connection. Speeds are normal for my area but I do plan to use this primarily as a travel router which I will use in my car and at hotels... I bought a USB-C to barrel connector cable to use instead of the OEM provided power cable, as I intended to power the router from USB-C (mainly because my car has 20W USB-C, but also convenience) and it works great. I do wish the router had a small battery so I could move it without power loss, or if my car port powers off, but this can be fixed by using a USB-C power bank as a middle power device which I plan to do. The proprietary OpenWRT fork they run on these works great, no bugs that I've found. Feature rich.. allows you to really "own" your device, such as issuing changes to the internal 4G/5G modem settings. Has all DNS, VPN, Tor features, WiFi repeater (awesome feature, but I haven't used it). Build quality and accessories included are also top notch. This is my first GL-iNet device and despite it being costly (but on par or cheaper than other 5G cell routers) I don't regret the purchase and GL-iNet has a customer for life from me.

Went from a MiFi X Pro to this cellular router and speeds went from 150 to 225 down and 20 up, to about 300 to 500 down and 30 to 50 up. Have to restart about once every week or two to reset the cellular channel since the data connection seems to act like a call but, restart is about 45 seconds. Setup VPN for a single ROKU device and worked great. I work remotely and they internet is solid and consistent with very low latency.

I had no trouble setting up and connecting to T-Mobile. I used a hotspot SIM and got great download speeds until T-Mobile started throttling. But, I was not able to give this device a good test. I was not able to access the band locking feature. Even though I could connect to my PC's without trouble, I was not able to connect either of my android phones to WiFi network (I would get an error message that the password was wrong event though it was correct). I spent hours trying to find a way to connect the phones to the WiFi network without success. Then, after 2 days the device quit connecting to the Internet. I checked the SIM in my Inseego device. It connected to the Internet without a hitch. Returned the device to Amazon. Then I made the mistake of purchasing another Spitz Ax. This one was DOA. The Wifi lights lit up, but the Internet lights never lit up and I was unable to connect to T-Mobile. I also inserted the test SIM that comes with the Spitz AX. No luck. I am truly dissapointed with this product. I wanted to use this in my RV. The size of the Spitz AX is great. The fact that you can attach it to a window with the provided sticky pad is great. What would really be great is if the Spitz AX devices actually worked. The rating are good, so why did I get 2 devices that were defective? The good news for me is that both devices crapped out within a couple of days. Imagine if they dropped dead after the 30 day return window.

I cannot add much more than what others said about it (the good things), but I can say what I needed it for and how it worked out. TL;DR: I needed it to provide both a stable local WiFi LAN and high-speed T-Mobile "5G UC" Internet for my Samsung Android devices in my car. And it was a major success. FULL STORY I have all Samsung Android devices and use a Samsung account with them. I need them to network with each other while also having internet access. I used to do this by setting my phone as a hotspot and sharing data, and calling/texting with my tablet, which is mounted on my dashboard and connected to my car via Bluetooth. The problem is that T-Mobile reduces speed when using the phone as a hotspot for my tablet (or the phone just runs slower in hotspot mode). On my phone alone, with "5G UC," I can get a sustained 1.5 Gbps in some parts of town. But when the hotspot is running to feed data to the tablet, the speed drops to as slow as 5 Mbps and is unstable. This wasn't going to work. My first solution was to get a dedicated hotspot device, and I did try a couple that failed hard—Inseego and Netgear. I suppose they would be fine if you're taking it with you to a stationary environment, but I needed this to be seamless and on the go. This solution had major issues: 1. The hotspots were battery-powered, and this created an issue where you either have to manage them every time you need to use them, or leaving them unmanaged means the battery will drain. Or in some cases, you need to physically turn them on or wake them up. 2. The Inseego m3000 hotspot, for some reason, did not allow devices connected to it to see each other, therefore breaking my Samsung ecosystem between devices. 3. The Netgear Nighthawk hotspot refuses to connect to T-Mobile 5G at all, but the connected devices to it can see each other. 4. Both hotspots couldn't get a real signal unless it was in the open air, but the Inseego did do much better indoors since you can force it to only use 5G, where the Nighthawk will not let you switch, and it always defaults to 4G. So I was back to square one when my tests all failed. Then I discovered the Gl.net, read the specs, and it looked promising, so I got it. I moved my T-Mobile $30 25GB hotspot SIM to the new device, and it just worked. As a bonus, even inside my house, I can get stable 2-3 bars of 5G UC, where my phone can only get 1 bar (or it drops to 4G). When I confirmed my connection worked, I installed it in my SUV, in the back cargo area, under the floor (extra storage), using a 12V cig cable run under the floor to power this up. Now, when the car turns on, this turns on. When the car turns off, this turns off. No need to manage it, just set it and forget it. As it turns out, with a lot of testing, this was the solution to my problem, because: 1. It's not a hotspot, it's a real 5G/4G modem with real antennas, and it's a real Wifi router, so networked devices can see each other—all devices connected to it are on a real LAN. (Important for my Samsung Android setup.) And the WiFi signal itself in the SUV is strong. 2. It connects to T-Mobile 5G at home, in the car, on the road, and remains stable. Keyword: STABLE. 3. Not battery powered, turns on and off with the power source (like in a car). This means not having to set any battery saver or sleep options, which also means no need to manually turn it off and on each time I get in the car. 4. Doesn't need to be out in the open, it picks up signal and gets fast speeds on 5G UC, avg. about 150 Mbps from inside my SUV's cargo space, tucked under the floor. I would probably get 500+ Mbps if I used an external antenna mounted on top of my car, but I wasn't doing this for the fastest speeds, just something 50 Mbps+ and most importantly, a STABLE connection, which this has. For my use case, this was perfect. But the added bonus of it working at home really is great because sometimes I lose internet at home, and this serves as an awesome emergency backup. The only downside I've had so far is that when starting up, it can take a couple of minutes to actually connect to 5G and also advertise itself to my other devices so they can auto-connect. But that's not a deal breaker at all for me, just something that I wish was better. But it is much faster than both the Inseego and Netgear. Overall, it's been great for what I needed it to do, and even if I didn't need it for this specific use case, it's a good product for other uses.

I purchased this router around a month ago, mostly because I work on a remote location where my Verizon unlimited ultrawide does not work, So I have to use Tmobile, and Tmobile likes to limit clients to a low bandwidth. There is some configuration you have to make if you want to use the router as a "Phone", I changed the IMEI from the router so my phone company believes is an Android phone, since the device is a 5G I had to use a 5G phone imei, after that just config the TTL settings and we are in business. The only issue, is that the modem likes to reset at sometimes, and all the APN configurations dissapear, that might cause potential issues with the phone provider, T-mobile in my case. I get decent speeds at about 450mbps down 30up, in my cell phone I can get 600+ mbps the first 50gb then around 20mbps the rest of the data, but in the router is always high speed. I like that we can customize the WIFI timer on and off, even set the device to restart at some time in the week or day. That helps me with the typical signal stuck that most router and phones get, so a reboot a day helps getting a fresh connection. Also Like that the device can connect to GoodCloud so I can manage all my GLiNet routers with my phone from anywhere, I like to see if someone is using my routers at some time of the day with or without my permission. There are way too many functions on this router, VPN adblockers scripts and more, VPN is good when you do not want to config every device on your network same as the adblocker, usually I prefer local machine VPN is faster than routers. I might not recommend the modem to persons that don't like to constant check your router settings, since this modem uses an opensource OS it might fail from time to time, and needs to be reset or rebooted. A few days playing with the configuration will give you enough knowledge to be able to manage the router, Pro users might even log into the device using ssh and other advance cloud services.

Wow, this router is pretty much the holy grail. It has so many features (multiple VPNs, 2.4/5.8/6Ghz WiFi, the ability to connect to a WiFi network as well as rebroadcast another SSID, built in DDNS) that actually work as expected and all with an interface that puts other vendors to shame. I have rarely been more impressed with a router either enterprise or consumer.

This has proven to be a much better product than its smaller brother. GL-X2000. Spend the extra money and get the X3000 when and if possible, you will be happy you did. Tons of features you will never use but paired with both satellite or Cellular this is truly a go anywhere device do all device.