Quite a sunset
Mobile Broadband External Antenna
We used to get fixed line broadband but it was a bit unreliable since the cable comes through a bunch of trees and whenever the wind blew the connection would keep dropping out. Obviously this would not do.
So 3 do a mobile broadband solution for £29 per month. I managed to snag it for £20 a month but this lead to a whole bunch of calls with 3 who insisted on charging me £29 per month…but that is a whole other story!
Anyway, we got a reasonable speed from the 3 router – about 18Mbps down and about the same up I think. But whilst researching why my page loads sometimes stalled I happened across a site where people were discussing their download speeds and some of these dudes were getting 80Mbps. Needless to say, I fancied a bit of that. So I bought myself a Poynting external antenna and sent the boy up onto the roof
Turns out having your son on the roof holding the antenna and just pointing it in random directions didn’t work out too well. So I built myself a little wooden caddy for the antenna and got myself up on the roof with a mobile app that measures all sorts of funky stuff like RSRQ, RSRP, RSSI and most importantly SINR [ Signal to Noise Ratio ]. By some judicial repositioning of the antenna whilst keeping an eye on the SINR mesaure I managed to get this…
Well over double the speed I was getting from fixed line broadband. I’ve since seen it up at 50Mbps – but it all depends on how many people are on that given cell tower. These speeds are with 4G too – when 5G comes along … well