Guilty of a click-bait title there 🙂

Anyway a while ago we had a thread on SIM based broadband. On the back of that we bought the uncapped three service with their (crappy) router. Performance was okay, occasionally good but very variable.

Bought an external antenna and a new two channel router. Short term mounted them on the outside of a Velux window. Peformance now good (20-40 meg download) but still a bit patchy.

Now we have it on the chimney.

The Internet Shelf. That’s a Tenda Mesh box and the new router in our loft. Mate had to wire the electrics in as we needed to be within 5m of the Antenna (can’t extend cables)

Man on a roof. Rather you than me Rex! First try abandoned due to strong winds.

Results.

It’s not that good all the time and it’s still a bit variable (worse in the morning, not sure why) but we’re consistently getting 30-40 meg+ download and 8-10 upload. That costs £22 a month. So at least five times the bandwidth for less than a 1/4 of the cost. I’ll take those numbers!

That’s quite impressive and I love a good antennas on roofs thread (Telecoms geek).

How do you find those Tenda Mesh boxes?

They are pretty good. Occasionally feel the urge for a catastrophic full mesh reboot but generally really impressed. The new ones are apparently better but since we could do the whole house and the outbuilding for £120 (6 units), I was happy to go with these.

They do work well in terms of hand-off as you move about the house, and the mgt app is useful. Definitely a big upgrade on boosters and/or home plug type solutions.

£22/month for that speed is very good! 👍👍👍

I pay more than double that price for download of 55Mbps and only average at around 50Mbps while upload is around 8 – 10Mbps. 🙁

I recently cancelled my fibre broadband and just use my phone with a shared connection:

4G 100GB/month 20e

It was the cap that put us off originally. Until three offered an uncapped service, it wasn’t economical to go this way. Our previous 2 line bonded solution originally had a cap of 250 gig/month which – for a family of 4 – ended up with us rationing internet access by about the 20th!

Try that with two teenagers in the house 😉

We’re currently on EE 4gee broadband, not cheap but great speeds when compared to what we were getting down the line (2mb with “fibre”).

I don’t think I get 3 4g coverage at home unfortunately.

Interest d to know what you felt made the biggest difference, the new router or the antenna? We have the three huawei one and it’s super patchy, but adding an external antenna didn’t make much difference. We’re in a rented place so are a bit limited on options

Antenna. But to get the best throughput from the antenna we had to get a two channel router. The HW/Three one was one channel only. We tried an external as well with the HW router but it didn’t make much difference either. Can you stick an antenna on the outside of a window? Using suckers? Thats an option if you can’t start attaching stuff to chimneys….

I guess it will depend on what the limiting factor is. If it’s signal strength, then an external antenna will work wonders but if your local cell is heavily congested, you are limited by how many other users are online.

@footflaps. That’s the issue over fixed line. With fixed line, congestion starts at the exchange! Where we live tho, it’s very rural and I don’t think the local cell gets that congested. Shame there’s no way to find out.

Yes, I’d expect rural areas to have low cell loading and an external antenna would improve things. We’re in the middle of a town, so I can’t see any cells being quiet except in the middle of the night.

Makes sense. I’m old enough to remember the disappointment that was WAP 😉 Back in my telecoms days, BT and the like really didn’t seem to see the whole data thing coming. In the same way fixed line is great for phones but not so clever for data, we managed to build a whole new network that suffered similar problems!

Three’s pitch is they have lots of ‘spare’ space in their spectrum so they’re not worried about capping BW, assuming you can get out of the local cell.

5G will be interesting. Not sure the business model of digging up roads to put fibre in has that much longevity in it…

5G will have the same problems that 3G and 4G has/had. In cities, where the demand density is high you struggle to build enough masts eg in central London we did some work for O2 and planning permission in the posh parts can take years as all the buildings are listed etc. In rural areas, you have huge distances and not many paying customers, so masts are easier to deploy (outside national parks), but they don’t cover their costs in terms of revenues…

5G doesn’t really change anything, capacities have gone up a bit over 4G, but still no where near enough capacity density to touch cable / fibre.

I’m old enough to remember the disappointment that was WAP 😉 Back in my telecoms days,

I vaguely remember that from early 2000 ish, IIRC 3G made it obsolete.

BT and the like really didn’t seem to see the whole data thing coming

I always though BT didn’t care. They always prioritise quarterly results over long term investment, so made no investments unless Ofcom etc force them to do so. They’d have been quite happy to have the uK still on 56kb/s dial up modems as long as we had to pay 20p/minute dial up costs…

Apt article in the Economist..
https://www.economist.com/business/2019/08/22/vodafones-search-for-the-g-spot

If there’s blokes involved Footflaps they will never find it!!

Yes, bit of an odd / click bait article title….

Thanks, will look into router and external antenna combos. But as we’re in town I’m suspecting it might be cell congestion that’s our limiting factor rather than signal, is there any way to lookup loading on a tower?

I don’t know of one. I know where our cell ‘ends’ on one side as there is a black spot where the next cell doesn’t quite overlap. I’m sure i found some geeky maps showing coverage but nothing showing load.

Someone might know better tho.

On that note we bought our kit from Solwise. They really know their stuff so it might be worth giving them a call for some advice.

After that last post, I decided to check out our transmitter coverage. Cellmapper.net shows you cells by carrier. Interestingly – ish – we’re between two cells and *just* inside a dead spot. It seems pretty accurate as I know we lose the phone signal in the dead spots shown on the map.

But as we’re in town I’m suspecting it might be cell congestion that’s our limiting factor rather than signal, is there any way to lookup loading on a tower?

Not unless you know someone in the Network NoC who can take a look for you….

Thanks, interesting reading. What external antenna did you go for? In a similar situation to yourself having been using 4G on vodafone for a while with a ‘combo pass’ for unlimited streaming etc on main services. A bit more expensive at £34/month so will have to look at three when the contract is up for renewal. Getting around 20mbps on the router’s basic antenna but have always wondered how much better it would be with an external antenna. Will have to try something similar out!

Thanks all, good info to keep me investigating. I had hope with good signal in Hereford town centre we’d get better throughput, but maybe it just need more tweaking

It was this one: https://www.solwise.co.uk/4g-antenna-omni-xpol-a0001.html – you’ll need a router with two aerials for it to work. We bought it with one of these: https://www.solwise.co.uk/4g-routers-rut240.html