4g Router

I bit the bullet today and ordered a netgear LB1110 4G/LTE modem. And a Netgear Nighthawk R7000 router to go with it, got lucky as €400 worth of hardware for €120 all in posted via ebay. The 2 auctions ended within 3 mins of eachother and just said i’d chance it.

will be interesting to see if it is significantly better than the trusty huawei.
 
I bit the bullet today and ordered a netgear LB1110 4G/LTE modem. And a Netgear Nighthawk R7000 router to go with it, got lucky as €400 worth of hardware for €120 all in posted via ebay. The 2 auctions ended within 3 mins of eachother and just said i’d chance it.

will be interesting to see if it is significantly better than the trusty huawei.

Keep us posted, I would be interested to see the results.
 
If I was to set up a second 4g router and sim card off the one antenna with would I be able to get full speed from both both routers. What I'm really trying ask is the antenna or the 4g router and sim the limiting factor for bandwidth?
 
It's not clear in your opening post, when you say the internet "goes to muck", are you talking about lack of signal or lack of bandwidth.
Also not sure, why you want another router, different provider ?

Anyway

If you have good signal i.e "bars" on your phone or hotspot, but crap broadband speeds, then an external antenna is of limited use in the first place.
The major limiting factor for bandwidth assuming you have a signal is contention, i.e how many users at the same time.
i.e on a Sunday evening, when everybody is online, speed sucks, 4:00 am, all in bed, same equipment, great speeds.

The purpose of the antenna is to boost your signal strength, i.e if you have poor signal indoors at your modem, you use an external antenna to gather as much signal from the great outdoors and get it into your modem.
In this case a second antenna is required if possible, as in the great scheme of things, the antenna should not be all that expensive. Trying to use the same antenna involves "splitting" the cable obviously, and regardless of how you do this there will be signal loss.

So in layman's terms at your end terminal , ie laptop, ip camera, phone etc there are 3 variables.

1. The actual 4G/LTE signal from your mobile provider, this is the bit the external antenna mostly helps with if you have a poor signal level.
2. The contention ratio of your provider, i.e how many users on the mast, nothing you can do about this only move provider if you had a choice.
3. The quality of the distribution of the wireless signal in your home, i.e wifi strength and speed, this can be helped/hindered by the quality of your network equipment
 
It's not clear in your opening post, when you say the internet "goes to muck", are you talking about lack of signal or lack of bandwidth.
Also not sure, why you want another router, different provider ?

Anyway

If you have good signal i.e "bars" on your phone or hotspot, but crap broadband speeds, then an external antenna is of limited use in the first place.
The major limiting factor for bandwidth assuming you have a signal is contention, i.e how many users at the same time.
i.e on a Sunday evening, when everybody is online, speed sucks, 4:00 am, all in bed, same equipment, great speeds.

The purpose of the antenna is to boost your signal strength, i.e if you have poor signal indoors at your modem, you use an external antenna to gather as much signal from the great outdoors and get it into your modem.
In this case a second antenna is required if possible, as in the great scheme of things, the antenna should not be all that expensive. Trying to use the same antenna involves "splitting" the cable obviously, and regardless of how you do this there will be signal loss.

So in layman's terms at your end terminal , ie laptop, ip camera, phone etc there are 3 variables.

1. The actual 4G/LTE signal from your mobile provider, this is the bit the external antenna mostly helps with if you have a poor signal level.
2. The contention ratio of your provider, i.e how many users on the mast, nothing you can do about this only move provider if you had a choice.
3. The quality of the distribution of the wireless signal in your home, i.e wifi strength and speed, this can be helped/hindered by the quality of your network equipment
Thanks, I got sorted with the antenna a couple of weeks ago and there was a big improvement over the mobile hotspot. Mainly due to the antenna height up beside the tv aerial. I've found that 3/48 have better speeds compared to gomo and vodafone here as well. There's still a bit of variation during the busy times of the day as you said.
I'm trying to get internet to a granny flat across the yard and I was planning on splitting the cable and bringing it 20/30m across the yard and setting up another router with sim. The main house would be obstructing the direction the signal would be coming from if I were to put up a second antenna off the granny flat.
What I'm trying to figure out is how feasible splitting two cables and bringing one 20-30m is. On top of that would someone using the second router be contributing to the overall contention ratio or would they be competing for the same bandwidth as if we were connected to the one router.
 
Don't bother splitting the antenna. Run an Ethernet cable to it off your existing router.
 
Don't bother splitting the antenna. Run an Ethernet cable to it off your existing router.
And run just a standard router off the other end of the ethernet cable is it or another 4g router Candor? Only getting 2/3mb at the worst part of the day so not a whole lot of bandwidth to share about!
 
And run just a standard router off the other end of the ethernet cable is it or another 4g router Candor? Only getting 2/3mb at the worst part of the day so not a whole lot of bandwidth to share about!
You can plug in a standard network switch or WiFi access point in the new building.

I hear you on the bandwidth, I recommend a good external log antenna and fine tuning it to point to the nearest cell tower that your service provider has LTE/4G on. Get it as high as you can. I've found by experimenting with this, I went from similar speed that you have to reasonably consistent 10-20 megabits per second. On a good day with the wind in our favour we can get 60 megabits per second download and similar upload.

See https://www.forum4farming.com/forum/index.php?threads/broadband.11221/post-720484
 
And run just a standard router off the other end of the ethernet cable is it or another 4g router Candor? Only getting 2/3mb at the worst part of the day so not a whole lot of bandwidth to share about!

what are you trying to achieve? More bandwidth or more outright speed?

i have something similar to what i think you are describing here. I have a 4G contract with Eir and Three. The eir contract (router only no external antenna) takes care of all of the streaming and smart devices (CCTV, Apple TV, alexa a few smart plugs we have for lights etc) All of which it handles at its consistent 8mb download, there there is another router (set up with an antenna) which handles the phones, laptops ipads and consoles etc, which is faster with an average download of 15mb, but more importantly the bandwidth load is shared.

i only went this route 6 months ago when it became apparent that there was going to be a lot of requirements on the ‘home network’ with us all being at home a lot, both are on 30 days rolling contracts and could be cancelled if the need arose.

can you get hold of another router? And throw a pay as you go sim in to test it? I conciously chose to have 2 different providers so that if there was to be an issue with one, the other should be ok.
Downside is at €63 a month combined, i’m at the cost of a good rural fibre or satellite type setup, but i have the flexibilty and facilities to handle a good number of devices.

going back to your original question, my antenna has 2 connectors but i’m fairly certain that they both service different frequencies, maybe even signal types, so by splitting them between the 2 routers i think i would end up reducing signal strength to both modems/routers
 
what are you trying to achieve? More bandwidth or more outright speed?

i have something similar to what i think you are describing here. I have a 4G contract with Eir and Three. The eir contract (router only no external antenna) takes care of all of the streaming and smart devices (CCTV, Apple TV, alexa a few smart plugs we have for lights etc) All of which it handles at its consistent 8mb download, there there is another router (set up with an antenna) which handles the phones, laptops ipads and consoles etc, which is faster with an average download of 15mb, but more importantly the bandwidth load is shared.

i only went this route 6 months ago when it became apparent that there was going to be a lot of requirements on the ‘home network’ with us all being at home a lot, both are on 30 days rolling contracts and could be cancelled if the need arose.

can you get hold of another router? And throw a pay as you go sim in to test it? I conciously chose to have 2 different providers so that if there was to be an issue with one, the other should be ok.
Downside is at €63 a month combined, i’m at the cost of a good rural fibre or satellite type setup, but i have the flexibilty and facilities to handle a good number of devices.

going back to your original question, my antenna has 2 connectors but i’m fairly certain that they both service different frequencies, maybe even signal types, so by splitting them between the 2 routers i think i would end up reducing signal strength to both modems/routers
What I'm planning is pointing a second antenna in the direction of the other cell tower. I'm getting slightly better speeds pointing that direction, not sure how much that will be affected when the foliage comes out on the trees again. Currently using the cell tower in the first picture. I can get 20-40mb/s during the day and then it drops to 3-8mbs in the evenings with an increase in jitter so the main problem is congestion.
I can run a 50m ethernet cable across the yard if one or other is particularly bad on a given day.


gWoUAdZ.png

t2o9wJE.png
My signal seems ok based on your chart anyway @candor
 
61gU%2BU%2BFI8L._AC_SL1500_.jpg

Went for a twin arm one last time, Is there any advantage of one of these over a single arm one. Most for sale are single arm.
 
What I'm planning is pointing a second antenna in the direction of the other cell tower. I'm getting slightly better speeds pointing that direction, not sure how much that will be affected when the foliage comes out on the trees again. Currently using the cell tower in the first picture. I can get 20-40mb/s during the day and then it drops to 3-8mbs in the evenings with an increase in jitter so the main problem is congestion.
I can run a 50m ethernet cable across the yard if one or other is particularly bad on a given day.



My signal seems ok based on your chart anyway @candor

contention is a problem that is hard to resolve, that said, i think i see more contention with the Three sim than i do with the Eir sim. Stands to reason i guess as three would have been mibile broadband market leaders for a while and had the NBS scheme, so i would guess they have more users, whats more a lot of peoplei know that have Three phone contracts actually use it more for the data.

all leads to more contention from what i can see
 
contention is a problem that is hard to resolve, that said, i think i see more contention with the Three sim than i do with the Eir sim. Stands to reason i guess as three would have been mibile broadband market leaders for a while and had the NBS scheme, so i would guess they have more users, whats more a lot of peoplei know that have Three phone contracts actually use it more for the data.

all leads to more contention from what i can see
Yeah there are a lot with a similar broadband setup on three around.
I had very poor internet with Gomo who use the eir network. Completely dropped from 2pm in the day, getting on far better with 48 on the phone and 3 in the router.
 
Yeah there are a lot with a similar broadband setup on three around.
I had very poor internet with Gomo who use the eir network. Completely dropped from 2pm in the day, getting on far better with 48 on the phone and 3 in the router.

which unfortunately will only compound your problem with contention, if its the only viable option.

have you check comreg’s siteviewer to see what masts you are local to?
 
From my research, it's best to go with the twin antenna setup, something to do with polarity. Best to angle them perpendicular to each other.
 
which unfortunately will only compound your problem with contention, if its the only viable option.

have you check comreg’s siteviewer to see what masts you are local to?
I have but in practice only 3 has reliable internet with decent speeds compared to gomo and vodofone.
 
I have but in practice only 3 has reliable internet with decent speeds compared to gomo and vodofone.

other thing to try is manually switch back to 3G from 4G, may be less using the network and you may get more speed and bandwidth. Eases the contention. Sounds crazy but it works
 
other thing to try is manually switch back to 3G from 4G, may be less using the network and you may get more speed and bandwidth. Eases the contention. Sounds crazy but it works
That's true, I switched to 3g for a few days this week due to poor 4g performance. 4g back decent speed again. It's rare that I have to switch.
 
Jumping on this thread a moment.
I've been asked to do a virtual farm tour for the young farmers this Feb.
All good but I'm not sure if 4g is man enough in my shed.

Plan is to hopefully use my phone as a hotspot to run the Ipad (wifi only on ipad)
Would prefer ipad as I've no room on the phone for zoom. And questions will be typed so need to see them!!

So. How can I (cheaply) boost 4g in the shed?

Or I can almost get line of sight from superfast broadband hub in the house to shed door, but the shed is 10 bay long and behind a silage pit otherwise!! Any way too boost that down to the shed?
Don't want to go spending megabucks, although shed wifi could be usefull in years to come.
 
Jumping on this thread a moment.
I've been asked to do a virtual farm tour for the young farmers this Feb.
All good but I'm not sure if 4g is man enough in my shed.

Plan is to hopefully use my phone as a hotspot to run the Ipad (wifi only on ipad)
Would prefer ipad as I've no room on the phone for zoom. And questions will be typed so need to see them!!

So. How can I (cheaply) boost 4g in the shed?

Or I can almost get line of sight from superfast broadband hub in the house to shed door, but the shed is 10 bay long and behind a silage pit otherwise!! Any way too boost that down to the shed?
Don't want to go spending megabucks, although shed wifi could be usefull in years to come.
Off the wifi will be the way to do it. Get line of sight and then extend from there but you'd need @candor Or someone to explain the technology
 
  • Like
Reactions: AYF
Jumping on this thread a moment.
I've been asked to do a virtual farm tour for the young farmers this Feb.
All good but I'm not sure if 4g is man enough in my shed.

Plan is to hopefully use my phone as a hotspot to run the Ipad (wifi only on ipad)
Would prefer ipad as I've no room on the phone for zoom. And questions will be typed so need to see them!!

So. How can I (cheaply) boost 4g in the shed?

Or I can almost get line of sight from superfast broadband hub in the house to shed door, but the shed is 10 bay long and behind a silage pit otherwise!! Any way too boost that down to the shed?
Don't want to go spending megabucks, although shed wifi could be usefull in years to come.
Run the iPad off the phone hotspot, leave the phone outside the shed so it holds the 4G signal. Try it tomorrow by being if you can watch YouTube or something that way.
 
Ethernet cable will do 100 metres.

I would probably try running a cable to a WiFi extender if that is feasible layout wise.
The 100m is straight line from house over the yard to the shed. I was hoping some form of booster could cover it wirelessly?

@Paw how far will hotspot cover I wonder? I'll give it a go.

All this and I'm not even sure the light in the shed will be good enough yet!
 
Back
Top