Setting up 4G as home broadband solution

Chris C

Chris C

Chris C

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Joined
30 Sep 2004
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1,199
Location
Wiltshire
Does anyone have any experience setting up a 4G replacement for home broadband? My parents live in the middle of nowhere and have 0.5Mbit/s yes half a megabit for a connection. It's like living in the stone age.

What I want to do is get a couple of omni-directional antennas and hook them up to a 4G dongle and then a wireless router or a 4G router that accepts external antenna. Using a dongle only or a router won't work because the signal isn't great, but up on the chimney it's much better with a big antenna.

Does anyone have any advice on what I should be getting?
 
See what networks can cover that location, and work from there. 4G is expensive, I'd look into other options first like point-to-point wireless.
 
EE works and will give me about 50Mbps, my parents won't use it much at all so 10Gb/m allowance will work fine
They live in the middle of a forest on the side of a valley, there is no line of sight so microwave isn't an option and their phone line is 7km long so landline speeds are unlikely to ever improve. Satellite is even more expensive than 4G because you have to pay for the backhaul connection seperately.
 
I've previously used a pair of external 12db directional 4G antennae (the ones shaped like a triangular paddle) with a TP-Link MR200 AC750 but if I was doing it again I would either get a single dual output 24dB Parabolic antenna (looks like a satellite dish) with the same router or a Mikrotik SXT LTE which was suggested by someone in another thread here. I showed the link to a colleague and he's using the SXT with a Unifi USG router and he reckons it's a great setup. You need a separate router with the SXT because it's just an LTE modem but it's apparently also a very sensitive antenna array. Which could be just what you need. Just be aware that because the SIM card is inside the SXT if you needed to swap the SIM over you'd need to go up to the SXT to do it. With the MR200 option the SIM card is just in the back of the router.
 
That Mikrotik box looks pretty sweet. It definitely appears to be a router, though - just one with a single port.
 
I used EE 4G for about 4 months when I moved in to my new house, got great speeds.

I had an old ASUS N56U (I think) that would work with a 4G dongle, just had to get a specific one from quite a big list.

Plug it in, configure it and away you go, really easy.

Most ASUS routers still work with 4G dongles, I am sure other routers do, I only have experience with ASUS.
 
Caged said:
That Mikrotik box looks pretty sweet. It definitely appears to be a router, though - just one with a single port.
Click to expand...

I've just spoken to my colleague and he's adamant that which technically it might be a router in the most simplistic terms, it's not usable as what most people would call a router. It will only route traffic to one IP address if you opt not to use it in modem mode and there is no DHCP server etc.
 
I use a EE router thing and works really well. only thing is it eats up 50gb limit each month very easily, and that's with not using netflix on it and only my phone, ipad and pc.

I did buy a proper 4g router but it had a worse signal than the free EE thing and even with an external antenna it was still slower.
 
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