new rural verizon lte setup

[miboss]

Hello, I'm so happy to have found this forum. Just recently got confirmation that my last internet option (frontier) will not work, so I've started researching lte internet.

I have a new home in Southern OH almost complete that is deep in the woods. BUT, I do have a verizon cell tower on the ridge that almost boarders my property. It's approx 2100 ft away and about 120 ft higher than my house, well the base is about 120 ft higher, I'm not sure how high the tower is

property_celltower.JPG

I also found the cell tower ID and some directional stuff, which I do not know the importance of. Yeah, I know I blocked out road names, and left the cell tower ID, which is pointless...

cell tower.JPG

Testing signal strength with my phone from on a porch, I can get signal strength of -81. I ran a couple speed tests from my phone and I would get approx 8-12 Mbps down and 12-16 Mbps up. I didn't think the signal strength was that bad, but my speeds seem really low, any thoughts on potential to get this up to 40-50 Mbps?

So my first question is, can I make this work? Can you be too close to a tower? From reading the forums everyone seems to be 2-5 miles away.

I would like to build something that would be a bit future proof, but by the time this tower sees 5G or another provider it may be time to get new hardware anyway.

It seems The Wireless Haven doesn't have much in terms of product right now. I can't seem to find a WE826 or WG3526 and honestly, I don't even know if that's what I need. While were on the subject of things I don't know, do I want cat4,6,...20?

I am open to running any number/size of antennas to make this work. I work from home and will have potentially a remote teacher and 2 students requiring as good of internet as I can get.

I'm a current Verizon customer now, so adding another line/sim to my plan shouldn't be difficult. Does going with Visable or PagePlus provide any benefit over Verizon, other than cost?


FWIW, There is fiber running to the cell tower and is so close I can smell it, but the fiber company quoted me 80k to run it to my house, which is about 78k more than I want to spend on getting this setup to work. That quote is following roads and utility easements. There is another option of trying to purchase an easement from a neighbor to connect to the road that has the fiber, but that still leaves trenching fiber lines and the fiber co looked at the topography and said HECK NO! They would not let me do my own trenching and burying pipeline, so sadly I have to forget about getting fiber till I hit the lottery.

Please let me know your recommendations.

Thank you,

Mike

[Viper67857]

That signal strength is excellent... You're close enough to the tower to not really need any big expensive antennas. A Verizon Jetpack 8800L might be all you need...

[gscheb]

Try those phone speeds tests in the off hours.

[miboss]

That signal strength is excellent... You're close enough to the tower to not really need any big expensive antennas. A Verizon Jetpack 8800L might be all you need...

Thanks Viper, the jetpack may serve in a pinch, but I'll be running my whole house on this and there is some functionality I'm looking to gain from a router I can put a custom firmware on.

[gscheb]

Thanks Viper, the jetpack may serve in a pinch, but I'll be running my whole house on this and there is some functionality I'm looking to gain from a router I can put a custom firmware on.

Never done it, but have heard those jetpacks can be tethered to a router. Believe heard it from mobile internet resource center. Have one set up at my uncle house and to get more wifi coverage just set up a repeater to cover the whole house.

[Viper67857]

Yes, tethered to say an Asus router you can do anything you could do with an actual modem.

[miboss]

I've also heard they can be tethered, but I've also hear they are unstable and require rebooting often. This is a second home for us and we won't be there full time until we retire, so I'm trying to find a good/stable solution. I've read that openwrt flashable routers can be set to auto reboot, which may come in handy if we're away and can't be there to reboot. I'm sure there's lots of other benefits over a stock jetpack, but that one stuck in my head.

I will be connecting the router to a wireless mesh to cover the whole house. I also hope to run some security cameras if I can get enough speed to support them.

[Viper67857]

So you want the "go big or go home" approach... I can respect that, and it's generally the best bet if you're not looking to save money up front, as you may save more in the long run not having to toss out cheaper hardware to upgrade later.

So source out a wg1608 router and a Quectel em-20g (or the 5g rm500 or whatever it's called if you really wanna future-proof). I'd probably start with the stock paddle antennas since your signal strength is great, then if you need something better because maybe signal isn't so great where you want to put it, then you can add a couple flat panel 2x2 mimo antennas later.

Just for comparison, I only manage -87dbi with my expensive parabolic grid and you're already getting better than that with just your phone, so I really don't foresee any major benefit from adding powerful antennas in your location.

[miboss]

So you want the "go big or go home" approach... I can respect that, and it's generally the best bet if you're not looking to save money up front, as you may save more in the long run not having to toss out cheaper hardware to upgrade later.

So source out a wg1608 router and a Quectel em-20g (or the 5g rm500 or whatever it's called if you really wanna future-proof). I'd probably start with the stock paddle antennas since your signal strength is great, then if you need something better because maybe signal isn't so great where you want to put it, then you can add a couple flat panel 2x2 mimo antennas later.

Just for comparison, I only manage -87dbi with my expensive parabolic grid and you're already getting better than that with just your phone, so I really don't foresee any major benefit from adding powerful antennas in your location.

I was originally thinking about going with a Quectel em-20g, but I'm not sure if my location can take advantage of carrier aggregation (probably because I don't know much about CA). I pretty much have line of sight to one Verizon tower (Band 13), the other nearby towers are also Verizon only (also Band 13), but I can't see them because of topography. I also just saw a comment from Didneywhorl in another thread saying that "Verizon based connections are blacklisting the EP06 and likely the EM12 as well", so while not the EM20G specifically, it does give me caution that Verizon may blacklist that modem soon. So I'm still trying to find the best option for modems...

[Viper67857]

I'm not sure if they're blacklisting by imei or what... The imei on my em12 seems to be recognized as an IPhone X by AT&T

Also, going with the higher category isn't just about the CA, as the 4x4 mimo capabilities can quadruple the speed of a single channel, even on a single band. Intra-band CA is also a thing, though I haven't looked at the specs to see if 13+13 is supported.