How can I improve this?

[shwaba]

Hello to all,

Short back story first to get everyone up to speed.

We built a new house(5miles out of a bigger town) and came to find out, in order to get internet it would cost us $14,100 to build the cable company's network for them, so we told them to go pound sand.

At that time I was not aware of Wireless Joint or The Wireless Haven so I bought a Mofi4500 and a Proxicast cross polarized panel antenna which I put it in the attic(my wife refuses to have any antenna on the roof or a tower),ran 50' of LMR400 to the Mofi, got a plan from AT&T and we got really good signal with it(-80dbm), but followed Mofi's instructions for setup and locked bands to B2 and we always struggled with buffering at peak times. Did some more research and found out what a noob I was and unlocked the bands and was then receiving 2CA(B4/B12) tried different groups of bands and those worked best with speeds of 30-40Mbps down at peak times and 92Mbps down at off peak times(3am).

When that happened I got hooked and started doing more research to try and get to 100Mbps down. I then came across Wireless Joint, read everything on here and somethings two or three times.

Which brings us to my new setup:
Router: WE826-T2 (with the 12V 2.5A Power adapter) (the Mofi4500 will be a backup now)
Modem: EM7565 (running GoldenOrb_2019-03-10 ( OpenWrt 18.06.1 ) )
Antennas: (2) 700-2700MHz 15dBi 4G LTE Directional Antenna (mounted +45/-45) still mounted in the attic using 50' LMR400 to the router.
Using all Cat 6A cable throughout the house

Bands available: 2,4,12,30,66 all at 10MHz, 3-4 miles to the tower and I have LOS.(other than the roof that's in the way) There are 2 other towers in a 3-4 mile radius and they both have Band 2 @ 15MHz, but they are not accessible with my current setup and they are in a bigger town, so they will more than likely be congested the majority of the time.

Now that I am getting 3CA(all at 10MHz) from the new modem my peak time downloads increased to 50-60Mbps, but my max download at off peak times(3am) is still at 92Mbps?!?!?
Doesn't 3CA @ 30MHz = 225Mbps down? Dividing by 50% for real world, shouldn't this still get me to 112.5Mbps down when everyone is sleeping?

Things I've tried:
Tried with modem unlocked, same result
Tried making band groups and locking to those, same result
Took the router to the attic on 3' cables, same result
Removed 1 cable to verify MIMO
Bypassed my 10/100 Ethernet switch, same result
Asked my wife if we can put the antenna's outside, same result

I know the short answer to get more speed is the antenna's need to go outside. Maybe once the new smell wears off the house she'll budge. She is more than pleased with the current setup, so that doesn't help my case either. Maybe a little sabotage is in order.

I've include screen shots below. Thanks in advance for any help.
Screen shots show B2 RxM varies by 50 points, is this a firmware bug? (both screen shots taken at 10am on 09-02-219)

[JimHelms]

One of your biggest limitations is that the WE826-T2 LAN/WAN is only 100M...as opposed to 1000m (or GB).

[swwifty]

One of your biggest limitations is that the WE826-T2 LAN/WAN is only 100M...as opposed to 1000m (or GB).

This is your issue. I'm surprised you can even get 92mbps down. I see normally about 86mbps limit on a 100megabit network card.

[shwaba]

Thanks guys for the quick responses. The LAN/WAN speed was a definite oversight. I'll be putting a order in for a WG3526 and see what kind of speed I can get out of that.

[jose.herrera]

Thanks guys for the quick responses. The LAN/WAN speed was a definite oversight. I'll be putting a order in for a WG3526 and see what kind of speed I can get out of that.

Keep us updated!

[scott.king.walker]

Earlier this year, I bought a Mofi4500 to test out. I was maxing out at 87 Mbps down using the "upgraded" on device antennas that look like paddles rather than sticks. I too concluded that the 100 Mbps port on the Mofi was probably part of the problem. A neighbor was having difficulty getting a reliable 10 Mbps down, so I took the Mofi to his house and the combination of:
- Better device than his AT&T broadband device
- Better placement (near an upstairs window, rather than hidden in a cabinet in a brick house)
were enough that he was able to start getting about 30 Mbps down. Needless to say, he bought the device off me, since I didn't really need it yet, I just wanted to see how well it would work for me.

My new setup is using a MicroHard BulletCAT11 modem. That eliminates the 100 Mbps port, and I was able to get up to 175 Mbps down. I am also using a Proxicast antenna. I will post about my setup separately.

[swwifty]

Earlier this year, I bought a Mofi4500 to test out. I was maxing out at 87 Mbps down using the "upgraded" on device antennas that look like paddles rather than sticks. I too concluded that the 100 Mbps port on the Mofi was probably part of the problem. A neighbor was having difficulty getting a reliable 10 Mbps down, so I took the Mofi to his house and the combination of:
- Better device than his AT&T broadband device
- Better placement (near an upstairs window, rather than hidden in a cabinet in a brick house)
were enough that he was able to start getting about 30 Mbps down. Needless to say, he bought the device off me, since I didn't really need it yet, I just wanted to see how well it would work for me.

My new setup is using a MicroHard BulletCAT11 modem. That eliminates the 100 Mbps port, and I was able to get up to 175 Mbps down. I am also using a Proxicast antenna. I will post about my setup separately.

Very nice! You must be super close to a tower with those kind of speeds.

[scott.king.walker]

Very nice! You must be super close to a tower with those kind of speeds.

Yes, I am 0.6 Miles from the tower, and it is on a hill so I have a clear line of sight. I *think* the modem is also doing at least 2-way, and possibly 3-way carrier aggregation, but I haven't figured out how to tell for sure what aggregation it is doing.

[shwaba]

I did get the WG3526 setup running with the EM7565 and tried a couple of speed tests with it. The test on the left was the fastest speed I got with the WE826-T2(using the EM7565) the one on the right is the fastest one I've gotten so far with the WG3526, both were on bands 4,2,12(3CA, 30Mhz total).

WE826-T2_WG3526_downloads.jpg

I did not get much testing after I set up the WG3526, after about 30 hours it became unstable, and would drop connections. It would bring up the splash screen, but would time out when trying to get to the rooter login. I pulled it apart and it appeared one of the pan head screws on the PCI-E to M.2 adapter was touching the EM7565. Luckily I found some wafer head screws in my old PC parts bucket and now I easily have 1MM of clearance. Fired it back up and thankfully everything seems to be ok and I did not short out the modem.

I would encourage anyone building this same set up to read THIS write up by Need4Speed maybe it will save you hours of headaches

[swwifty]

very nice improvement! Either of those speeds is excellent.

[shwaba]

Thanks Swwifty. Unfortunately the WG3526 is still giving me problems.. I'm posting this question on my WE826-T2(using the EM7565)because my WG3526 has become unusable. The only time I can ever communicate with the WG3526 is after I reset it using the down loader method and it comes up in Chinese mode. I can ping it then at 192.168.1.1 and all packets are received.(I did use a camera translator on my android before proceeding to make sure I understood everything). I tried flashing it with wg3526-GO2019-03-06 and wg3526-GO2019-03-10 and after each flash the router is unreachable in a web browser or CMD line with a ping. Any thoughts?

[JimHelms]

I would recommend choosing one firmware or the other, and download a fresh copy to your desktop. And, make sure it is for the WG3526 (as you have listed above) and not the WE3526.

Using an ethernet cable from the router LAN to the PC, upload the GoldenOrb firmware again using the bootload menu.

If you had to configure your IP address in the PC network card to use the bootload menu, reset it to Obtain an IP address automatically (which I sometimes forget to do).

Once the image is uploaded, log in to GoldenOrb and flash the firmware a second time using the same firmware image and make sure the box to save settings is UNCHECKED.

This process will assure it overwrites the partition and files that may be left behind from a previous build.

Hard reboot the router (Power off, Power on)

Reboot the PC.

[shwaba]

Thanks for the reply Jim.

Using the boot loader turorial HERE

I get to the firmware recovery screen in "Chinese". Now after I select the firmware to flash and hit OK to continue I get an ERROR screen and it redirects back to the firmware recovery screen in "Chinese" right where I started. So I can select the firmware to flash and get the ERROR screen again, never ending loop.

firmware recovery_1.png

firmware recovery_error.png

I've tried with a static IP and defining the Default Gateway and without defining anything. I get the same results.

ever seen this before?

[JimHelms]

Try a different web browser.

[shwaba]

Try a different web browser.

Tried Firefox and Chrome, making sure cache was cleared on both. Same result as shown above.

[JimHelms]

Hmm... The bootload menu can be a little tricky, but it is usually timing it to get it to appear.

The firmware recovery mode seems to be working, just not accepting the image.

The only thing that I can think of is to try a different PC, and/or a different LAN port on the router, and possibly a different Ethernet cable.

[shwaba]

Tried a different PC, every LAN port, different cable.

I can get the bootload menu every time.
So now It seems to Flash the firmware, but while doing so the progress bar stops about 90% through, hangs for a minute then finishes, loads to a reboot page with another progress bar and then refreshes back to 192.168.1.1 and the router is unreachable, whether I reboot both the router and PC, use static IP's, and it wont assign any IP's on it's own. The only time
I can reach it or ping it is on the Chinese bootload menu..