Wireless Joint

Hello Wireless Joint Community,
I have stumbled upon this site while looking for better internet options than what is currently provided in the area (3 MB down/1 MB up) that I am building a new house. I have been reading through various posts and am finding a ton of information, however finding difficulty trying to soak it all in. This is all pretty new to me and I apologize for lumping all of this on the Antennas board, I didn't see a general discussion board.

A bit of background -
I live in NE Kansas, with one local company to get internet services from. To be fair, it is modestly priced, yet at 3MB down I find myself wanting more. I work in IT (but the opposite spectrum of networking) and am on call 24/7, so reliable internet access at home is a must. I have AT&T for my personal phone, Verizon for my work phone, and have tested out a T-Mobile hotspot. In my testing, I have found that AT&T provided the best results in terms of Up/Down speeds going through SpeedTest by Ookla. I also used Open Signal to test the bands that my phone uses in my area and found that it used mainly band 2 (1900 MHz) and very rarely band 12 (700 MHz). My build site is on old farmland, only treeline is along a creek that surrounds my property, yet we aren't on top of a hill. The closest tower is 2.75 miles away, roughly due South.

Starting with the antenna -
So as I have heard, I should focus on finding an antenna that is optimized for 1900 MHz, as band 2 was most prevalent in my testing. I have looked around and have yielded little success when searching specifically for "1900 MHz cellular antenna". Or really any combination of 1.9 GHz/dual pol/MIMO/High gain...the list goes on and on. I keep finding wide range antennas, which is what I am trying to avoid, right? I have found some antennas that are 1700-2700 MHz, but with a 1000 range, is that narrowing it much? I guess, what it really boils down to, is it 1900MHz for band 2 period? Or is it, in itself, a range around 1900MHz (like 1710-1990MHz)? And in terms of gain, if an antenna is 12dB gain, is there a mathematical translation in terms of what benefit you should expect to have? To further that question, if I had two for polarization, would it equate an average of 24dB gain? I suppose I ask this as to see if using dual polarity will be worth the investment.

Hardware -
I had been looking into the MoFi 4500, but found the The Wireless Haven site due to looking into that. So I have been looking at the WE826-T2 as it seems to be roughly the same device, but am certainly up to suggestions on routers and modems. While I like the idea of a Pi, plug and play is more my speed. One feature that I am interested in is TTL (time to live). I assume most everyone on here is able to get away from throttling from the carriers, and it seems the TTL is how it is achieved. Does everyone use their WE826 as their sole wifi router? How do you encorporate a wifi mesh system or additional access points without accounting for more hops? I would think that the carriers would see the extra hop and consider that "tethering data".

Sorry for the novel, any and all suggestions are helpful. Thank you in advance!

Welcome to the board! You came to the right place with your questions.

It sounds like you've done a good bit of home work already which is good. AT&T is who I was going to recommend as they have a reasonably priced plan.

As far as antennas go, you will need at least two, or one that is defined as MIMO, which means it has two antennas built into one enclosure. As far as bands go, I would get an antenna that covers 700mhz-2700mhz. This will cover any carrier and give you the most flexiblity in the future if you switch. I would NOT recommend getting only band 2 antennas. Antenna gain is a complicated topic, but two antennas with 12dbi gain don't combine to give you more gain. Antenna gain is relative to what is called an isotropic antenna. It's mainly referring to the level of directivity it has. You can read more about it here if you're interested: https://antennatestlab.com/antenna-educ ... -dbi-scale

You want both of these antennas because LTE is designed to use both to overcome issues that are unique to the wireless channel. Mainly, the issue of multipath (which is a topic that can be talked about for a long time.) but also to help double throughput on the same frequency.

I would recommend going with a dedicated device if you feel more comfortable with that. You can just use the WE826 as the router (disabling any wifi on it) and using your own dedicated wireless access points that are connected directly to it, or though a network switch.

Hopefully that helps somewhat, but feel free to ask any more questions you have. Hopefully I didn't confuse you more

Hello,
If you do decide to go with an AT&T plan know of one that has unlimited hot spot data so you don't have to worry about the TTL settings. You can PM me if you want to know what that is.
You might want to try AT&T without antennas at all at at first. What kind of speed test result do you get on your AT&T phone on data inside the house? Have set up two people with this AT&T service with antennas but they are both around 5 miles away.