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4G router help, please

JSHarris

Super Pro Member
With the impending shutdown of the PSTN, and as we're not getting fibre here for some years (earliest 2030 I've been told) I need to try and sort out a reliable VOIP phone (we can't get a signal on a mobile in the house or outside at ground level). The problem is that we get a lot of power cuts, the FTTC cabinet stops working after about half an hour (and Openreach say that's OK), we have backup power to deal with the power cuts, but will need a reliable emergency phone for when the PSTN shuts down.

After playing around with Cellmapper I discovered that a mast about 3 miles away is used by O2, 3, Vodafone and EE. By trial and error (playing with a iPhone whilst at the top of a ladder right up at the ridge of the house) I discovered that we can get a barely usable Band 20 signal here from EE and a slightly better signal from O2 and Vodafone, so I assumed that 3 on Band 20 should be no worse.

Noting that all four operators use Band 20, and all have sector antennas that cover our area (we're smack in the middle of the angle of coverage for all of them), I opted to buy an A&A data SIM (uses 3), largely because the the crowdsourced data on Cellmapper showed that the max RSRP from 3 was better than Vodafone (-59dBm versus -67dBm) and a lot better than the max RSRP from 02 or EE (-86dBm and -90dBm respectively).

I've bought a second hand 4G Cat 4 router plus a directional double antenna (2X MIMO) to play with (may change this in the light of experience, I didn't want to make a big investment if I can't get this to work and need to fall back to something like Starlink).

I can't get the router to work with the A&A data SIM, it sits there trying to connect forever. A&A say the SIM is activated and I've confirmed this with their control panel. I have the router set up according to their instructions.

To check the router (being second hand it may have been duff) I swapped the SIM for the Lebara one from my phone (uses Vodafone). This works fine, the router stats are certainly plenty good enough for making VOIP calls, with an RSRP of -81dBm, although the SINR isn't great (between 13 and 17).

Could Cellmapper be wrong about there being Band 20 LTE coverage here from 3?

I'm at the stage of binning the A&A SIM and getting a Vodafone data SIM, but am at a loss to understand why the supposedly stronger 3 Band 20 service here won't work. Unfortunately I can't try the A&A data SIM in my phone as I'd need to cut it down with scissors (it's not punched for a nano SIM) and that might make it challenging to clip back into a full sized SIM cutout for the router.

Sorry this is a bit of a long first post - I'm hoping someone may be able to shed some light on what the problem may be. I can't help thinking that I'm missing something very obvious.
 
I'd use https://bidb.uk/ in the first instance to compare coverage maps.

The only real test is to use test SIMs as you did (buy with no contract or borrow) for each of the main providers. This will confirm whether THREE is the most effective. Its not clear from your description what results you got and the conclusion made.

Just a note: Your data does not necessarily need to be on the same SIM or provider as an emergency phone. ASDA (Vodafone) for instance do a call & text PAYG SIM.

The A&A VoIP solution is great for an emergency line (over mobile or fixed) at only £1.20/m (using ATA)

If power failure I (home or fixed network) is the key issue then I would recommend using (or having available) a low power 4G/Router combination that can be powered by a USB power pack (or car battery) such as GL.Inet range (as I use in my camper).

Switch over to backup can be manual or automated depending on budget.
 
Many thanks for the reply, much appreciated.

That coverage checker seems to confirm the info from Cellmapper, and shows that 3 offers the best 4G here:

1694706717968.webp


Weird that 3G from 3 is poorer than 4G though. Makes me wonder if the A&A SIM is trying to work on 3G. No way to tell from the router stats, it just reports 3G/4G, which isn't very helpful.

I probably just need to try another SIM from a provider I know works here, like O2 or Vodafone. Does seem odd that the 3 signal seems not to exist, though, especially as all four providers cover this area on Band 20, with sector antennas with close to the same coverage.

I agree about the A&A VOIP service, set this up a couple of weeks ago, really just to see what it was like. Cheap as chips when compared to a landline, especially as we don't make a lot of landline calls.

We have plenty of backup power and can run the house for a couple of days or more if the grid goes down (as it tends to in winter), so keeping things running isn't a major concern. The setup I have is a 22kWh battery bank and inverter that switches over automatically when the grid fails. To prevent stuff crashing when this happens (takes a second or two to switchover) I have the modem, router, 4G gateway, switch, AP, CCTV and home automation all powered from a small UPS. The UPS only needs to hold the power up for a short time whilst the grid changeover operates, so never really works very hard.
 
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I think its far too early to be spending your own money.

"Telecoms companies are required by Ofcom to take all necessary measures to ensure uninterrupted access to emergency organisations for their customers, including in the event of a power cut."

Gov website

Who knows what free kit you'll get when they try to shut down your line.
 
I think its far too early to be spending your own money.

"Telecoms companies are required by Ofcom to take all necessary measures to ensure uninterrupted access to emergency organisations for their customers, including in the event of a power cut."

Gov website

Who knows what free kit you'll get when they try to shut down your line.

I wish I felt that I could trust telcos to abide by anything Ofcom says they should do.

Locally the PSTN stopped working a few weeks ago for a small hamlet. Openreach just said that a fault in the line was too costly to repair, given that it will become redundant within 18 months, and Ofcom seem to have just accepted that. There are half a dozen homes there with no landline phones now, and no landline provided broadband either, as they were getting ADSL and that stopped working when the line failed.

Every cloud and all that, though, as the antennas and 4G, cat 4, gateway/router I have came from a farmer in that hamlet that upgraded his stuff, partly because he wanted better performance, partly because he needed reliable phone comms.
 
I think its far too early to be spending your own money.

"Telecoms companies are required by Ofcom to take all necessary measures to ensure uninterrupted access to emergency organisations for their customers, including in the event of a power cut."

Gov website

Who knows what free kit you'll get when they try to shut down your line.
Here's a BT MiFi, enjoy
 
With the impending shutdown of the PSTN, and as we're not getting fibre here for some years (earliest 2030 I've been told) I need to try and sort out a reliable VOIP phone (we can't get a signal on a mobile in the house or outside at ground level). The problem is that we get a lot of power cuts, the FTTC cabinet stops working after about half an hour (and Openreach say that's OK), we have backup power to deal with the power cuts, but will need a reliable emergency phone for when the PSTN shuts down.

After playing around with Cellmapper I discovered that a mast about 3 miles away is used by O2, 3, Vodafone and EE. By trial and error (playing with a iPhone whilst at the top of a ladder right up at the ridge of the house) I discovered that we can get a barely usable Band 20 signal here from EE and a slightly better signal from O2 and Vodafone, so I assumed that 3 on Band 20 should be no worse.

Noting that all four operators use Band 20, and all have sector antennas that cover our area (we're smack in the middle of the angle of coverage for all of them), I opted to buy an A&A data SIM (uses 3), largely because the the crowdsourced data on Cellmapper showed that the max RSRP from 3 was better than Vodafone (-59dBm versus -67dBm) and a lot better than the max RSRP from 02 or EE (-86dBm and -90dBm respectively).

I've bought a second hand 4G Cat 4 router plus a directional double antenna (2X MIMO) to play with (may change this in the light of experience, I didn't want to make a big investment if I can't get this to work and need to fall back to something like Starlink).

I can't get the router to work with the A&A data SIM, it sits there trying to connect forever. A&A say the SIM is activated and I've confirmed this with their control panel. I have the router set up according to their instructions.

To check the router (being second hand it may have been duff) I swapped the SIM for the Lebara one from my phone (uses Vodafone). This works fine, the router stats are certainly plenty good enough for making VOIP calls, with an RSRP of -81dBm, although the SINR isn't great (between 13 and 17).

Could Cellmapper be wrong about there being Band 20 LTE coverage here from 3?

I'm at the stage of binning the A&A SIM and getting a Vodafone data SIM, but am at a loss to understand why the supposedly stronger 3 Band 20 service here won't work. Unfortunately I can't try the A&A data SIM in my phone as I'd need to cut it down with scissors (it's not punched for a nano SIM) and that might make it challenging to clip back into a full sized SIM cutout for the router.

Sorry this is a bit of a long first post - I'm hoping someone may be able to shed some light on what the problem may be. I can't help thinking that I'm missing something very obvious.
what router?
 
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what router?

It's a fairly old Amit IDG761, but I think it's working OK. It came with a pair of directional antennas, set at 45° to each other, mounted to a pole about 2m long. I just bolted the pole to the wall, made sure the antennas are pointing straight at the mast and assumed that all would be well. I paid the farmer £35 for the lot. Worth it as an experiment, as if I can get 4G to work OK then I may bin our FTTC, as the performance of that isn't great (around 18Mbs down, perhaps 4 or 5 up).

To be fair, the router does seem to be working reasonably well with the Lebara SIM from my phone fitted. I may just get another SIM from Lebara for the router and cancel the A&A one. No great loss, just the £10 setup charge and the first month at £2.40 lost (well, not really lost, as I think I've learned something).
 
It's a fairly old Amit IDG761, but I think it's working OK. It came with a pair of directional antennas, set at 45° to each other, mounted to a pole about 2m long. I just bolted the pole to the wall, made sure the antennas are pointing straight at the mast and assumed that all would be well. I paid the farmer £35 for the lot. Worth it as an experiment, as if I can get 4G to work OK then I may bin our FTTC, as the performance of that isn't great (around 18Mbs down, perhaps 4 or 5 up).

To be fair, the router does seem to be working reasonably well with the Lebara SIM from my phone fitted. I may just get another SIM from Lebara for the router and cancel the A&A one. No great loss, just the £10 setup charge and the first month at £2.40 lost (well, not really lost, as I think I've learned something).
1694716408489.png


Which model?

They are around £150 on eBay:
 
View attachment 8362

Which model?

They are around £150 on eBay:


The full model number is IDG761-0T001 and it's the EU model I think. Looks exactly like that ebay one, with two SMAs for cell antennas and two WiFi antennas on the side.

No idea whether it's any good or not, I bought it simply because the farmer was taking it down and fitting a newer system. At £35 for the router, pole and two antennas I thought it was worth the risk. I'm pretty sure it's only a Cat 4 model, so not capable of super high speeds, but then we only really need it to work with a VOIP phone (unless I find that we might be able to use it to replace our fairly slow FTTC broadband).
 
Been trying to get a handle on why I don't seem to be able to get a 3 signal here, when everything I've read suggests that 3 should give us the best coverage. Dug out an old Sony tablet, fitted the A&A SIM and then drove around trying to do a very rough survey of signal strength and quality.

First thing was that the tablet wouldn't get a signal from 3 even at the top of a ladder, so that seems to confirm that the router is OK. I walked around the lanes locally and still couldn't get a signal. I then drove to the top of the hill behind us and the tablet got a signal, only two bars, and the operator shows as AQL for some reason (presumably A&A go through AQL as a 3 reseller?).

I tried a few other areas within about a mile of our place and in general the signal's not at all good. Best I managed was 2 bars (not a very accurate measurement, but all that's available on this old tablet).

The tablet does have a fairly crude network scanning option in settings, and that was useful (if very, very slow) as it showed every operator in the area. O2 and Vodafone were far and away the most reliable everywhere I checked. Wish I'd done this crude survey before I bought the A&A SIM, TBH, would have saved a lot of time faffing about.

What I think I've confirmed is that, despite the 3 coverage map showing that we should get a very good 4G signal, in reality there's pretty much no signal at all. The lesson learned is to not believe signal strength/quality predictions from providers!

I'll cancel the A&A SIM and get a Vodafone or O2 one, as both of those operators have a fairly good signal here at roof height, but not at ground level. Tempted to get one of the bargain pre-paid SIMs suggested on another thread, one with a couple of years worth of usage. Not as cheap as the A&A SIM, but having more data usage might be useful if I end up getting this to work well enough to replace our (fairly slow) FTTC.

Next stage is to get the router and antenna system properly installed, do some testing with a Vodafone or O2 SIM and see whether or not the router is likely to be the limit on performance. If it is, then as it cost me next to bugger all I may look at replacing it with a better performing model.

What I'm not at all sure about is whether getting, say, a Cat 20 router would give any benefit over my Cat 4 router with the modest signal coming from just a single mast. I've read conflicting information about this, as the reality for us is that there is only that one mast we can use, and looking at it doesn't seem to have many antennas (although it does have a big generator building an oil tank next to it, so will stay up when the power goes off).
 
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Just to round this off, I've discovered that the directional antennas that came with this router don't seem to be up to much. I've been doing some local testing with an omnidirectional antenna and a HackRF One. That's confirmed there's no 3 signal, only usable signals are from O2 and Vodafone.

As an experiment, I hooked one of the directional antennas to the HackRF One to see exactly what the router was getting. Signal was barely better with the omni. Swapped to the other directional antenna and the result was the same, maybe 2dB - 3 dB up on the 1dBi - 2dBi omni, so nowhere near the 12dBi on the labels. They look OK physically, but either they are damaged internally (they are inside sealed plastic housings) or they are just cheap Chinese crap that has never properly worked.

Time to cut my losses and look at other options. Thanks for all the help on this thread and the signal strength one. I've been reading lots of threads here and now feel better equipped to try and decide what I need.
 
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