sixtocks
Casual Member
Despite being in the middle of a town, my VDSL is a bit pants. So, I picked up a Three 4G broadband setup almost on a whim last week - despite reading all the horror stories on this forum before doing it...
Since then, I've spent far too long faffing about trying to optimise the connection, and I guess I'd like some outside input as to when good enough is good enough.
According to cellmapper, the tower it connects to is about 300m away. I'm in the overlap of two of its B3 cells, and there's another tower about 750m away which is also spreading B3 in this direction. No B1 cells nearby. B20 can come in real weak from miles away.
Router is the standard B535, so I downloaded H-Monitor to keep an eye on things. I currently have the router oriented vertically, up against the wall on my windowsill. This gives me the 'best' values for SINR / RSRQ / RSRP of 6dB-ish / -5dB-ish / -79dBm.
(Interestingly, the RSRQ drops to -10dB when I shove load on the connection and jumps back to -5ish when I stop. I assume that's expected?)
It can aggregate the B3+B20, but the B20 signal is poor. If I force the router to B20 only, I get a total of about 1.2Mb/0.9Mb down/up, and the signal stats are atrocious. I've actually disabled B20 because I figure any gains from the aggregation are probably lost in the effort of actually doing it.
Speeds are a bit variable through the day, but in the dead of night (I stayed up 'til 2am to check...) it will provide a solid 40Mbit pretty much continuously.
I know that an 'ideal' SINR is a higher value - 13+ or so, but I'm also unsure exactly how much extra capacity is there for me to grab by spending time/effort/money to achieve that, or even how achievable any improvements actually are.
So, I come for the wisdom of the forum - should I just stop now and be happy with what I have, or are there appreciable gains still to be had?
Since then, I've spent far too long faffing about trying to optimise the connection, and I guess I'd like some outside input as to when good enough is good enough.
According to cellmapper, the tower it connects to is about 300m away. I'm in the overlap of two of its B3 cells, and there's another tower about 750m away which is also spreading B3 in this direction. No B1 cells nearby. B20 can come in real weak from miles away.
Router is the standard B535, so I downloaded H-Monitor to keep an eye on things. I currently have the router oriented vertically, up against the wall on my windowsill. This gives me the 'best' values for SINR / RSRQ / RSRP of 6dB-ish / -5dB-ish / -79dBm.
(Interestingly, the RSRQ drops to -10dB when I shove load on the connection and jumps back to -5ish when I stop. I assume that's expected?)
It can aggregate the B3+B20, but the B20 signal is poor. If I force the router to B20 only, I get a total of about 1.2Mb/0.9Mb down/up, and the signal stats are atrocious. I've actually disabled B20 because I figure any gains from the aggregation are probably lost in the effort of actually doing it.
Speeds are a bit variable through the day, but in the dead of night (I stayed up 'til 2am to check...) it will provide a solid 40Mbit pretty much continuously.
I know that an 'ideal' SINR is a higher value - 13+ or so, but I'm also unsure exactly how much extra capacity is there for me to grab by spending time/effort/money to achieve that, or even how achievable any improvements actually are.
So, I come for the wisdom of the forum - should I just stop now and be happy with what I have, or are there appreciable gains still to be had?