Neighbour has better signal data but slower downloads

[kommando828]

I was helping a neighbour out today testing what he could get from a 4G router for his internet.

He is 1 mile closer to the EE/Three shared mast than I am and has direct line of sight whereas I have some trees in the way.

I have a spare B525, external antenna and Three sim, before I left to visit I set this up in the driveway at my house and on speedtest app I got 35mb dl and 20mb ul. Not as good as my permanent setup of 50mb/20mb but I wanted a baseline with the same test setup at my address to compare to the same setup at his address.

These are my stats

SNIR 10db
rsrp -101db
rssi -77db

So I took the setup along to his house using a window high up on a gable end with direct line of sight of the mast and fired it up and got

SNIR 15db
rsrp -75db
rssi -66db

However the speedtest result was 15 dl 10 ul, tried it with the antenna in lot of different positions, several router reboots etc but signal data was worse in alternate positions and the speedtest was worse too.

With the signal data being so much better I expected better 4G downloads than my own test in the driveway but they were worse than when I forced the router into 3G.

I confirmed it was the same mast I connect to using cell mapper and the router data on the mast was the same.

Any idea's as to what's wrong, its a rural mast so little interference.

Only possibility I can think of is that he is in the zone between 2 of the 3 120 degree antenna on the mast and the 2 mast antenna are interfering.

I am going back next week and trying an EE sim incase their antenna are orinatated differently.

 

[kommando828]

Did some more testing, everytime I thought I had fixed the router to 4G only band 3 as it could find band 3 at all it defaulted to 3G, I found band 20 4G but useless download. This is odd as he is closer and has better line of sight of the mast. Switched to an EE simcard as they share the mast and got 5 bars on 4G band 3 with the antenna on the floor and a good download before the laptop lost access to the internet, guessing this was an APN issue as it was really a BT sim out of a phone.