Thought I'd add my mainly positive experiences with external Poynting antennas.
Network is 3, test period about 12 months (Sept 2019-August 2020).The mast is 1500m (almost line of sight) to Cell ID 320153. This cell only supports 15mhz B3.
4G-XPOL-A0001 - Small omnidirectional antenna. 3dBi
4G-XPOL-A0002 - Medium MIMO directional antenna 9dBi
A-LPDA-92-KIT - Pair 3G/4G Yagi Directional antennas 11dBi / 45 deg Polarisation
The aerials were tested in my roof space, pole mounted and positioned using the CLI output from huawei_band_tools (except zyxel
)
4G Routers tested.
Huawei B525-23a, Zyxel LTE 3302 and Huawei B535.
To briefly summarise; Like others have found, around Sept 2019, 3 started to throttle their network. I saw peaks using the A0001 antenna in excess of 95Mbs, early in 2020 with the same equipment this fell to peaks of 30-40Mbs.
In my testing, using non standard ports and using SSL bypasses 3's edge proxies for a more reliable speedtest.
Start point performance was:
(Internal B525 antennas - Sept 2019)
CELL_ID: 3201538
RSRQ: -11dB
RSRP: -100dBm
SINR: 8dB
Latency (ping times) and throughput performance is very variable, and very noticeable when browsing, using Amazon Fire TV etc.
Final Test:
(B525 conneted to External 45 degree directional antennas - August 2020)
CELL_ID: 3201538
RSRQ: -4dB
RSRP: -67dBm
SINR: 25dB
Now my Ping times are consistent at 42-50ms, download throughput is 50Mbs (peaking at 70Mbs), upload throughput is consistently between 30-32Mbs.
I found changing the routers made no difference to performance in my location.
I'd recommend the Poynting Yagi's, however, the price has increased 50% in the last 12 months! My experience with the A0001 and A0002 has been less stellar