This may seem pathetic but..................................

Having had sub 0.5Mb/s speeds for 5 years and with BT recently telling me that they can no longer provide a service (multiple probs since move to them in February - Long line, 'final third', Market 1 etc) I have moved to 3G.

With a Huawei Omnidirectional antenna, 3 premium dongle and a TP-Link router I'm getting 2.5Mb/s.

OK so its about 1/3rd of the alleged national ADSL speed and its a bit up and down speed wise at times but its actually usable.

I am not a big downloader so the 15Gb cap per month is not an issue but its really great to be able to watch something stream without waiting 10 minutes for it to buffer and I can download programme updates in an hour or so rather than overnight..

At this time I could see the advantage of say 10Mb/s but I'm not sure what I would do with 50 or 100 - I guess there are many who do need this - families and serial torrent users mainly I guess!!

Hi, can you post some details about your omnidirectional antenna, where you got it from.
I'm presuming that being the same make as the dongle it just plugged straight in.
I don't need one right now, but maybe in the future at another location one might be called for.
Have you tested the signal strength indicator in the 3Connect software with the antenna connected/disconnected ? Also the TP-Link signal indicator ?
Thanks.

I got this antenna.

I upgraded the TP-link firmware before plugging anything in.

Hanging the dongle out of the window directly attached via USB to my laptop I got 4 'bars' but it fluctuated between 3G and ?HSPA.

On the TP-Link the Modem is recognised as an E367 and the signal strength is 32%.

The antenna is attached just below the roof and pointed in the direction of the nearest 3 mast which turns out to be about 4 miles away.
Phil

We had one of the old E220 dongles for years which used to run at 2 to 3Mbps down and 0.33 up (always)

This started failing recently, I thought it was the cell/contention but went out and bought an E367 anyway.

With that in the same place as the old one it hits the same speeds.

Clip it to the guttering outside the window and it gets 5.6Mbps down 1.5Mbps up most of the time. The E367 is a lot more sensitive to positioning.

In our case the cell is 2.5km away. The little 3 applet thing shows either no bars or 5 bars (I can't really tell since the graphic never changes, so I'm not sure whether that's full or none - full I'd guess, as it has near line of sight, but still pushing it at that distance)

Ironically the phone exchange is slightly nearer than the cell is but the phone lines round here are useless, so that can only do 1.7Mbps at best, 3G was a big improvement before @ 3meg but it flies now. Relatively speaking, anyway. The upstream is usable at last.

I'm led to believe the answer - especially in our case where there's only one decent cell - is a directional (not omni) antenna pointing directly at the cell. Given the speeds I get now, I'd have thought I wouldn't see a huge improvement (latency is 70 to 90 as it is and top speed 7.2Mbps possible which isn't much more than 5.6Mbps) but will be interesting to see.

I've bene in touch with a local firm who can put the thing up and align it (on the chimney) but they're not experts with 3G so it's just the decision on which antenna to go with that I need to make.