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Hi forum, I have been reading many posts over the months, and thought I might impart some knowledge of different hardware, all subjective of course. So I live rurally, get 3mbs from BT, and over the last year have been trying many different routers and antenna to get good signal, low noise, and acceptable down / upload speed. I opted for three unlimited 4g sim, at £22 month its the best option for me as I work in IT from home.
I have tried internal and external mounting of equipment, and in the end for ease of use, testing, and performance, opted for a loft install with negligible loss of signal or bandwidth.
I have tested 7 different antenna and 8 different 4g / LTE routers.
These include MikroTik, Huawei (525 and 535), TPlink, Dlink, Draytek, Zyxel, Poynting, Mimorad, Yagi.
Antenna:
Now I should point out as many will say, directional has the best signal, but what I have found (being 3 miles away from 2 opposing facing antennas) is that some antennas get congested, and often fail, if you use directional and rely on a constant need for broadband, like me, this doesn't work.
The best directional antenna I have tested also contained the router inside it, this was the MikroTik LHG LTE, as the router is inside the dish, you dont have Db loss on the coax as the ethernet cable plugs directly into to dish and can power it via PoE. This runs on RouterOS as is a steep learning curve for those who are used to normal router UI's that just have a few toggles.
I moved away from this to an omni antenna due to constant call tower congestion and maintenance. Firstly via the Poynting Xpol1, and now to a lower noise antenna (and considerably cheaper) MikroTik mANT lte 50 - this is by far the best omni antenna I have tested for both stable signal strength and low noise - my router is connected to the mANT via 2 x 1m MikroTik low loss SMA's.
I have tested this same antenna further on 7 Routers, and found very interesting results. I use a mesh network in the house so preferably wanted a router with bridge mode, but after testing many different options, I settled on a router that doesn't offer this, so have just adjusted my mesh settings to AP mode and changed the LAN address range to suit.
In third place was the Zyxel lte 3301, a rock solid router, but just average signal performance, second was the Draytek 2862, but this was massive overkill in functionally and cost for what I needed, speed and signal was good but still not the best. The worst of the bunch surprisingly was the Huawei 525 and 535, both had poor signal strength (even though they show full bars), looking at the readings (RSRP/RSRQ) they told a different story that explained the poor throughput. I should also say they both needed constant rebooting, the 535 needed rebooting 5 times in the first 48 hours.
The dark horse and best of breed, surprised me, it was the TPlink MR200, not only has this not needed rebooting once, the signal throughput both wirelessly and to my mesh, has consistently been the highest via internal speed checks and ookla. When paired with the mANT 50 the results were outstanding 46-55mbs down and 32mbs up, the average speed from the directional MikroTik Router Dish (LHG LTE) was 30mbs down and 15up, and from the other router onmi-antenna combinations roughly around 22-26mbs down and 20 up.
Even testing the TPlink with -7db 3rd party sma screw on antennas produced speed in the early 30 mbs down, considerably better than all the others, even the latest 535 with its enormous rabbit ears was only just hitting 20mbs down.
Anyway, I have struggled to find many multi antenna / Router 4g reviews independently tested, so I thought I would add my own waffle on what I have seen in the real world from testing many products (Amazon returns are a wonderful thing, lol).
Of course these results are based on my house, location and three network, but the results were consistant and reproducible.
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