Will Antenna Improve 5 Bar Signal

After making do with a dreadful landline connection in London for many years, I have made the jump to 3 mobile home broadband. So far, so good. I get 5 bars on the Huawei B535 router consistently, but speeds do slow in the evening (which I know is to be expected). My question is will an antenna improve my speeds if I am already getting 5 bars? In the day I can get up to 22 Mbs with the internal antenna, which suggests the signal is already quite strong.

In reply to a post by ando3000:

After making do with a dreadful landline connection in London for many years, I have made the jump to 3 mobile home broadband. So far, so good. I get 5 bars on the Huawei B535 router consistently, but speeds do slow in the evening (which I know is to be expected). My question is will an antenna improve my speeds if I am already getting 5 bars? In the day I can get up to 22 Mbs with the internal antenna, which suggests the signal is already quite strong.

Doubt it. If you are getting 5 bars the issue will be congestion,

I am with EE and I too see evening slowdowns that are due to congestion. The pattern is regular.

If you are already getting a strong signal, adding some "rabbit ears" indoor antennas are not likely to improve your evening speeds at all.

Because I am in a rural area around 3.5 miles from the nearest mast over hills and woodland, I have a rooftop external outdoor omni antenna connected to my own outdoor router via a 1m cable (you want to keep the cable between the antenna and modem as short as possible).

For you to compare your signals, I see RSRP of around -92dBm steady throughout the day and SRN of around +2.0 to +4.0dB off-peak dropping to between -1.0 and +1.0 in the evenings. I get around 30-35Mbps down, 20-25Mbps up at deep off-peak, 20-25Mbps down, 15-20Mbps up off-peak and around 10-15Mbps down and 15Mbps up on-peak.

In reply to a post by ando3000:

After making do with a dreadful landline connection in London for many years, I have made the jump to 3 mobile home broadband. So far, so good. I get 5 bars on the Huawei B535 router consistently, but speeds do slow in the evening (which I know is to be expected). My question is will an antenna improve my speeds if I am already getting 5 bars? In the day I can get up to 22 Mbs with the internal antenna, which suggests the signal is already quite strong.

I suggest that you install LTEWatch for Huawei (a free windows app) which will tell you the RSRP, RSRQ and SINR values you are getting. https://www.lte-anbieter.info/ltewatch/huawei.php
Chances are that the signal is strong, but there is a lot of interference, which brings the SINR down.
If it is slowing in the evening, that suggests the problem is congestion, but even 22Mbs is pretty rubbish.
You might find that a directional antenna (carefully positioned so that it is sheltered from some of the RF noise in your area) will allow a narrower beam of signal to the transmitter you are using.
LTE Watch tells you which cell you are using, look up its location on Cellmapper, so you know which way to point the antenna.
An omnidirectional antenna is unlikely to make things any worse.Might make things worse.
You may also find that changing the channels your B535 is using may improve things. Again, you can do that with LTEWatch.

Edited by hoopla (Thu 30-Apr-20 18:45:40)

That seems incredibly slow. I get 110 down and 30~ up and I only get 3 bars. (Mobile) (Vodafone)

Are the OPs slower speeds because of the Huawei tech being so outdated compared to phones?

In reply to a post by Xuse:

Are the OPs slower speeds because of the Huawei tech being so outdated compared to phones?

Not really. Yes, a higher LTE category device can transmit / receive more data, but it helps if the network mast is also upgraded to support higher category. More likely is increased load now everyone is working, and staying at home all the time.

Worth trying all the networks in an area, they are not all the same. Your experience on Vodafone is great, but Vodafone and O2 split the country in half, and in the O2 half, Vodafone speeds are lower. Three is doing a major set of upgrades for 4G (LTE) as well as adding 5G (NR) to some masts.

Always worth trying a higher LTE category device, e.g. the Netgear M1 or M2 which are higher than the Huawei home routers.

In reply to a post by jchamier:

Always worth trying a higher LTE category device, e.g. the Netgear M1 or M2 which are higher than the Huawei home routers.

I'm not sure it is tbh. I switched to the B535 recently as I had been using the Three SIM as SIM2 in my Galaxy S10 but the weak signal was killing the battery life.

The Huawei gets just as fast in my room now as the S10 did when I went across the road into a high-rise building that gets better line-of-sight to the mast.

I've seen it do 100Mbit 4G+, but on average its 20Mbit due to congestion and during peak hours latency and packet loss is insanely high. Three just can't handle the load in some areas.

Edited by alexatkin (Tue 19-May-20 15:02:43)

In reply to a post by alexatkin:

I've seen it do 100Mbit 4G+, but on average its 20Mbit due to congestion and during peak hours latency and packet loss is insanely high. Three just can't handle the load in some areas.

Agreed, a lot of their older masts are overloaded with the volume of people.

However if you are on the "cell edge" then a 4T4R device (e.g. OnePlus 7 Pro, OnePlus 8 Pro) will always outperform a 2T2R, or worse. The higher LTE categories also make a difference, if everyone on the network was running a Cat 12 device, then everyone's speed would be higher.

Three are rebuilding masts see:
https://pedroc.co.uk/content/three-chariot-huawei-an...

In reply to a post by Xuse:

That seems incredibly slow. I get 110 down and 30~ up and I only get 3 bars. (Mobile) (Vodafone)

Are the OPs slower speeds because of the Huawei tech being so outdated compared to phones?

Far from it. Huawei is by far the best, the most reliable and also the cheapest. That's why the Merkins hate it.

In reply to a post by jchamier:

Vodafone and O2 split the country in half, and in the O2 half, Vodafone speeds are lower.

Can you give more info? Where is this split?