I currently as well as the external SXE LTE I also have one internal pointing out through a window (havent had the balls to drill more holes and stick another one on outside of house, the good lady will kill me as she already asked "what the hell is that") as I have 2 x 3 mobile connections for redundancy and load balancing.
I also have a CAT6 Huawei E5186 with small antenna and using it in exactly the same place the SXE is again loads better, so I dont think a more modern chipset will make much difference, not for me anyway.

So...

Really good high gain 1,800MHz yagis seem to be in short supply here, but slightly lower gain ones (and I'm guessing the design frequency is ~2,000Mhz, not 1,800) are available cheaply on ebay.

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/302562209822

And ones with SMA connectors

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/WCDMA-3G-1800-2100MHz-Out...

In reply to a post by Rolandrat:

I messed about with an external antenna to 4G router and the SXE LTE Kit, the SXE performed better by miles for me, it wasnt very scientific but the Mikrotik is the one I made the effort to install outside properly.

That IMHO is the trick, if you are using the Mikrotik SXE LTE Kit indoors then you are doing it all wrong. The idea is it can go outside and be powered using PoE.

I would also note that if you look on the Mikrotik website for the SXE LTE Kit on the test results page it has performance figures for bridging mode, so it would certainly seem to do it.

https://mikrotik.com/product/sxt_lte_kit#fndtn-testr...

Those results would also suggest that having the SXE LTE kit do routing and NAT is probably not the best idea, and you probably want it in bridging mode with something else doing NAT/routing.

Of course if 9dBi is not enough you could switch to the Mikrotik LHG LTE kit which has a built in 17dBi parabolic antenna for only an extra £30. Got to beat messing about with an external antenna.

I use Untangle for routing and all its multi wan/security features.

In reply to a post by andynormancx:

50ms ping is what I get as well. It appears when I use the three.co.uk APN it drops to 40ms, but is at 50ms on 3internet.

Though something very odd happened with my latency. I'm doing bandwidth and latency monitoring, using the Speedtest.net command line tester, on my Linux router.

That has been averaging 50ms fairly consistently. At 10:30 on the 28th Jan it dropped to 40ms and had stayed there since.

10:30 on the 28th just happens to be the exact time I added my Three connection to the BQM monitor on Thinkbroadband.

Could just be a coincidence of course

With a Poynting 4G-XPOL-A0001 hanging in the roof space connected to a Huawei B310s (HomeFi router) my figures are

RSRQ -3db
RSRP -86dBm
SINR 26dB
RSSI -63dB

I am 1 Mile from the mast, clear line of sight over fields. 100Mbps down 30Mbps up

In reply to a post by andynormancx:

So...

Really good high gain 1,800MHz yagis seem to be in short supply here, but slightly lower gain ones (and I'm guessing the design frequency is ~2,000Mhz, not 1,800) are available cheaply on ebay.

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/302562209822

You really dont want high gain yagi antennas for LTE connections - unless you are going to bother to fabricate a suitable mount to arrange them as Cross Polarised. Even then you will struggle to match the performance of a well designed Cross Polarised MiMo
antenna.

Remember gain isnt everything - and too much gain will cause more issues than it solves especially with LTE / 4G.

In reply to a post by jabuzzard:

Of course if 9dBi is not enough you could switch to the Mikrotik LHG LTE kit which has a built in 17dBi parabolic antenna for only an extra £30. Got to beat messing about with an external antenna.

Actually the LHG only provides 17dBi at 1 frequency (Band 7) at Band 3 it is closer to a claimed 15dBi (and is very variable in real world testing) while at Band 20 it is around 5dBi

Excessively high gain will cause issues with airtime sharing at the mast with other users, so what you may gain in terms of improved RSRP you will lose in performance terms when the mast is under load.

Also don't use RSSI as any marker with 4G it isnt relevant - RSRP is the key metric followed by SINR which will never be static as it is relative to RSRQ which is realtime dependant on user and loading on the cell.

As you cant change your orientation to the mast sector antenna much (unless you have a big site) you can only aim for a balanced connection. Improving SINR will generally gain you increase in bandwidth, but higher gain will not deliver that alone.

These are the metric indicators you need to look at

https://forms.na1.netsuite.com/core/media/media.nl?i...

Bear in mind that for 4G Home - EE use 5dBi at 1800MHz only - for good reason - it ensures uniform performance for all subscribers

I have decided to give Three's network another go. Thankfully it's connecting to band 3 now. Using an old Netgear Aircard I have found a position in the house where i get an RSRP of -88db and according to aircard 80% signal. Been running some tests tonight and getting:

Ping: 30-50ms
DL: 25-35mb/sec
UL: 15-20mb/sec

Oddly the internet feels nippier than it does on my Virgin Media Connection. Thought I would try this again as I'm out of contract on VM so they are charging £42 for 50mb. Being a tight bum there is no way I am going to keep paying that amount. As I am moving to my new house in the next couple of months needed a short term fix so hopefully the connection keeps this performance up.