And sadly the way my stats are collected, I can't go and compare hour stats from July

Thanks for all the replies. I'm not bothered about the fact the speed varies through the day or the signal stats change through the day, I understand and accept the fact that congestion will affect the speeds I get. At the start of the year I was probably getting about 40+Mbps fairly easily using the internal antennas of my bundled router sitting on a table, later when the signal degraded I went to a loft mounted antenna and was getting 60+Mbps peaks and 25Mbps lows - and this was during lockdown, now I'm getting 40+Mbps peaks, but more crucially <10Mbps lows, which I'd like to try and improve.

The reason I'm assuming mounting outside might help is that I probably live around 2km from the nearest mast, if I move 1km closer to the mast with my phone (also on Three) I can easily get about 20Mbps faster speeds - and if I move closer still and find the right sweet spot I'll easily see speeds 100Mbps+. I'm hoping that by moving my antenna the other side of brickwork that I'll improve my signal quality some more, but I don't know if I'll be spending £100+ for very little gain or if there are other ideas I haven't tried first.

I phoned Sat-works.com and they won't even come out to your home without you paying them £90 - which I don't want to do if there is a chance they will conclude I won't have much advantage from moving the antenna somewhere else!

Looking at the posts on some of the recent Three problems people have been having has been interesting on here, which sounds like problems when they have been trying to introduce 5G in areas. Right now I'm kinda assuming my problem isn't the same as my speeds don't degrade by the same amount and how much more bandwidth I seem to see moving closer.

Mounting an antenna outside and getting the signal back inside so that all the extra cable and joints don't put you back to square one is a very tricky game to play.

Generally speaking you are better off getting an outdoor router like the Mikrotik SXT LTE6 kit which is then powered over the same Cat5e cable that brings the network indoors and which is really easy to terminate well enough to get full speed on the link.

I believe you are using TP Link MR600 - it does Carrier Aggregation on Band 3&7. Three UK needs B1+B3, depending on your area. MR600 doesnt support B1+B3, so the speed is limited to either of the Band. If you can borrow B535 router from somewhere and try to use your sim in that, without external antennas (XPOL), it should give you much faster speed.

In reply to a post by andynormancx:

https://imgur.com/a/OOdLtv3

(ignore the minimum figures there, my stats box couldn't see my router for a while, thanks to me fat-fingering my attempt to toggle the LTE interface on/off and accidentally disabling the Ethernet interface, doh)

Interesting, I want to setup something similar to capture speedtests and snr is there a guide or something for setting up a stats box similar to yours?

cheers

I'm not sure there is a guide anywhere.

I use Munin running on an Ubuntu machine, it is available for many Linux distros and FreeBSD.

http://munin-monitoring.org

The LTE specific part is a simple Munin plugin that I wrote, to pull data from my Mikrotik router.

#!/bin/bash

case $1 in
config)
echo "graph_category wan"
echo "graph_title LTE SXT signal"
echo "graph_args --base 1000 -l 0"
echo "graph_vlabel RSRP / SINR / RSRQ"
echo "graph_scale no"
echo "rsrp.label RSRP"
echo "rsrp.type GAUGE"
echo "rsrp.draw LINE1"
echo "rsrq.label RSRQ"
echo "rsrq.type GAUGE"
echo "rsrq.draw LINE1"
echo "sinr.label SINR"
echo "sinr.type GAUGE"
echo "sinr.draw LINE1"
echo "cqi.label CQI"
echo "cqi.type GAUGE"
echo "cqi.draw LINE1"
echo "rssi.label RSSI"
echo "rssi.type GAUGE"
echo "rssi.draw LINE1"
echo "graph_info Graph of LTE SXT signal"
exit 0;;
esac

DOWNLOAD=`snmpget -v2c -c public 192.168.7.2 .1.3.6.1.4.1.14988.1.1.16.1.1.4.1|grep -P -o '[0-9]+$'`
UPLOAD=`snmpget -v2c -c public 192.168.7.2 .1.3.6.1.4.1.14988.1.1.16.1.1.7.1|grep -P -o '[0-9]+$'`
RSRQ=`snmpget -v2c -c public 192.168.7.2 .1.3.6.1.4.1.14988.1.1.16.1.1.3.1|grep -P -o '[0-9]+$'`
RSSI=`snmpget -v2c -c public 192.168.7.2 .1.3.6.1.4.1.14988.1.1.16.1.1.0.1|grep -P -o '[0-9]+$'`

CQI=`echo '/interface lte info lte1 once' | ssh [email protected] -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no -T|grep cqi|sed 's/.


echo "rsrp.value $DOWNLOAD"
echo "sinr.value $UPLOAD"
echo "rsrq.value $RSRQ"
echo "cqi.value $CQI"
echo "rssi.value $RSSI"

Unfortunately I've not managed to make the CQI bit work yet. It doesn't seem to be available over SNMP and I haven't managed to get ssh (keys, file perms etc) working when munin runs from cron.

Thanks Andy,

So the speedtest is something built-in on the Mikrotik router and you're just pulling the numbers?

I got a Amit IDG761 which supports SNMP, but still figuring out all this private/public MIB stuff using PRTG as a windows alternative to Munin.

Sorry derailing the thread... but all in the name of 4g antenna signals!

The speed test is the speedtest.net command line tool. I’ll dig out the detail later.

I use this speedtest.net command line interface tool to collect the data:

https://github.com/sivel/speedtest-cli

I also use a fast.com one:

https://github.com/branchard/fast-speedtest-api

I schedule that to run using cron, to dump the output into a file. Then I have a munin plugin that parses the results:

#!/bin/bash

case $1 in
config)
echo "graph_category wan"
echo "graph_title Speedtest"
echo "graph_args --base 1000 -l 0"
echo "graph_vlabel DL / UL"
echo "graph_scale no"
echo "graph_period hour"
echo "down.label DL"
echo "down.type GAUGE"
echo "down.draw LINE1"
echo "up.label UL"
echo "up.type GAUGE"
echo "up.draw LINE1"
echo "downfast.label DL fast.com"
echo "downfast.type GAUGE"
echo "downfast.draw LINE1"
echo "graph_info Graph of Internet Connection Speed"
exit 0;;
esac

OUTPUT=`cat /tmp/speedtest.out`
OUTPUTFAST=`cat /tmp/fast.out`
DOWNLOAD=`echo "$OUTPUT" | grep Download | sed 's/[a-zA-Z:]* \([0-9]*\.[0-9]*\) [a-zA-Z/]*/\1/'`
UPLOAD=`echo "$OUTPUT" | grep Upload | sed 's/[a-zA-Z:]* \([0-9]*\.[0-9]*\) [a-zA-Z/]*/\1/'`
DOWNLOADFAST=`echo "$OUTPUTFAST"`

echo "down.value $DOWNLOAD"
echo "up.value $UPLOAD"
echo "downfast.value $DOWNLOADFAST"

I also have a separate munin plugin for latency, from the same speediest.net data:

#!/bin/bash

case $1 in
config)
echo "graph_category wan"
echo "graph_title Ping"
echo "graph_args --base 1000 -l 0"
echo "graph_vlabel ping"
echo "graph_scale no"
echo "graph_period hour"
echo "down.label ping"
echo "down.type GAUGE"
echo "down.draw LINE1"
echo "down.max 1000"
echo "graph_info Graph of Internet Connection Ping"
exit 0;;
esac

OUTPUT=`cat /tmp/speedtest.out`
DOWNLOAD=`echo "$OUTPUT" | grep Ping | sed 's/[a-zA-Z:]* \([0-9]*\.[0-9]*\) [a-zA-Z/]*/\1/'`

echo "down.value $DOWNLOAD"

You should be able to get the speedtest-cli and fast-speedtest-api to run on Windows without too much effort. Munin doesn't run on Windows though, unless you can get it to work on the WSL stuff (I suspect that would be a bit painful, with all the cron stuff that needs to be in place for it to work).