AT&T tower vs speeds

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Bkenobi69
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AT&T tower vs speeds

Post by Bkenobi69 »

I've been looking at cellmapper.com this morning to see what towers are near my location. I aimed a pair of Wilson directional antennas connected to my Nighthawk MR1100 last winter at the tower with the highest RSRP (-97 to -103dBm). My phone can get up to 70mbps download speeds depending on where I am, but typically gets around 40mbps at home. The hotspot gets around 25mbps usually. I just noticed that there are several towers around that have different bands available and the one I've aimed my antennas at only have bands 2 and 12. There is another right next to that one that reports 2, 5, 12, 14, and 30. If I were able to hit that or another with more bands would I see a notable increase in speeds or does band just mean it will help with more traffic from more users? I'm not sure I can hit that tower anyway since there could be a hill blocking it. I'm curious if I should go back and try aiming the antennas again.
gscheb
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Re: AT&T tower vs speeds

Post by gscheb »

Your speeds are effected by signal strength and amount of bandwidth. So if you can get a good signal strength and add more bands to your carrier aggregation (more bandwidth) in theory should get more speed. Since the nighhawk m1 is capable of allot of carrier aggregation.
Now if you had a like a cat 4 or cat 6 modem that don't carrier aggregate allot of bands together then no extra bandwidth no more speed.
Bkenobi69
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Re: AT&T tower vs speeds

Post by Bkenobi69 »

I'm looking at moving from the M1 to a WE826-T2 and Sierra 7455 at home and using the M1 as a mobile office solution. If I do that, then I would still use the same Wilson antennas but remove the dumb TS-9 adapters and use the SMA that a real device would use. I assume in either case the CAT6 (sierra) or CAT16 (M1) would benefit from a better tower (more bands, similar signal strength).
gscheb
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Re: AT&T tower vs speeds

Post by gscheb »

MC7455 only uses two bands at once.
Bkenobi69
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Re: AT&T tower vs speeds

Post by Bkenobi69 »

Is MC7565 significantly better? I am seeing prices in the $30-50 range for MC7455 but easily over $150 for the MC7565. I'm only seeing speeds of 25-40mbps so unless there's a benefit to the MC7565 I wasn't planning on going that route.
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