New to this scene - Need advice for rural LTE
Posted: Tue Dec 10, 2019 7:24 am
For years now I have been molested by ISP's charging me hundreds of dollars for finite data plans. I live in a rural place so there are very few options. All I want is stable, unlimited data, at a moderate speed... (1-5mb/s) Is that so hard?
After searching for ages I found this strange deal from "Visible Wireless" (It's some offshoot of Verizon) that is ACTUALLY unlimited 4G data for 40$ a month. Anyway I signed up and it works, somewhat... The catch is it is only supposed to work for a certain selection of "compatible" phones. I ended up getting one of the cheapest ones, a "ZTE Visible R2". It turns out it is a fully fledged little android 8.1 smartphone capable of USB tethering and everything. Sure enough, after a few days of testing I determined that the data is not capped and that the speed doesn't seem to get throttled too much.
TLDR:
The problem is that the LTE signal drops to 2 bars (-105db) pretty much anywhere where it would be practical to set it up tethered to my LAN, and thus the speed suffers greatly. Could anyone provide some insight as to how I can solve this without spending 300$ on a LTE router build?
I just discovered this forum and the whole concept of LTE modems/routing so please forgive my ignorance. Originally I was looking into building my own Yagi antenna to repeat/amplify the signal from where it is stronger. [url]http://bcbj.org/antennae/lte_yagi_diy.htm[/url](Could that actually work?) However after discovering these forums I think my new plan is to try the sim in a PANTECH UML290 + Rasberry Pi 3.
Any Advice would be greatly appreciated.
After searching for ages I found this strange deal from "Visible Wireless" (It's some offshoot of Verizon) that is ACTUALLY unlimited 4G data for 40$ a month. Anyway I signed up and it works, somewhat... The catch is it is only supposed to work for a certain selection of "compatible" phones. I ended up getting one of the cheapest ones, a "ZTE Visible R2". It turns out it is a fully fledged little android 8.1 smartphone capable of USB tethering and everything. Sure enough, after a few days of testing I determined that the data is not capped and that the speed doesn't seem to get throttled too much.
TLDR:
The problem is that the LTE signal drops to 2 bars (-105db) pretty much anywhere where it would be practical to set it up tethered to my LAN, and thus the speed suffers greatly. Could anyone provide some insight as to how I can solve this without spending 300$ on a LTE router build?
I just discovered this forum and the whole concept of LTE modems/routing so please forgive my ignorance. Originally I was looking into building my own Yagi antenna to repeat/amplify the signal from where it is stronger. [url]http://bcbj.org/antennae/lte_yagi_diy.htm[/url](Could that actually work?) However after discovering these forums I think my new plan is to try the sim in a PANTECH UML290 + Rasberry Pi 3.
Any Advice would be greatly appreciated.