4G Wifi router/modem

cafeamericano

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Does anyone have any recommendations for a 4G router/modem? We are planning on renting a country house that doesnt have wifi. Owner says cell phone signal is decent. I could use the hotspot on my phone, but prefer not to have to rely on that/have to leave my phone at the house if I leave the house since there will be others who need wifi.
 
A good 4G Router will sure help but depends on the bandwidth max. provided by the local internet provider. In my house, in the country, the max provided was 6 Mega ? at best . Not good enough for movie streaming during peak hours..? I may be wrong?
 
I looked at this before, and all I could see here were dongles or the tiny mifi routers (battery powered). It depends on the signal where you are (inside the building where the device will be placed) - and what connection speed you are happy with, stronger signal gives higher download speeds. With some dongles/mifi routers you can connect a proper external antenna outside (like a TV one) but none of the ones I saw here had that functionality.

LTE bands are 4 (urban/rural) and 28 (rural) here. Canadian 4g broadband providers use band 4 and in my case I got my hands on a proper router from there, although I didn't get an external antenna yet.

https://www.4gltemall.com/ has some very good reviews, so you can use that to cross reference what you find here.
 
To see what mobile service you have at the house, you can use pretty much any smartphone to check: on Android the application G-NetTrack Lite will tell you about the mobile environment, and on iPhone the field test mode (dial *3001#12345#*) also gives basic information on the frequencies and signal levels (works for Intel-based iPhones, for QC-based iPhones it's hit and miss).

To check speed, Speedtest is popular for checking latency and uplink / downlink speeds, but it may not give results relevant to the real world since network operators tend to have a Speedtest server in the mobile network to give optimal results. A better choice might be nPerf, which uses a bunch of real-world applications to give an evaluation of the network. OpenSignal is another useful application with coverage maps. You can swap SIM cards to check all of the operators.

Once you decide which operator to use, you should get the very latest possible 4G/5G WiFi router, so you will have the possibility to aggregate bands (Argentina has licensed bands 2, 4, 5, 7, and 28 to the operators for mobile service), use higher-order modulation and MIMO to increase your download speed. Bands 4 and 7 had the most spectrum allocated, so higher speeds are possible there. Band 28 suffers from interference and MIMO doesn't work well at low frequencies, so you get lower download speeds there. For the WiFi end,unless you need extended range, prefer 5.8GHz, since there's more spectrum and typically less interference than at 2.4GHz.

There are quite a few 4G WiFi routers advertised on Mercadolibre, the good ones aren't cheap. Fritz, HTC and NetGear have Snapdragon based equipment, and Huawei have some advanced 4G/5G CPEs.
 
To see what mobile service you have at the house, you can use pretty much any smartphone to check: on Android the application G-NetTrack Lite will tell you about the mobile environment, and on iPhone the field test mode (dial *3001#12345#*) also gives basic information on the frequencies and signal levels (works for Intel-based iPhones, for QC-based iPhones it's hit and miss).

To check speed, Speedtest is popular for checking latency and uplink / downlink speeds, but it may not give results relevant to the real world since network operators tend to have a Speedtest server in the mobile network to give optimal results. A better choice might be nPerf, which uses a bunch of real-world applications to give an evaluation of the network. OpenSignal is another useful application with coverage maps. You can swap SIM cards to check all of the operators.

Once you decide which operator to use, you should get the very latest possible 4G/5G WiFi router, so you will have the possibility to aggregate bands (Argentina has licensed bands 2, 4, 5, 7, and 28 to the operators for mobile service), use higher-order modulation and MIMO to increase your download speed. Bands 4 and 7 had the most spectrum allocated, so higher speeds are possible there. Band 28 suffers from interference and MIMO doesn't work well at low frequencies, so you get lower download speeds there. For the WiFi end,unless you need extended range, prefer 5.8GHz, since there's more spectrum and typically less interference than at 2.4GHz.

There are quite a few 4G WiFi routers advertised on Mercadolibre, the good ones aren't cheap. Fritz, HTC and NetGear have Snapdragon based equipment, and Huawei have some advanced 4G/5G CPEs.

some more technical details..... android field test mode (dial *#*#4636#*#*) there is signal strength information. I have used the "Network Signal Guru" app on rooted android phone with QC chips to get information on network bands and to lock to specific bands for signal/bandwidth testing.

I see iurban.net are one of the main sellers of antennas on mercadolibre. For example a mimo type dual antenna is 7500-8000 ars https://articulo.mercadolibre.com.a...or-yagui-16db-bi-banda-4g-gsm-gprs-gsm-iu-_JM
 
Thanks for the advice everyone. I found a Huawei on mercado libre that looks promising and covers the bands that were mentioned here. I ended up going with a battery powered one (can also plug in permanently) as I figure I can use it for traveling once the pandemic ends in 20 years....though it might be obsolete by then.
 
Huawei E5573


I will report back once I have had a chance to test
 
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