ethicalhacker

Well, I suspect they took LTE offline. I haven't been able to pull an LTE signal since Sunday morning. I swapped the antennas over this evening - just a strong (and slow) 3G connection. I was able to pull 4mbps for a period on Sunday with 1 bar of LTE. I've got full bars of 3G today.

LTE came up in the Lenoir City area 7/19ish. It had been extra crappy 3G signal for a few days, but then I noticed the U770 in my tower had just switched over to LTE. I still have all my antennas on the 3G input side, so right now, the signal level is still pretty dang low...RSRP of -115 (1 bar). Aided 3G RSSI is about -80ish. I think the quality of 3G/eHRPD has dropped since LTE came online. I suspect they monkied with the positioning of the antennas or something because the signal level is lower than it was before. However, I am impressed with the LTE coverage. I'm 5 miles from the tower I'm pointed at, and I've got two ridges between it and me that I cannot see over even from the top of my tower. The fact that I can still get 2.5mbps with no help whatsoever is significant because I wasn't even able to pull 1X with the same configuration in times past. I hope to climb my tower in the next few days and swap my antennas over to the LTE side of the USB modem. Perhaps the speed will go up.

There's a number of reasons that I went with fiber. One is that at high frequencies (like 1900Mhz), the coax attenuation gets out of hand. I'm actually using some short segments of LMR-400 coax (good stuff) up there, but if I'd run them all the way to my house (around 150'), I'd be looking at about 9db of loss. That'd hurt me pretty bad since an unaided cell phone on the ground gets an average RSSI of -117 dbm (for average joes, that's about -5 [yes, negative five] bars). Another reason is that the tower makes a really nice lightening rod. Fiber lessens the possibility that the rest my network will be burnt to a crisp in the event of a lightening strike. I have 120V AC running up that tower to power the devices...but it goes directly to a box on the utility pole - does not pass go and does not collect $200, so hopefully it'll leave my house alone. I've got grounding rods around that tower everywhere too. I also wanted to leave the mini-WISP possibility open long term, so I could end up with more bandwidth and more devices at the top eventually. I actually ran 12 strands of OM3 fiber up there...perhaps a little overkill...but I also ran a leg to my detached garage where I keep my 4 post server rack, and that's another story.....all of this to avoid satellite's higher latencies and lower bandwidth caps or paying Charter $20,000 to run cable out to me.

Here's my rig...multimode fiber to the house.

While I am looking forward to the promise of 4G (we have a 3G puck at the top of a rohn tower...using Millenicom's resold Sprint 50GB/mo plan for rural Internet), I must say that 3G in Lenoir City has improved drastically over the past week or so. In the mornings, we used to average 1mbps/512kbps, and in the evenings we used to average 128kbps/32kbps. This week we've been at 1.3mbps/512kbps in the mornings and around 768kbps/256kbps in the evenings with burst over 1mbps. I have actually been able to watch a little Netflix. Signal level has improved very slightly between the winter and now, but the noise level has remained very low. I've known for a long time that the bandwidth problem was on Sprint's side.