We have a couple Peplink routers (Balance 310 5G and B One 5G) and a Slim 40G antenna, and we are looking to improve the 4G and 5G signal reception.
We work in Madrid, Spain. Mostly in hotels and congresses, indoors.
It’s not that the Slim 40G doesn’t work for us. But I am just wondering if a directional antenna, properly placed, would work better. Or maybe an antenna with higher gain or more frequency bands.
I have been looking at Parsec and Poynting as well. What’s your experience with this brands? could you recommend anything for a similar scenario?
Also, is there a way of adding more that one 4 x 4 MIMO antenna to the same router?
We have a tool on our website called “Antenna Guide”, just enter the manufacturer and router you have and we show you all the different compatible antennas for the selected router.
Use the tool to also compare different antennas from Peplink, Poytning, Taoglas, MobileMark, Panorama. And PCTel.
You will want both.
If you are lucky (<5m from the outside) an external directional antenna will 8/10 work better than an omni directional antenna for single operator connections.
Inside of a venue with no line of sight you are going to see weird stuff from an RF perspective. The higher frequency ranges will ping pong and bounce around the rooms / halls you are in and their reflections will confuse you a lot. The lower frequency ranges are the ones that will penetrate walls best but they can come from almost any direction.
When I did events I had two favoured approaches.
Deploy a BR1s externally in an enclosure with a high gain directional antenna and power them via POE (and a DC split) cabling it back to a balance or MBX router inside to act as a gateway. Then repeat that as many times as the budget allowed - preferably to outside at different parts of the building to get different towers / operators.
The other approach was to take those same antennas and make an antenna tree on a speaker stand inside, directional antennas pointing all in directions, hopefully connected to different operators.
The final approach is omni directional antennas - ones with excellent low frequency response to gather up all of those frequencies from wherever they are coming from.
Poynting make exceptionally good crosspolorised directional antennas. You should look at the XPOL-2-5G XPOL-2-5G
I honestly believe that Peplink make the best omni directional 5G antennas in the world. the 42G is a work of art and the highest performance omni directional antenna I have ever seen in real world conditions. https://www.peplink.com/products/accessories/mobility-antenna-series/
Thanks a lot. I really appreciate that you took the time to answer.
I already knew your video (How to 5x your cellular…), and it really surprised me a lot the first time I watched it. Increasing from 150 Mbps to 750 Mbps is a huge difference!
Having the router outside seems unpractical for us in most venues, but I will definitely consider the Poynting XPOL and the Peplink 42G that you recommend.
Just out of curiosity, when you did events, how did you measure the cellular signal reception? Just by reading the RSSI, SINR, RSRP and RSRQ values on the Peplink device?
Is there another approach to measuring signals in order to find the best spot /direction for a cellular antenna?
RSRQ and RSRP are the key measurements. You want high quality signal and to prefer cellular connections with high levels of RSRP as low levls indicate tower congestion.
Best test is always speedtest though. You could have buckets of signal strength but no bandwidth from a local tower and lower signal quality from a distant tower but tons of bandwidth if that tower is not congested.
Signal quality and speedtests. quickest and best way. Site survey on a phone first if you want to find good signal locations.