Sorry, I’ve tried to be as succinct as possible, but this is kind of long.
Cellular Equipment: Peplink Pepwave MAX BR1 Pro 5G, Peplink Pepwave Maritime 40G antenna
My friend’s cabin is in the middle of a 35 sq. mi. township in Michigan. There are AT&T Wireless towers on the NW, SW, and SE corners of the township, as well as one about mid-way along the western border. The towers all have bands 2, 12, and 66. Three of them also have band 14 and one also has bands 14 and 5.
The terrain is mildly hilly and heavily-wooded (mostly coniferous trees [spruce, pine, fir]).
The cabin and pole barns are located in a relatively low elevation, relative to the northwest through northeast. There is also a rather tall-ish hill to the SSE.
He’s been using an AT&T NetGear Nigthhawk (M1?) 4G LTE-A WiFi mobile router at the location with acceptable results.
The goal was to provide wall-to-wall WiFi coverage within the metal-roofed and -sided structures, using a cellular data connection for Internet access.
Upon our Peplink vendor’s recommendation we acquired the hardware noted above. Our experiences with it have not met expectations.
Testing the Pro 5G at home, in an AT&T and T-Mobile tower-rich environment, I was seeing great download speeds (up to 135Mb/s down on AT&T, 50Mb/s down on TMO [more on this, later]) but upload speeds were inexplicably disappointing.
I’d earlier tested an Elsys Amplimax LTE modem. I regularly saw 12Mb/s up on both AT&T and TMO, and sometimes as much as 14Mb/s. The Pro 5G: Never saw more than 7MB/s up on AT&T and 8-10Mb/s up on TMO. (With the stock antennas.)
When we got the equipment up to my buddy’s property the results were very erratic and very disappointing.
With the Marine 40G antenna eight feet off the ground we were pretty consistently seeing ±90Mb/s down, but the upload was usually no better than ±1Mb/s. We actually got better results with the stock antennas, fastened to the back of the modem, with the modem sitting on a bucket, about a foot off the ground, but still never better than 2Mb/s up.
Meanwhile, the Nighthawk, sitting on an outside table about waist-high, was getting ±3Mb/s up. (±35Mb/s down.)
Another inexplicable thing: When we turned the “omnidirectional” Maritime 40G antenna on its axis we could get the upload up to 2.5Mb/s, but the download would drop to ±50Mb/s. Huh?
We went ahead with the installation, anyway, assuming that, once we got the Marine 40G attached to the western end of the pole barn, some 25 feet or more in the air, performance would improve.
Not only did performance not improve, but it got far worse. Download dropped to no better than 30Mb/s, at best. Upload went down to less than 1Mb/s - sometimes less than 500Kb/s. The next morning it was even worse, with download dropping to ±9Mb/s.
Knowing something of antennas: I have a hypothesis as to what might be happening with that Marine 40G antenna where it’s mounted, but I’d like to see what the brain trust here comes up with.
The other performance issues: I’ve no clue. E.g.: How that little Cat 12/16 Nighthawk could achieve more than double the upload speed, located a mere five feet or so from the Peplink Cat 20 modem with the Marine 40G antenna, and about six feet lower.
The T-Mobile numbers and Other Inexplicable Numbers (when I was testing at home):
On TMO the Pro 5G claimed it was connecting with 5G, yet I never got more than 50Mb/s down and usually ran around 8Mb/s up. Before that I’d seen 12Mb/s up with that Amplimax non-LTE-A modem. The Pro 5G claimed it was connecting to AT&T with LTE, yet it was getting up to 135Mb/s down. (The modem would occasionally display “LTE-A” for AT&T.)
