Question Factors that influence home LTE speeds?

[Titleister]

I've had home LTE internet from a local phone company for a year. It works about 90% of the time. When it works it's anywhere from 4 Mbps to 16 mpbs. When it doesn't work I will run a speed test and ping will be in the thousands and it won't give a speed. I live close to 2 buddies who have the same internet and same router and they're internet is always 4 to 16 Mbps and they never have outages. We are the same distance from the tower and all have our antennas on the peak of our roofs. When I contact the internet company they always say the connection looks good on their end. What are some factors that would make LTE home internet work good most of the time but not at all other times?

 

[bill001g]

That would be a specialized system if you have a antenna on your roof. That is not a common install for cell phone type lte.

What you will find with cell phone systems is they like to balance there network. They will at times force user to change tower so everyone can get a signal. Lets say you can get a strong signal from a tower but it near a big highway. You can also get a signal from another tower but it not as good but it is less used. So most the time you will connect to the strong signal. Now lets say lots of people were driving home from work and the only tower they can receive is the one near the highway. It would force you to the tower with the less signal so the people on the highway could get service. KInda socialism for phones where it is more important that everyone get service even if that means some people get much poorer service than they could.

Now if this is some other form of system that is using LTE but is not cell service I am not sure. You can buy LTE equipment to run on the consumer 2.4g and 5g bands now days. In general LTE can have interference issues that will cause it to increase latency/ping. With a cell phone network many times it will switch to one of the other data protocols that are many times called 3g. I do not know if the LTE equipment from WISP type of installs does that also.

In any case there is not much you can do. There are no setting you can make that will change anything and if you are using a fixed antenna it likely is pointing in the optimum direction.

 

[CountMike]

Signal strength and quality is most limiting factor for all wireless communication. At high frequencies any obstruction, even trees can lower signal strength and quality.

 

[Titleister]

I ended up doing speed tests as I adjusted the antenna. I now have 15 Mbps consistently. The install guy based the antenna direction based of number of bars (3 out of 5). I based it on Mbps. Simple fix Thanks for the input