Question

Interference

  • 24 January 2023
  • 4 replies
  • 230 views

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This is my house.  All the area around are woods.

I live a little over a mile from the tower I connect to.  I live in the woods, so between me and tower, there is about a little less than half a mile of woods.  Right now, since the leaves are gone, I’m connecting to n41 and my speeds are around 300 Mbps.  I’m worried that when the leaves come back, I’ll connect to n71 which gives me speeds around 30-120 Mbps.

I’ve had service since last November when there were still leaves, but didn’t pay attention to my speeds all that much.  Does anyone have any experience with leaves and living in the woods?  Just curious what I can expect come spring and summer.


4 replies

Userlevel 5
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Well, not exactly the “woods”, but I live in S. Florida in a heavily wooded development where the trees form a tunnel over the roads. It definitely has an effect in lowering my line of sight connection to the T-Mobile tower that serves me. I've only had service for about two months, and the best I can get via my gateway is between 35 and 70 Mbps. I only connect to a 4G signal. The tower is a 5G tower, but the trees are too thick for the gateway to connect to it, although my phone does show one or two bars.

We are a retired couple who stream TV, have a few computers that run 24/7, iPhones and iPads, lots of smart switches and plugs and security cameras. All of them work fine.

One last thought about bandwidth. I moved from using Xfinity as my ISP to T-Mobile as my Fixed Wireless Internet (FWI) provider. I was getting 800 Mbps from Xfinity, and there is no question that I was leaving a lot of bandwidth on the table. T-Mobile is definitely less “snappy”, but we are able to do everything we want with no latency when streaming and plenty of bandwidth to run our environment. My point is that just because the speed of your Internet may change as the leaves come out doesn't mean you'll actually see any performance hit. Unfortunately for us, the leaves never come off the trees in S. Florida, so what we see is what we get all year!

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I appreciate your reply.  Sometimes we drop to n71 and our speeds are below 100 Mbps.  I agree that I can still do everything I want like stream 4k and game without problems, but my wife and son download a lot and that just means it takes longer to do so.  My only other option is DSL that maxes out at 10 Mbps.  So this is still a ton better.

Userlevel 7
Badge +15

I had the same issue at the previous place we lived.  During the spring, summer, and most of the fall, the trees took the barely one bar we got in our old apartment and left us with no service outside of WiFi Calling.  If the trees are on your property, you could always thin them out or remove a path of trees in the direction of the tower.

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I had the same issue at the previous place we lived.  During the spring, summer, and most of the fall, the trees took the barely one bar we got in our old apartment and left us with no service outside of WiFi Calling.  If the trees are on your property, you could always thin them out or remove a path of trees in the direction of the tower.

They are not on my property and there are about half a mile worth I’d have to remove, an entire forest, so not possible.

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