home lte service 78056

In rural Medina Co, Texas (vice Ohio) you’re going to need to rely on T-Mobile’s coverage maps because both CellMapper and RootMetrics just show coverage along the major roads through Hondo.

I’m not sure if you meant band 41 or 66 but you won’t find band 46 outside of very urban settings.

T-Mobile uses bands 12 and 71 for rural coverage. Neither of these provide blazing fast speeds as the bandwidth is too low. One problem with T-Mobile’s wireless ISP offering is that (AFAICT) none of the modems they offer have external antenna jacks. So they are dependent on whatever signal is in the house.

One of the best ways to improve the performance of a cell booster is to raise the antenna. It’s hard to comment on your specific setup as we don’t know the location or how the components are arranged. If it’s professionally installed, I assume you’re getting everything possible from the unit.

You could just hold out until StarLink becomes available.

It’s hard to say. One thing you want to be sure of is that there is an RF separation between the outside unit and the indoor unit, Or window vs inside, as the case may be. The part that receives the signal from the tower can’t be within range of the part that rebroadcasts it inside the house. There’s a very tall tower located near the intersection of 1283 and 2720 that has multiple bands.

It can be a case of, yes, the signal is stronger but as you put the LTE phone/modem closer to the inside antenna, it’s also closer to the antenna on the roof and you’re getting interference. What’s the roof made of? Metal? Asphalt? Etc? A metal roof will be better at isolating the incoming and boosted signals.

The reason that the installer put the outside antenna on the roof and the inside one in the attic, is that there is tremendous loss in Coax cable at high frequencies. So, the coax runs must be kept as short as possible. It might be possible to put an extended inside antenna on the ceiling below the booster and get better service. Those booster transmitters are really low powered.

One test that I use is to put the LTE device (phone/modem) on the roof and see how it performs there. If it gets a good signal then a booster might help. It not, it probably won’t.

Personally, I’d be looking for alternatives. I’ve survived 1.2 Mbps DSL and StarLink isn’t that far off.

So anyone know how to get a ticket open with Tmobile, during the day, I”m getting almost 30, but by by 0900 when the kids need to get online for school, the speed drops down to 2Mbps or less. I gotta believe they can get more capacity on that Tower very easily.