Cheap $20 a month Stand Alone Unlimited Rural Internet through AT&T Wireless

Midniteoyl · Jul 18, 2017

Re: Cheap $20 a month Stand Alone Unlimited Rural Internet through AT&T Wireless

You might have went down in dB, but did your speeds improve?

There are different bands used on each tower (four or five I believe) and usually the ones with the higher signal strength are actually the slowest bands, and you might actually be connecting to a different tower altogether.. For example: My Mobley normally connects @ ~-102-104dB. Moved it to the other side of the house and got a better signal, was now at -92dB. Great! Nope.. Now my speeds went from the 20mbps+ that I was getting, to less than 9mbps. When I checked out why, I found it was now connecting to a different tower and on a different band too. Turns out that the new tower it was connecting to was an actual AT&T tower, while the other was someone else's 'rented' tower. Guess which one your AT&T device with AT&T plan is going to favor if it can? Even if that tower is more congested and thus slower..

Midniteoyl · Jul 18, 2017

Something funky going on... my whole post disappeared.. at least for me.

Midniteoyl · Jul 18, 2017

Re: Cheap $20 a month Stand Alone Unlimited Rural Internet through AT&T Wireless

You might have went down in dB, but did your speeds improve?

There are different bands used on each tower (four or five I believe) and usually the ones with the higher signal strength are actually the slowest bands, and you might actually be connecting to a different tower altogether.. For example: My Mobley normally connects @ ~-102-104dB. Moved it to the other side of the house and got a better signal, was now at -92dB. Great! Nope.. Now my speeds went from the 20mbps+ that I was getting, to less than 9mbps. When I checked out why, I found it was now connecting to a different tower and on a different band too. Turns out that the new tower it was connecting to was an actual AT&T tower, while the other was someone else's 'rented' tower. Guess which one your AT&T device with AT&T plan is going to favor if it can? Even if that tower is more congested and thus slower..

jcummins · Jul 18, 2017

Re: Cheap $20 a month Stand Alone Unlimited Rural Internet through AT&T Wireless

Midniteoyl said:
You might have went down in dB, but did your speeds improve?

There are different bands used on each tower (four or five I believe) and usually the ones with the higher signal strength are actually the slowest bands, and you might actually be connecting to a different tower altogether.. For example: My Mobley normally connects @ ~-102-104dB. Moved it to the other side of the house and got a better signal, was now at -92dB. Great! Nope.. Now my speeds went from the 20mbps+ that I was getting, to less than 9mbps. When I checked out why, I found it was now connecting to a different tower and on a different band too. Turns out that the new tower it was connecting to was an actual AT&T tower, while the other was someone else's 'rented' tower. Guess which one your AT&T device with AT&T plan is going to favor if it can? Even if that tower is more congested and thus slower..

On my Verizon phone I use the app Network Cell Info Lite to get cell tower info. I put my phone in airplane mode, hooked wifi to the Mobley thru my router....tried that app, but it would not work. How are you getting which cell tower the Mobley is attached to?

Midniteoyl · Jul 18, 2017

I actually did what you did on my phone.. I only have 2 towers to connect too, so when the signal strength matched, I figured it out.

I understand the Unite Explore gives all the info on its screen, if someone has one to use.

TemporaryKubotaOwnerMark · Jul 18, 2017

Re: Cheap $20 a month Stand Alone Unlimited Rural Internet through AT&T Wireless

Midniteoyl said:
You might have went down in dB, but did your speeds improve?

There are different bands used on each tower (four or five I believe) and usually the ones with the higher signal strength are actually the slowest bands, .

How many bands depends on a lot of factors. In a rural area, you are less likely to have more than two. Of course, that depends on the population in your area. The lower frequencies propagate better, but have less bandwidth, so, lower speeds. The best is Sprint's 2.5 gig, but you aren't likely to see that in rural areas. It doesn't propagate very far compared to the lower bands (1900, 800, & 700 MHz), so it's expensive to deploy, because you need a lot of sites to cover an area. AFAIK, AT&T doesn't have any, anyway. That's why Sprint is getting such good ratings for speed lately - the 2.5 gig band carries 20 MHz channels.

sd455dan · Jul 19, 2017

Re: Cheap $20 a month Stand Alone Unlimited Rural Internet through AT&T Wireless

Midniteoyl said:
You might have went down in dB, but did your speeds improve?

There are different bands used on each tower (four or five I believe) and usually the ones with the higher signal strength are actually the slowest bands, and you might actually be connecting to a different tower altogether.. For example: My Mobley normally connects @ ~-102-104dB. Moved it to the other side of the house and got a better signal, was now at -92dB. Great! Nope.. Now my speeds went from the 20mbps+ that I was getting, to less than 9mbps. When I checked out why, I found it was now connecting to a different tower and on a different band too. Turns out that the new tower it was connecting to was an actual AT&T tower, while the other was someone else's 'rented' tower. Guess which one your AT&T device with AT&T plan is going to favor if it can? Even if that tower is more congested and thus slower..

Yeah I hoped that was what was going on when I hooked up the new antenna,
unfortunately the speed tests I did then confirmed about an 80% drop in download and upload data efficiency , wondering if the antenna was bad out of the box? not sure what is going on but the mobley by itself is so much better than the sat system was -I am not complaining

TractorGuy · Jul 19, 2017

My speed tests get mixed results. I am located NE of Tallahassee FL. When I first got things running it would ping Orlando FL. Speeds were around 3 down and 1 up. Had to restart Mobley and router last week and it started pinging Dallas TX and was hitting 5 down. Today it quit out of the wild blue so I restarted again. Now it's pinging Orlando again and I am seeing 3 up and down. When I restart I just flip the switch both the Mobley and router are plugged into and turn it back on. I do not disconnect the Mobley from the router and they both start back up just fine. Who knows why it will be working fine one minute and not the next but it seems to keep working for days in between. I would occasionally have to restart my DSL modem but not as frequent as I have had to do this thing. The first time it happened I tried to connect straight to the Mobley and it would not so I suppose that is where the problem is.

BTW the up speeds never exceeded .5 Mbps with the AR150 router with internal antenna and the AR300M EXT seems to allow much faster.

clemsonfor · Jul 21, 2017

I just saw this and was curious so I clicked it.

Since ATT wireless sucks so bad there is not a drop of ATT signal within a few miles of my house so, this option goes right out the window like so many other things. And I really am not that rural!!!