I currently have an external antenna which is linked through to a Huawei router which I was using for an internet service until fibre was installed, which has now happened.
I live in an area with really poor mobile reception (hence the external 4g antenna) so I’d like to use the antenna to provide a better mobile service.
indoors. There are plenty of 4g boosters to buy but they all seem to have an internal booster and separate internal antenna which is supposed to be placed quite some distance from the external antenna. Given the current setup I have, it’ll be difficult to achieve this distance. Is it absolutely necessary?
Also has anyone ever bought this sort of set up as separate items rather than a bundled package ? I don’t need the external antenna but can’t seem to find the internal hardware sold on its own.
Are you talking about boosting your incoming 4G signal or installing a micro cell with connects to your cellular network over the fibre broadband and acts as your personal base station?
The latter can work well if you have a decent broadband connection, but the moment your broadband drops out, your indoor base station will too.
The former are a con.
I have one as described and used it with my neighbours permission to piggy back off his internet. He has now moved so thats come to a stop and next experiments will be end of next month when I return to France.
It was the former that I was referring to, this sort of thing:
https://www.amazon.fr/Lintratek-Amplificateur-téléphone-Portable-répéteurs/dp/B098PVSL6L/ref=sr_1_15?__mk_fr_FR=ÅMÅŽÕÑ&crid=1TXRZNNECJK30&keywords=amplificateur+interieur+4g&qid=1691006167&sprefix=amplificateur+interieur+4g%2Caps%2C163&sr=8-15
Why are they a con - don’t they work?
I’ll say what I always say - some people swear by them but they are illegal and amplifying a poor, low quality signal merely gives you a more powerful low quality signal which probably doesn’t work any better in practice.
Does it actually need an amplifier though? As there is currently an external antenna which was able to get a decent enough 4g signal to provide 4g internet, does it need an amplifier or would just an internal antenna work ok ?
Depends if you run out of range in the garden for instance. I wasnt trying to boost a signal as Billy described, I just wanted to increase the range of the service.
You would need an amplifier, at least the one that you linked “makes sense” given that it has both an external and internal antenna so probably will boost your indoor signal (assuming that the external signal is better which is likely).
@corona - were you “piggy backing” off Wi-Fi rather than 3/4/5G?
Yes of the wifi next door as at the time you might or might not get a 2G signal.
I’ve never seen an affordable one that boosted both downlink and uplink frequencies without seriously reducing signal quality.
In my last job, I was involved in the development of a test system which could take any network’s mobile signal and either amplify or attenuate as required before feeding this signal to various phones inside of a shielded box. Just the radio frequency side of this system cost about €10K.
Network operators really didn’t like the idea until we proved that it wouldn’t increase interference, though they were never really happy the greatly increased call traffic and call drops on the one sector of their nearest cell.
And some phones have receivers that don’t play nicely with the addition radio link delay that these repeaters can cause.
The other fun thing is that greatly amplifying the return signal from the phone to the base station causes all sorts of problems as the network tells the phone what transmitter power to use (to minimise interference - a big problem for CDMA systems) and any phone using such a “booster” would appear to be using far higher transmit power than it was told to.
So it sounds like I might as well give up on the idea
Not at all.
Talk to your cellular provider and see if they can supply one of the micro base stations which connect back to their network over your fibre broadband.
Who is your cellular provider? I just read that Orange stopped supplying these a couple of years ago.
Mobile contract is with Free, internet provider is Orange
Do you have a link to show what these micro base stations look like ? I’ve not heard of them before
They look just like a regular wifi router, but provide a 3G or 4G phone service rather than a wifi channel.
Is it the same as a femtocell ? It seems Free only offer them to users of their own internet service
If your phone supports VoLTE then it’s very possible that your fibre router also supports it. If your phone supports it then you may have an option in your phones settings called ‘4G calling’ or ‘Voice over WiFi’ or some such. I had terrible mobile reception here and bought a new phone that supported VoLTE and turning it on and connecting the phone to my SFR WiFi hotspot caused calls to be made automatically through the internet when I was in range of the WiFi. It’s seamless and you won’t know the difference … apart of course being able to make a call 