What do I need?

Bouygue 4g reception in our house is a bit flaky. My wife uses Bouygue but her phone barely gets 4g signal here; we have a Huawei E5577 sim modem, which can get the signal reasonably and she WiFis to that.
I want to improve our 4g signal, so need a better modem. Any recommendations? I am getting confused, most of the equipment I have seen seem to be just routers, what I need is a modem/router. I think.

Sometimes you can add an aerial to improve 4g.

a couple of links to consider
Eightwood Antenne 4G

and

Also look through this very useful thread with lots of suggestions

Last (but not least) @james posted this very helpful topic just under a year ago.

Quite a bit of reading I’m afraid but some have obtained good results.

I have an antenna - a proper Huawei jobbie - but it does not help the E5577. I am asking a simple question: all these dozens of routers that you can get: do they get their 4g signal from the sim you put into them? If they do not take a sim, how do they receive the internet signal?
I simply want a good-performance modem that I can shove my Bouygue sim in and WiFi to it from our laptops.

If its called an LTE Router it uses a SIM to access the internet.

But they don’t magically create a mobile signal - if your Huawei isn’t getting a signal then there’s not much point expecting a differant brand to achieve it.

Find anywhere in the house that has better reception and stick it there (ours sits on the top floor where signal is far stronger)- spend money on an external antenna and someone to fit it (but no guarantees) - try a differant network - but fundamentally you need mobile signal.

we had a friend who couldn’t get a signal from his Bouygues router nor a mobile signal either in the house.
Placing the router up in the eves of a bedroom facing the mast direction solved the issue.
@chrisell you are right, of course but in this case, other than using something like WhatsApp from which he could make voice calls using WiFi from the carefully placed router nothing changed in respect of his ability to use his mobile phone signal.

I’d better reveal all. Lived here 16 years. Put up with expensive Orange, all wired internet and at best 1,0Mb/s (limited to that, we were told). For the first 11 or 12 years we put up with it, but as 4g got better we found that Bouygue’s 4g signal here was 15Mb/s or so. Stopped Orange (begrudged having to pay €50 cancellation fee - is that legal?). Got the Huawei router and were happy with Bouygue signal for 4 or 5 months, then suddenly the signal reduced AND Orange had put fibre cable into a nearby village, meaning we could get up to 8Mb/s. So back to Orange. Just over 2 years later ‘free’ started transmitting 4g from under 2km away from here, transmitter visible. Sometimes over 100Mb/s with our phones, always above 30. So a dilemna; after having suffered some change in Bouygue’s signal there was some suspicion that the same might happen with free. But…after a couple of months we again stopped Orange contract.
The main problems with Orange had always been cost and unwanted phone calls. We were paying €35 a month for a reasonable, steady internet, a fixed line and 40 or 50 marketing calls. Bloctel had been activated and kept up-to-date but was useless.

Our ‘free’ deal, not contracted, is €11,99 for 80Gb a month. No fixed line, but there is Whatsapp / Skype for world wide free calls, with video too.
My wife wants to keep the Bouygue 4g deal but it would be nice to get a better signal.
A month ago a friend came round and was interested in the speed we got from the free transmitter, so we both stood side-by-side outside and speedtested at just the same time. I got 85Mb/s but he got 140Gb/s. So the quality of the receiver did make a big difference.
My Huawei modem is at least 7 years old - I got it s/hand.
My reasoning is that a new, up-to-date technology LTE router will perform much better than the Huawei on the Bouygue signal.

Should that be 140Mb/s? 140Gb/s would be mighty impressive.

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Yes, it should be. Thanks. At the rate I mistakenly wrote I’d use my month’s allocation in half a second!

I wonder how long before that becomes normal, or even required.

I’ve just had Fibre installed in the UK - it is available in our village in France as well, though the VDSL connection there gives 70Mbps down which is more than adequate at the moment. I went for the 500Mbps package but up to 900 is available (up to 800Mbps I believe in France).

For now I can’t see anything that really needs 500Mbps - even if we go with 25Mbps per 4k stream that is enough bandwidth for 16 streams with some left over, it’s enough for at least four 8k streams - but higher bandwidth tends to drive application development that makes use of the extra speed. For now the big gain is game downloads (mainly my son) - these could top 80G and tie up the house Internet connection for hours - now it takes about an hour and the fact that I can’t quite get the whole bandwidth to my son’s PC (he’s on WiFi and the best we’ve consistently had is 300Mbps) means he can’t quite hog the whole thing.