1/27/2024 0 Comments Router vs modemDoing so is almost certainly in violation of the carrier’s terms of service, but many people do it anyway because they have no other choice. ![]() If you don’t have that kind of money, there are also ways to get cheaper plans, like the ones available for tablets, to work on cellular routers. These router-compatible data plans are not cheap, and sometimes carriers will only offer them as business plans. If you’re not eligible for T-Mobile’s branded home internet service, you can get a Magenta plan with the Global Plus add-on and have truly unlimited “hotspot” data. cellular carriers are so reluctant to offer truly unlimited data. This is sadly not as easy as it sounds, since U.S. The other thing to keep in mind with these cellular routers is that you’ll need a plan for them. So, by using a cellular router with real antenna connections, we can place a MIMO panel antenna on the side of our home, pointed toward the center of town, and actually get that 20Mbps of signal. One of those mobile hotspots simply won’t work. Inside the house, however, the signal drops to practically nothing. That’s not a lot, but it’s enough to get by. This is enough, actually, for about 20Mbps of speed depending on the time of day. Here at our house, we have about one bar of signal on all three carriers while standing outside. Many mobile hotspots don’t have any external antenna ports, and this is a big problem for people trying to get internet access at the last mile. One of the most important features of cellular routers is the external antenna connectors. So even though CAT numbers are important, a higher CAT does not guarantee fast speeds by any means. We’re quite far from the towers, so even though the CAT18 router is much more advanced than the CAT6 one, they both perform almost exactly the same because of how far we are from the towers. ![]() Just to give an example of CAT numbers in a rural context, I have a CAT18 router working right next to a CAT6 one, both with identical antennas. Getting into each feature is a bit beyond the scope of this article, but generally speaking, the higher the CAT number, the faster the modem can go. These CAT (category) numbers are important to pay attention to because they define what features the modem has, like carrier aggregation (CA), MIMO, and QAM. These devices are also considerably more powerful than their first-gen counterparts, boasting CAT4 performance at the low-end all the way up to CAT18+ on the high-end. These devices aren’t new - Verizon has offered them to rural customers for a few years now – but only recently have non-carrier branded cellular routers hit the market at approachable prices. ![]() For a long time people were hooking up their mobile hotspots to regular Wi-Fi routers, but this just adds complexity and points of failure, so a cellular router combines and streamlines everything so that you don’t have to have a networking degree to get things working. These all-in-one devices include both a cellular modem, which you need to connect to 4G and 5G towers, and a regular Wi-Fi router all in one device. ![]() So what do you do when you need internet access but Starlink isn’t an option? The answer: a cellular router. Some are constructing their own municipal mesh networks, while others are waiting, hoping, and praying that Starlink will service their area. All over the country, people in rural (and even suburban) areas have resorted to all kinds of hacks just to get access to the internet. But because this house is about a mile outside of city limits, not a single cable-based provider will touch us. And it’s not for lack of initiative on their part they’ve been trying to get traditional internet access to their home for nearly 10 years. Right now I’m staying at my parents’ home in rural Tennessee, and the internet is, well, bad.
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