Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

If you are looking at urban or suburban solutions, skip this and look for reviews that more closely match those scenarios. The principles involved are the similar, but this review is targeted to those particular to the challenges rural people face when presented with few or no options for decent voice or internet communications. Ok, background. 1.5 miles from nearest Comcast/xfinity mark. Quote was 46K to run a node to my location, and I’d be basically carrying all the load for all new customers added downstream of me with zero reimbursement after the fact. So that was no solution. AT&T switch for ADSL was maxed, and even if there would have been a port available to me it would be at a whopping 1.5mbs up/ .5 down, so that too was out. That left HughsNet. Super slow and laggy, hyper expensive but it was all we really had at the time so i suffered for a year on that. AT&T Wireless LTE at my location was on the low end. Two bars at best in house. I decided to focus on this as a possible solution. I worked in IT for AT&T Wireless for 11 yrs and still had friends and contacts there in the RF Engineering side of the company, so i did have an edge most won’t be able to leverage. The RF engineer was able to give me coordinates for the tower closest to my house. I was able to locate it at night through line of sight and confirm that from a few spots both on the ground and on the roof there was an area where by holding my phone to that direction i could get a strong, consistent 3 bars of signal. I had to go by bars because my iphone was 11iOS and that update screwed up the field test mode needed for decibels. It turns out the bar reading was just fine anyway. He recommended the weBoost as a signal booster. He told me to ignore the square footage specs for the house size and the specific models and get the top of the line spec’d for a house much bigger than mine. So, i did. Wow. 3 bars turned to a solid and strong 5 bars. So impressed! To sum this up and give you the best advice i can: * Ignore low reviews here. Most can be chalked up to either not enough signal to begin with or they did not follow the EASY instructions provided. * Do you homework prior to purchase. Most of you probably already know where in your house AND outside on your property that you get the best signal anyway. Go with that and refine. Scout for info as best you can on where that tower is located and how you can best grab it from the highest place at your home possible. *Maintain BOTH vertical and horizontal distance between the receiving antenna and the inside broadcasting antenna! THIS KEY TO SUCCESS! *With the above rule in mind, identify the best possible location for the indoor broadcast antenna. Situations and how you use data and voice vary, but i chose a location roughly central to the first floor of my home. Most calls and computing happen here for me. Make sure this antenna is oriented in the OPPOSITE direction as your outdoor receiving antenna. Using this allowed me to us mobile LTE voice throughout my home at great signal. By moving my mobile hotspot (AT&T netgear hotspot with Wifi netgear cradle found here at Amazon, with 25g unlimited plan) to a location close to the indoor antenna (close, but not too close. You need to move it around a few times and be patient to find a cinderella best location) I am able to run my entire household of internet connected devices at very acceptable speeds. That being relative term, i average 20mbps up/ 16mbps down. Works for everything i need here, period. Netflix, remote vpn for my work and wifes work connections, xbox...everything. I can’t explain the relatively high 16mbps up speed. Thats unusual as up is usually about a 3rd of downlink in most other settings I’ve been in, even wired high end provider connections. I’ve seen as high as 50mbps downstream at times! I am about to swap the netgear hotspot with a MoFi 4G LTE/Wifi router, because of overall robustness of it for this application and to overcome the 15 device limitation of the netgear hotspot. Ill update the results when i have them. I’ll also update with some photos to more clearly illustrate my particular situation and the solution used. I am extremely happy with the WeBoost device. It does exactly what it says it will if you implement it as instructed. Period. Full stop. I hope this helps others in our situation. Also note: this is provider agnostic. My ‘closest’ neighbor came here to look at the solution i used as his plight is the same as mine. He has a Verizon iphone. His signal pegged off the meter on speed test! He about flipped and has ordered one as well. It is likely that the tower i am aimed at via line of sight is either...close to a Verizon tower, and it might be as i see three light beacons on the horizon where Im pointed when looking at night or...AT&T and Verizon are co-located on the same tower. This is common, especially so in highly desirable tower locations near high traffic areas. You can spot a collocated tower as it will be a single tower with two or more ‘ring’ arrays of radios going up the tower.