This may seem off topic, but bear with me. My girlfriend and I are building out 2 20’ shipping containers to move to some land near Blanco. We’re going to be setting up off-grid solar and have water from a well and rain catchment. This is all well and good, but we’re not trying to disappear.
There is no service on the property… like, at all. The nearest service is a couple miles down the road going back towards town. So my question is, is there a consumer grade signal booster that would get us signal? I plan to erect a 40’ “tower” (more like a steel pole) as immediately as possible, so hopefully that would help with the range.
I wouldn’t try to boost the actual LTE - boosters at best are kind of iffy.
I’d set up a router and an LTE modem with a directional antenna on your tower pointed toward town. Just make sure to pick phones that support wifi calling.
There are some off the shelf solutions that would work, or something like a pi would have plenty of horsepower if you wanted to roll your own.
Do you have specific products that you’d recommend? I really know very little about cell networks. Basically, what I need to do is setup something that will allow me to use AT&T service. I don’t know if that’s 4G, LTE, or what. My phone and my GF’s phone both support wifi calling.
If you have a good resource/tutorial or something to point me to, that would also work.
A little research shows that I may be able to build a Yagi antenna that would improve reception. I don’t really understand how such an antenna would would interface with a cell phone though. I’ll keep researching on my own, but any help would be appreciated.
Okay, so the antenna feeds into a modem which is connected to a router. The phones connect to the router and use wifi calling? Would something like the NETGEAR LTE Modem LB1120 work? I see that it has a main antenna connection on the back.
Ubiquiti gear would likely work for Wifi and subsequent VoIP and Wifi-calling. If it’s your land, you can likely get service to the nearest location and use a point to point bridge antennae. This will likely require a metered power service which would need to meet the local utilities requirements. You can also partner with a neighbor or business to host the site.
The following link lets you play around with locations/heights/signal/gear combos.
A couple nano iso-beams would likely do it and are only a few hundred for a pair, but the poles, metered power service, etc can be in the thousands.
There are also wireless frequency restrictions / licenses / registrations required depending on your area. Know that if you need to use a restricted band, the survey alone from the FCC to make sure that you don’t interfere with another(and vice versa) is about $1,100.
There are already some WISPS( wireless internet service provider, which is essentially what you’d be to yourself using the same equipment if you installed Ubiquiti gear) in Blanco. Rates are expensive but most things are in the rural area and the data caps aren’t as bad as the LTE option, e.g. 250GB cap instead of 25GB. You can use that airlink estimator to get a rough idea of the quality with/without installing a pole.
(sorry, I started researching a reply and got distracted before actually posting it )
If you’re not much of a network tinkerer, a standalone LTE router is probably the way to go. They work just like your wifi router at home, except instead of hooking them up to cable or fiber, you connect an LTE antenna.
Netgear makes an LTE router called the “Nighthawk” that works with AT&T and has jacks for external antennas, and turnkey antenna/cable/adapter/bits kits are available for it in a few different configurations.
The drawback of this sort of network setup is that the router itself has a SIM, so it’s another data plan you have to pay for. If you were to find an actual LTE bridge/booster/thingie that worked well, it wouldn’t need its own plan.
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